There are many games in today’s market that offer a visually pleasuring experience, but often incorporate elements of extreme violence, dark comedy, and a touch of social satire. Games such as Braid, Super Meat Boy, and Abe’s Odyssey offer seemingly cute looking games with an unusual twist that is not for the child gamer. Stealth Inc. 2: A Game Of Clones brings yet another merging of cute cartoon animation and bloody mayhem with stealth/lateral gameplay blended in. The sequel to Curve Digital’s 2011 game Stealth Inc: A Clone In The Dark (originally released as Stealth Bastard), it blends both action, platforming and stealth gameplay, bringing an experience that’s pretty close to “Metal Gear Solid meets Super Meat Boy”.
Stealth Inc. 2 is set within a bizarre world, where a major fast food chain explores the realms of science (other than genetically modifying hamburgers). The company experiments with creating walking drones that kill people, to cloning thousands of little guys who look like a cross between Stewie Griffin, and a Minion from Despicable Me. The story feels similar to Abe’s Odyssey, telling the tale of cooperative greed and its impact on the helpless. Our narrative focuses on a lone and crazed scientist working the late shift, while trying his best to be the employee of the month.
Releasing a collective of clones for testing, you take the role of a singular clone who’s attempting to escape and save as many of his friends as possible. The Clone must venture deep into the complex, solving a mass of puzzles and completing a series of tests in order to gain freedom.
It’s a simple premise, and one that allows for easy integration into the story for hardcore and casual gamers alike. The design is similar to the likes of Metroid and Ori, where players are allowed to explore an open world and progress further via obtaining new gadgets and completing test chambers. The game’s graphical representation looks pretty good, with a stylish edge and intense atmosphere that’s created through a world that literally feels alive. The complex reshapes itself the more you progress, and the experience is only heightened with the advanced lighting and physics.
Test chambers involve players using certain gadgets to complete them, encounters involving boss like NPCs, or testing your resourcefulness with attributes such as speed or lateral thinking. For example: Players will obtain an adorable item called “Inflate-a-Mate”, where a life size balloon chum will appear. It can give you a boost over hard to reach places, act as a decoy, a shield, and even to set off explosive mines blocking your path. Obtaining new gadgets will create new gameplay opportunities, such as disguising yourself as an enemy robot or even controling them to fight other enemies, as well as being used in a number of puzzles. Stealth Inc 2 does a great job at creating a long line of divisive gameplay opportunities that only grows as the game continues.
The game offers a range of different gameplay variations, but focuses a great deal of its mechanics and overall experience on stealth (hence the title). Being a 2D-platformer, the controls are pretty straightforward, with simple maneuvers and interactions that are easy to learn. All of your skills from speed, to endurance, to intelligence will be tested as you’ll be tasked to sneak past cameras, avoid many hidden death traps, and figure out how to arrange an assortment of colorful blocks with friendly faces to open a sealed room.
The throwing mechanic’s one thing that I felt needed tweaking, as it can be either overpowered, or underpowered when you least expect it. It’s a slight pain, as the game will increase in difficulty at random moments, with tremendously high octane set pieces that require you to get a move right the first time, or it’s instant death with a simple mistake, along with the game pulling off a cheap trick or two to kill you off. It can be a little infuriating. But thankfully, this is alleviated a bit with the help of a generous checkpoint system that takes away a great deal of annoyance, and ensures you’re ready to get back into the game.
Stealth Inc 2 is indeed a lengthy game and can last a good ten or more hours if you decide to revisit the world to find hidden collectables and take part in any of the test chambers once again. With leaderboards and grades to earn, a competitive factor has been implemented to grab the best times and grades on levels; meaning many will happily enjoy replaying every test chamber in order to beat their scores and many others. I know I did.
Along that, there are also a ton of secrets and rewards hidden in the game world itself, with many being acquired after collecting a multitude of the gadgets and discovering a majority of the map. Plus, you have to save all those little clones from certain destruction.
There’s also more than the single player campaign to enjoy. The level editor allows players to design their own test chambers filled with a number of different obstacles and items from the main game. It has a great level of depth and allows players to fully design the most outlandish, dynamic, and interactive tests possible and share them online as well. I did feel that any general help or tutorial when designing a level was needed, as I felt confused on what to do in order to design a level – it was pretty much a guessing game.
Stealth Inc 2: A Game Of Clones is a huge amount of joy for anyone who loves 2D platforming, stealth, and cuteness with a touch of blood lust. If you don’t have the patience, or if you don’t like trial and error gameplay, then you might want to miss this. However, I highly recommend it.