Cloak & Dagger: Shadow Operations

Cloak & Dagger is a short stealth game heavily inspired by old Splinter Cell titles. The game features 5 levels (though one of them is a tutorial and only has 2 enemies), with the main challenge being avoiding the guards that cannot be killed or taken out in any way. While developer did add an option to knock guards out from behind, it can be very clunky to use and enemies only stay down for a very limited period of time, so it's best to avoid confrontation entirely if you can help it. Our spy is equipped with 4 weapons to help him deal with the enemies: a EMP gun that can be used to shock enemies or disable lights and cameras, which is completely silent, or you can charge up a powerful shot that will destroy the lights completely (though not the cameras), but that can be heard by enemies who will arrive to investigate the commotion. The other 3 weapons are all different types of grenades: EMP grenade, the most useful of the bunch, can disable every light source in the environment, though in my experience it doesn't always disable cameras, and I'm unsure if it's a bug or not. Next we have a flashbang, which disables enemies for a limited time, and finally a noisemaker. Frankly, in my playthrough I only ever used the EMP grenade. Levels in the game are very short, if one were to look on youtube you can easily find walkthroughs of the full game that can take less than 30 minutes overall. However, they aren't without their charm, the Oil Rig level in particular was a pretty big difficulty spike due to cramped environments and confusing layout. Despite their small size, the levels often provide the player with different ways of approaching their objective, such as breakable windows or vents that can sometimes be used to circumvent a large part of the level. The game can be pretty buggy, particularly during climbing animations, which a few times resulted in me getting completely stuck and unable to move. The final level also had noticeable framerate dips, though overall it was playable and the game never crashed on me. The AI can sometimes bug out and end up stuck on in an alert state, standing in the same spot, which I assume happens because guards are unable to reach the source of the sound and end up stuck in place. Despite its issues, I did enjoy Cloak & Dagger, and my main issue with it isn't even the price, which isn't all that high, but rather the length. Game is very short, and while, to my knowledge, the dev is currently working on a new title, I wish he made an update or DLC for Shadow Operations with a few new levels. Even with how short they are, if the title had at least twice as many levels I could've easily recommended it, but as it stands this is a very cautious recommend that mostly applies to the fans of the genre, or those willing to support indie devs interested in providing us with the style of game that AAA publishers are not invested in these days.

We need more stealth games, and for a one man operation this is pretty great. If you like Splinter Cell or the classic Metal Gear Solids, give it a try.

I wanted to like the game, but it's buggy and has not been play tested well. This is what a lot of Indies always get wrong. They don't playtest well to find pain points. For example the tutorial tips in the game in the first tut level only show up when you stand in a particular small area in a lot of places. If you slightly move forward or backwards it disappears and you have to stand in the sweet spot. It seems they set the collider area for triggering the tips is too small in a lot of places.