Never Stop Sneakin' is a stealth game with an arcade feel that will immediately remind you of Metal Gear Solid 1, what with its PS1-era visuals, music akin to Snake's outing on Shadow Moses Island, and a number of other cheeky references and jokes. It's half tribute and half parody, being unafraid to glorify Metal Gear Solid exactly as much as it tears it down and makes fun of it. This is great, and if you're a fan of Metal Gear at all, you'll probably appreciate this element of the game. Funny enough, this game also riffs on Peace Walker and Metal Gear Solid V, when it comes to the base-building gameplay that is presented like something you have control over, but is really just a completely linear progression you have to partake in, in order to advance. Just like how Mother Base pretends to give you free will in terms of how you develop Militaires Sans Frontiers or Diamond Dogs, but you're not really free at the end of the day. It's another cheeky element that tends to go unmentioned.
The story of Never Stop Sneakin' is simple, and completely ridiculous. You are a secret agent who works for the aptly named Department of Sneakin', and the dastardly enemy, Amadeus Guildenstern, has used a time machine to kidnap every single President that has existed or will ever exist. His demand is simple; instate him as President forever, or lose every other President, forever. The Department of Sneakin' doesn't seem to vibe with this idea, so Major Milestone, a kooky Colonel Campbell parody, voice acted by Arin Hanson of Game Grumps, sends you in to infiltrate Amadeus' bases and installations. Why are we infiltrating these bases? For one overarching purpose; to rescue or kidnap enough capable men from the battlefield, as well as to accumulate enough currency in order to develop a base advanced enough to eventually build our own time machine, and thereby save the world. The plot is silly, hilarious, charming, and is spread far too thin because this game is too long for its own good.
The Department of Sneakin' makes use of a Currency called Espionage in order to develop its structures. Espionage isn't just a concept or a method of intelligence-gathering in this world, it is a literal, physical object that exists lying around the enemy bases. It's these pixel-looking particles that you absorb into your Agent with satisfying sounds and animations. Collect enough Espionage in missions and you can buy Upgrades or HP inside of the current base. These Upgrades go away if you're killed or if you Extract from the area of operations from the pause menu. In this regard, the game shares some small DNA with roguelikes, but it isn't one. When you're outside of a mission, you'll be in the Department of Sneakin's base camp, which you are theoretically responsible for building and enhancing, but in a funny moment of self-awareness and further parody, the game doesn't actually give you any choices in what to build or when to build it. What you do get is humorous flavor text which had an irreverent tone that I thoroughly enjoyed all the way through. Espionage can be collected by walking near the little bits of it, but you can collect more massive clusters of Espionage by hacking computers or opening lockers, which requires you to stand still on top of an interact marker as a meter fills up.
I'll talk about the game's controls now. When you're building your base or accepting stuff in menus, you can use the Stick, D-Pad or Movement Keys, as well as the standard Accept button on controllers or keyboards, to finalize decisions. However, when it comes to actually playing inside of the stealth environments, there's only one control you need to concern yourself with, and that's Movement. Everything in Never Stop Sneakin' happens contextually and automatically, and is decided or impacted by where you move and how you move there. If you move into an unaware enemy, you'll assassinate them. If you move onto interaction markers, you'll use them. If you move into breakable wooden fences, you'll shatter them. Likewise, if you move into the wrong places, you'll incur some kind of penalty. Throughout the bases, you can find resources like Bullets, EMP Grenades or Smoke Grenades, and these Resources function in both offensive and defensive capacities. If you step into a guard's vision cone and you have Bullets in your clip, you will automatically headshot that guard and take him out. If you don't have Bullets, you'll use a Smoke Grenade instead, which blankets the area and lets you kill stunned guards in the vicinity using your blade. For machines, like Cameras and Turrets, you'll normally drop an EMP Grenade upon detection, which will automatically destroy them, but if you're out of EMP Grenades and have Bullets, you'll quickshot the device with your gun instead. You very quickly get the hang of how this works. When you have no resources, you want to play safely and carefully. When you're overflowing with them, you can charge forth with reckless abandon, because fast kills in succession will build your Combo, and the higher your Combo, the more Espionage everything is worth, including kills, computers and lockers.
Never Stop Sneakin' was originally released on the Nintendo Switch and iOS, and it was only ported to PC after the fact. This is a game designed to be a bite-sized, mobile experience, first and foremost. The one-handed controls make it relaxing, the lack of significant difficulty means you can just chill out and casually stroll through much of the game with no issues, and the levels lacking in variety is not a problem if you play it as intended; which is to run two or three missions per subway or bus ride, then play two or three more the next day. I did not play Never Stop Sneakin' like this. I burned through the entirety of this game in, essentially, two days. And I did it by collecting everything in a mission, like a singular locust devouring all available matter in my path, before descending upon the next one. This was my and a major reason for repetition. You're not really supposed to play Never Stop Sneakin' by killing every single guard, collecting every bit of Espionage, finding every computer, every locker, and finding everything available on each floor, and that's because doing so starts to take forever and starts to grate.
The basic feel of the game is high-quality, and is satisfying to experience. Killing enemies feels good. Movement feels good. The animations and sounds of everything in the game are well-done and happily so, because you'll be doing all of these actions a lot. This is one area Never Stop Sneakin' absolutely excels at, and I'm glad for it.
I recommend this game to Metal Gear fans, as well as to anyone who's way too into Stealth games as a fun, casual version of the experience you're already used to playing. I also recommend it to people who are bad at Stealth games, because while this game is very easy, it also contains some bare fundamentals that people new to the Stealth genre would do well to understand, like patrols, vision cones, movement in spaces controlled by guards and cameras, things of that nature. Playing this game won't make you good at other stealth games, but it will help your mind start to understand some basic patterns behind how every guard in every stealth game ever made, behaves on a very basic level. That, I think, is a good thing. Baby's First Sneak Game.
I enjoyed Never Stop Sneakin', and even though I got tired of it near the end, I can tell I'll go back to play more of it sometime, just to see how damn fast I can speedrun an entire playthrough, knowing what I know now.
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