For console players, Metal Gear was their first exposure to a game that prioritized stealth over combat. The idea of not using lethal tactics to get through a mission was a novel idea, and while it was a cult hit for NES players, the general public wouldn't really grasp onto the idea until Metal Gear Solid arrived on the PSOne. With the lens of nostalgia now turned on the PlayStation generation of games, it's no surprise to see a game like Spy Drops try to pay homage to that seminal stealth title. What is surprising is how poor of a job was done on so many fronts.

The story emulates what you would expect from a game using Metal Gear Solid as its inspiration. A terrorist organization has threatened to destroy all communications around the world and hack all electronics unless a ransom is paid off. Half of the world got taken down when the first strike team was sent in, so it falls on one covert black ops soldier to go on a one-person mission to infiltrate and neutralize the group.

What plays out almost feels like a parody of the kind of story offered by a stealth title. Your organization isn't run by any government but by oil companies that provide all of the funding. Your agent goes around questioning everything at every opportunity, and you have a chatty colonel that will say anything in between every mission, even if it ends up being a tutorial for something you've performed several missions ago. Even when the story about a group led by a former agent starts to get interesting, the method of storytelling is so dull in its delivery that you won't care when information is divulged.

Presented from a top-down perspective, the game plays out similarly to Kojima's classic. You can crawl on your stomach to lessen the amount of noise you make while also evading cameras and laser traps. You can use various tools to open up passageways or distract enemies, but you can also knock out people using a choke or simply punching them. Then you have to move their bodies somewhere else, including dumpsters. You can look at your world from a first-person perspective, but you stand still while doing so. Various firearms can be used, and while you won't immediately end the game by killing people, it is frowned upon because non-lethal tactics are preferred.

Your tools run the gamut between realistic and silly. Normal firearms that you pick up from enemies are expected, as are things like C4 to blow up items and land mines that you can lay as traps. There are also tranquilizer rifles for those who want to stay non-lethal and stealthy. Some of the more ridiculous items include a demon mask that you can wear to make yourself invisible if you stand still and have sponge boots to soften your steps. The more intriguing item in your arsenal is the Dream Catcher, a multi-functional tool that you'll use often to extract information from knocked-out enemies. Its presence adds a sci-fi vibe to the mix, even though you don't get the benefit of seeing what information you've extracted.

The major thing the game shies away from is having one big, interconnected mission. Instead, Spy Drops has a few major missions where the story progresses, but there are plenty of smaller missions to undertake to access the more important stages. Each mission has specific objectives, such as rescuing prisoners, finding documents, or gathering information from a number of enemy soldiers. The missions vary in the level of difficulty, but completing each mission does more than unlock access to the next mainline mission. Cash can buy more tools, and more tools are unlocked based on how much stuff you buy. XP is also gained to boost stats, like health and stamina.

The game's approach makes it feel like it was made for bite-sized stealth excursions, and one element that helps with this is the fact that all of the levels are randomly generated. It's more that the game has a set of premade rooms at its disposal to choose from and creates levels with each of them interconnecting by passageways. The size of the level is dependent on the difficulty of the selected mission, and while you can't get another randomized level layout if you fail in a mission and wish to retry it, the approach means that other players attempting the same mission in their own game will play a level that's completely different from yours.

The randomization is supposed to help make the game feel dynamic, but it doesn't take long before the approach backfires. The setup is always the same: You land in a fairly empty field and then have to find a small opening in a wall to infiltrate the base. Several rooms get repeated often throughout a mission with a nonsensical layout. No matter the mission type, you need to find your way back to the landing spot to escape. The pattern repeats ad nauseam, and it doesn't take long before all of the locations start looking the same. While the random level approach may seem neat, it pales in comparison to what could've been done if the time had been taken to hand-craft the level layouts.

Even if the failed randomization approach doesn't bother you, there are simply too many other misfires in the design that drag down the game. Menu navigation in the pre-mission screen is confusing, since active buttons are colored in a way that makes you think they're inactive. When it comes to your moves, you can run and dive and crawl on your belly, but you can't perform a crouch walk. When aiming with a gun, you have a tiny dot for your crosshairs, which is useless because it blends in too well with the environment. When trying to use weapons, you're barely given instructions on how to fire or remotely detonate something, so you have to depend on fiddling around with the controls until you discover the correct actions. Shooting guards require you to empty two full clips of ammo no matter where you aim, and trying to interrogate them is useless because you're getting general gameplay tips from them rather than information that's useful for the mission.

The camera is also a big source of frustration with the title. By default, the camera is set way too close to your agent, where it becomes very difficult to see any of your surroundings. You can set the camera to pull back quite a ways to comfortably see your environment, but that doesn't work in some rooms, where the camera insists on going back to its default height. Hug a wall, and the camera only shifts when you're near a corner, but some of the spots where the camera is supposed to turn are so small and your movements so imprecise that the camera change is too quick to be able to react. During regular movements, the camera will also start zooming in and out at different heights, making the experience disorienting. Aiming with a gun is no better, as the view snaps back to normal after a few seconds of fine-tuning. If you're sensitive to sudden camera movements, this experience is going to be absolutely painful.

The biggest blunder plaguing Spy Drops are the stealth mechanics. Except for some rare moments, guards don't pay attention to sounds. You can run near them, and they won't react. The same thing occurs when you shoot them; as they'll resume their patrols as if nothing happened, and they completely ignore dead or knocked-out bodies. The only time they'll react is if you cross their plane of sight. Even then, they might run away before taking a shot. At least they won't miss, which is the opposite of what the camera-operated turrets will do. You'll need to stand absolutely still if you want them to hit you.

Being able to knock out a guard is fairly easy. An attack to their back will produce a decent-looking slow motion cut scene of your attack. The experience is spoiled because the camera doesn't center on you, causing you to miss parts of the cinematic. A simple three-hit combo will also get the job done. While you will see birds that should indicate how long the guard will be knocked out, that metric becomes useless when you learn that you can see three or more birds flying by before the guard recovers. Even then, the guard will alert everyone about your presence before they wake up and return to their routines. The alerts shouldn't mean anything, as you're rarely in a situation where guards actively try to chase you down, even when they're on full alert. Should you decide to knock out the same guard again, you'll find that you'll kill them. This is one game where the penalty for killing a guard is financially so high that you'll want to go on a pacifist run if you want to buy stuff for the next mission.

This all comes to a head when you get to the game's first major story mission and realize that you're not supposed to sound off any alarms. Thanks to the game's wonky overall mechanics, the task is absolutely impossible if you're trying to go for a run where no one dies unless you get very lucky and somehow never get seen by any of the guards. For those going for a pacifist run, the only way to go through stages like this comfortably is to go against the game's wishes and just kill everyone you see.

Aside from the campaign, the game features a multiplayer mode that's split into four types. You have a basic deathmatch mode, a scenario where you need to race to find important documents, a setup where you need to take a picture of your target first, and a mode where you need to hide or hunt down your opponent. The modes sound good enough, but the overall game mechanics prevent them from being enjoyable. The multiplayer is limited to two players in local split-screen. While it is nice to get another local multiplayer game on the PC, this type of game isn't suited for that. With no online play, expect this mode to get no playtime outside of initial curiosity.

The audio is deeply flawed and would've been a bigger deal had the game's stealth even accounted for sound. You can't hear any of your walking sound effects, so it becomes surprising to hear yourself bang on metal on the rare occasion that something plays. The rest of the effects and music are fine, but don't expect too much variation in the themes being played. The voice acting feels amateurish, with some of the voices having poor delivery and other voices, such as that of the Colonel, not fitting the character. The volume balancing for voices is terrible. One moment you'll have a line played at a normal volume, while the next line is played loud enough to scare you — even if the line wasn't intended to do that.

If you ignore the aforementioned camera issues, Spy Drops lives up to its graphical goal of emulating a PlayStation-era title. The pixelated textures fit well with games of that time period, as do the unstable polygons during cut scenes. The animations are fine for the most part, and the frame rate is high at all times. While there was a big deal made about adding in more modern effects to the game's aesthetic, they actually hurt the experience because they can be distracting. This is especially true of the lights that produce lens flare, as it is bright and prevalent enough that it obscures the scenery while also feeling unnecessary.

For a game that tries to emulate something you'd see on the original PlayStation, it shouldn't be a surprise to see that the Steam Deck runs it just fine. The game runs at the device's native 1280x800 at all times. While there are barely any graphical options, that doesn't affect the frame rate; the game runs at a smooth 60fps no matter what's happening. As for battery life, the launch version of the Steam Deck LCD model has the game clocked at roughly four hours on a full charge.

Spy Drops is a game with a novel concept but bad execution. The idea of smaller missions for a bite-sized stealth experience is neat, and the game mostly nails the graphical aesthetic of a top-tier game from the original PlayStation's timeline. Everything else, especially the stealth mechanics, are so poorly done that the whole experience feels like an absolute chore to get through. Unless you're the forgiving type who's absolutely craving any kind of stealth experience, don't bother with Spy Drops unless it massively overhauls everything with patches.

Score: 4.0/10