It’s not often that you get to take charge on a trip to Berlin to try and stop the third Reich, but thanks to Undercover: Operation Wintersun; developed by Sproing Interactive and Published by Lighthouse Interactive; the game sends you straight into the battle-zone which boasts a full-on Adventure full of puzzles and quirky British Accents.

The game sets you in motion during 1943 where Hitler’s Germany is performing Scientific Research on Nuclear Weaponry.  In the beginning you receive a phone call from the Secret Service (MI6) asking you to meet them to talk over something important which could eventually be a matter of National Security.  From there you enter as Dr. John Russell, a renowned Physicist whom has been drafted to check the latest unfinished German Nuclear Fission Plans that have been leaked to MI6 Officials.  After you determine they’re real Nuclear Device plans the game starts you off in Berlin on a hair-brained mission to retrieve the rest of the plans.

I think the most authentic piece of the game is the main protagonist considering he’s definitely not your everyday game stand-in.  The change in this games main character is a much welcomed change of pace from the usual Action-Thriller style characters we see day-in and day-out.  He’s a whimsical man who seems to find everything to be a huge burden on himself but his analytical style is certainly right up there with Professors in the same field.

Throughout your travels, you will find yourself examining way more than you can chew, scouring Offices and other rooms for hints on where the Plans could be and generally using every tool ever introduced to the Adventure Point-and-Click Genre.  You can keep an endless amount of items in your Inventory and can access the menu to save often leaving the game with a reasonable difficulty but nothing impossible.

So, you suddenly arrive in Berlin on this huge mission to find the unfinished Nuclear Plans and help restore National Security, sounds like a good idea so far right?  Well, it is for the most part considering the storyline could certainly have been plausible at that time during World War II which leaves both a compelling argument over ‘could this have happened?’ and a storyline to tantalize even the most casual PC gamers.  Unfortunately, after the good starting-point in the story, the game play pretty much destroys any hope of this game being fun for anymore than 30 minutes.  The game forces you into some of the most bewildering puzzles which forces you to think way outside of the box (considering I don’t think Scientists will be the only people playing) and at times, it’s just daunting to find an answer to things like ‘How to open a door without having it squeak’ (this is one of the early on missions).  It’s a daunting task which will put gamers off if they can’t figure out the answer.  This game isn’t full of car chases or anything which would be deemed ‘exciting’, instead it takes an educated approach by making you re-live your High School Science Classes as you tackle various experiments and puzzles ranging from ‘un-creaking doors’ to ‘mix the contents’.  There are a few times puzzles with are quite entertaining as they could feature you being caught, shot or just removed from play.  These sequences usually reload though allowing you another crack at them once you’ve died.

The artificial intelligence is pretty much useless.  The characters that follow you around always say they’ll do something but at the end of the day, you as the player character seems to have to do everything.  For example, if you’re being guarded by two men and there are enemies around, it’s your job to find a way to get rid of them using your Scientific knowledge, which well and truly defeats the purpose of having bodyguards at all.

The in-game sound is nice and doesn’t get too repetitive offering a nice, balanced tone and atmosphere to the game, although the voice acting is much to be desired due to it’s dull and bland tone.  Overall, the sound comes across well but it’s far from perfect, the voice acting needed a lot more depth to get the true experience of both Britain and Germany in 1943.

The graphics are quite astounding, well at least the backgrounds are as lush as people would expect.  The character models could have done with a fine tune-up but overall, they both work nicely to create an interesting blend of 2D to 3D graphics.

Undercover: Operation Wintersun just isn’t what it’s all cracked up to be.  The storyline, while enjoyable doesn’t manage to leave any sort of impression on the player.  Setting the game during World War II should have emphasised that the war would be a major factor in-game but it just didn’t seem to exist unless someone spoke about it.  The voice acing was densely abysmal leaving what could have been a great game hung out to dry.