Death to Spies: Moment of Truth Review

The Real Moment of Truth

Right, so all that stuff is rubbish – what’s next? There’s so much that’s wrong with Death to Spies: Moment of Truth and it’s so difficult and awkward to get along with that it’s actually hard to know where to start.

The game is poorly balanced for starters. You move incredibly slowly and sedately even when you’re running, and jumping into any of the readily available vehicles doesn’t help things either. The vehicles all handle like epileptic elephants in an avalanche, despite going slower than a spider trying to crawl out of a bottle of washing up liquid.

The physics are rubbish too – we’ve actually front-wheel wheelied across an entire army base on a motorbike, which is even more impressive impossible considering that the bike had a sidecar attached.

The combat isn’t great either, and for a game with such a great attention to detail it’s a little weird that most of the guns are pin-point accurate, yet are immediately ineffective at even a centimetre past their range limit. This makes it easy to go on a killing rampage, unless the guards pull out grenades. If that happens you may as well reload the game because it’s game over thanks to their godlike ability to shower you with shrapnel.


Speaking of which, you can expect the AI to be a schizophrenic affair. Outside of combat the guards all follow sensible, realistic routes and conduct regular searches. If you try to don the guise of a VIP they can recognise you based on your facial features and not just judge you by your clothes, which is something we’ve always wondered about in games like Hitman. When it comes to the nitty-gritty of sneaking though, you can often just wander right up alongside guards and stab them easily. If you do get into a brawl, then they’ll happily make things easier by running round in circles for a bit before getting their guns out.

Despite this, the game is still harder than a knife fight in a phone booth despite the predictably stupid behaviour of your opponents. The game never warns you when you’re doing something wrong and, if you ignore AI exploits, you’re hugely vulnerable even on the easy difficulty.


Topping it all off of course are the terrible graphics, which are shockingly bad for a 2009 PC game; we saw some of the most clunky character models and hilarious ragdolls we’ve seen this year. One of the few slivers of fun we had from Moment of Truth came from ploughing through crowds in a car and letting the bodies bounce away – this was the only way we could think of to breathe some life and character into the relentlessly brown and sepia-toned levels.

The most frustrating thing about Moment of Truth is that, hypothetically, it’d be fairly easy to make a good game out of it. New plot, better graphics, add a tutorial, re-write the AI…OK, maybe it wouldn’t be that easy, but still, there are elements of Moment of Truth that show promise. That’s the point we’re trying to make. Things like collecting half-spent magazines and customising timers on explosives or setting traps on slain guards to delay discovery of your deeds. These are all wonderful flourishes; it’s just a shame that they’re draped over such a monotonously awful framework that we really can’t recommend to anybody.

That’s an important problem for Death to Spies – that we can’t recommend it to anyone, not even the masochistic, hardcore stealth fans that the title is obviously catering to with it’s forbidding difficulty and linear progression. It’s just too clunky a game, too drab, too slow, too difficult and ultimately too bad to score anything else other than a three.

Score Guide