SECRET AGENT
SHORT VERSION: Double OOOHHHH YEAH! One of the better DOS shareware platformers, this game does a lot with little, making you feel like a little spy infiltrating challenge filled lairs with fun, cartoony visuals.
LONG VERSION: This feels a bit like a spiritual successor to Crystal Caves, as it plays very similarly. I mean, it obviously uses the same engine, so I guess it shouldn’t be any surprise.
There are quite a few differences, though! For one, in Crystal Caves you had to collect all the crystals before you could exit a level. In Secret Agent, you have to destroy a satellite dish, find some dynamite, then use said dynamite to blow up the exit and leave.
Crystal Caves tended to focus on gimmicks on each level, such as reverse gravity or whatnot, whereas Secret Agent focuses on strong level design built around core mechanics.
And what level design it has! This game was a blast. They manage to make most of the levels feel different and fresh despite the limited mechanics and goals, and they all have such a wonderful sense of place… sometimes you’re in a castle, sometimes a high-tech lair, sometimes an office of death.
It does a great job in general with the spy theme… fighting ninjas, soldiers, and robots, jumping over shark infested pools, grabbing special glasses to let you see hidden platforms, hacking computers with floppy disks to turn off lasers, plus feeling like you’re on a mission thanks to the previously mentioned sense of infiltrating a place and the objectives.
There are a lot of levels that do the thing where you go back and forth for keys and the associated doors, but I didn’t mind here because 1) the levels aren’t huge 2) the levels are fun to traverse and 3) the levels have good flow so you’ll often find your way back through a new path. It’s not like Duke 2 where they just stick keys and their doors on opposite sides of levels and just throw a random assortment of platforms between them. It kinda feels like good boomer shooter design.
Again like in CC, you have limited ammo, BUT AGAIN LIKE IN CC, you carry it over between levels and the game throws plenty at you, thankfully.
I said Crystal Caves felt like an action-focused puzzle platformer, well this is the same except even heavier into the action. It’s still possible to soft lock yourself if you go the wrong way or do the wrong thing, but as in CC, you have infinite lives so can just retry, and in most cases you can avoid getting stuck if you think ahead.
Well, until the third episode… AGAIN like CC, this is where it gets a little tedious and unfair, requiring you to go back and forth over insta-kill hazards (usually you have three hits), and they hide more information from you which makes it harder to plan ahead. It never got as bad as CC did, but it was definitely the weakest episode due to how tedious some of the levels felt… I had to replay some of them quite a lot and I almost quit the game all together (but I was also tired). They also love to hide blue keys with blue backgrounds in this ep.
It also has some of the problems CC had such as collision boxes taking up entire grid spaces (making insta-kill mines very annoying if you don’t jump over them quite right), moving platforms are annoyingly small, the scrolling and controls are a little clunky, and enemies only move if they’re onscreen which I found annoying… I wanted to camp them!
And while it has cartoony graphics with fun enemy designs and locations (and great faux lighting), it lacks the cutscenes of CC which gave that game a lot of humour and personality. This one feels quite dry in comparison, like a martini.
BUT overall I think this is definitely one of the better DOS platformers. I had a great time with it until the third episode, and even then I don’t think that was terrible, just much more tedious than the first two.
