Stealth (SNES)

 This is a game I'd never heard of before last week, when the name stood out to me for some reason while I was looking for something else. I looked it up online, and the idea of a turn-based strategy game with a focus on stealth sounded appealing, despite the unpleasant thematic aspect of playing as American soliders in the Vietnam war. Unfortunately, this wasn't a lucky find, as the game turned out to be awful.

 

The first thing you need to know is that this isn't a game where you're being stealthy, it's a game where your enemies are being stealthy. Furthermore, they have some ludicrous advantages over you. First, you can only see them on the map when they're attacking you during their turns. On its own, this wouldn't be too bad, and it could add a little memory test aspect to proceedings, having you shoot where you saw the enemy's gunfire originate. However, it's couple with another advantage that pretty much makes the game unplayable: unlike your men, the enemy can move after they shoot.

 

So you're essentially blindly wandering around the jungle, maybe shooting at random squares in the hopes that there's an enemy there, while every time they take a turn, they'll be able to damage multiple of your men. One of your guys does have the limited option to call airstrikes, but even so, you're still firing blind, and in the several attempts I've made at playing the game, an airstrike has never killed more than one enemy, and sometimes doesn't get any at all.

 

So, it's not a fun game. It's not an attractive one, either! It's ugly enough that I would've suspected that it was originally intended for release on the original Famicom and got shifted over to Super Famicom as that market shrank, were it not also for it having been released in 1992, and also being (as far as I can tell) the first game from its developers. It's not the first time their work has been on this blog, though, as they were also responsible for Tarot Uranai on 3DO, which at least looked nice.

 

Stealth is a game that, as far as I can see, has no redeeming qualities, and you definitely shouldn't bother playing. It's boring, slow, and fundamentally broken. The most interesting thing I think can be said about it is that GameFAQs listed five other, completely unrelated games also just called Stealth. Maybe some of those might be better?