Phantom Covert Ops Free Download GAMESPACK.NET

Phantom Covert Ops Free Download GAMESPACK.NET Let me say up front that I’m in no way saying that no special forces commando has ever stealthily infiltrated an enemy stronghold exclusively via kayak without ever setting foot on land. I mean, if such a soldier exists, they must be such a badass that no one has ever seen them and lived. But for the sake of argument, let’s say it’s a goofy premise for a VR stealth game, and Phantom: Covert Ops leans into it hard enough that it sort of works. Given the fact that you’re effectively half man, half boat it’s bemusing how seriously Phantom: Covert Ops takes itself. You’ve got the amazingly generic name, and the paint-by-numbers Tom Clancy story about a former Soviet madman planning a biological weapons attack is played 100 percent straight, smack-talking villains and all. All of that is relayed to you through voices over a radio. It’s practically self-parody. Where Phantom does stand out is in how you sneak around. Propelling yourself through the water is pretty fun once you get over how ridiculous waving a virtual kayak paddle looks to anybody watching – picture someone doggy-paddling through the air. I ended up getting into it, though, even putting my feet up on a footstool to simulate sitting in a kayak (though this sometimes made it difficult to reach items in my lap).TOP/BEST ADULT VIDEO GAMES IN UNITED STATES OF AMERICA (USA)

Phantom Covert Ops Free Download GAMESPACK.NET

It’s cool to build up some speed, then hold the A button on the right controller and dip a paddle to make tight turns, though it’s a little inconsistent about when you can just hold the paddle and when you have to push repeatedly. At the same time, in a lot of ways dealing with the inertia of your boat while avoiding spotlights and incoming enemy boats is like if Agent 47 were trying to be sneaky while wearing ice skates. Getting the hang of stopping when you need to stop and positioning yourself close enough to a switch to reach out and pull it is not without its frustrations. Because of that imprecision it’s probably a good thing that, as stealth games go, this is a fairly simple and forgiving one. Granted, AI needs to be predictable and robotic for successful stealth to feel like solving a puzzle rather than just getting lucky, but these guys are hilariously dumb. Your binoculars permanently mark enemies for you, and soldiers are all but completely blind unless you float directly into their flashlight beams or zoom by them at top speed. I found myself being thankful that Phantom doesn’t use the Rift’s microphone to pick up sound that could be perceived by enemies because I was usually laughing in their faces at how brazenly I could lazily cruise by under their noses – sometimes literally when they’re standing on a bridge. Sometimes just sailing by isn’t an option because an area is well lit or heavily patrolled.

WHERE PHANTOM DOES STAND OUT.

But in those cases there are usually highlighted objects like lights, radios, and fire extinguishers you can shoot to create a diversion and draw them away. Failing that you’ve always got a silenced pistol at your side that can drop all but the most armored of enemies with a single headshot. You even get about five seconds of slow-motion reaction time to take out whoever spotted you. It’s kind of odd that, for most of Phantom’s seven missions, you’re armed to the teeth: a silenced pistol, an assault rifle, and sometimes a silenced sniper rifle and another fun toy or two are strapped to your body and boat, and you’ll often have explosives you can toss. Usually I had more ammunition than I could carry, which was confusing because this is a game about avoiding firefights. You’re actually penalized for unnecessary kills. What am I supposed to do with all these bullets? I did enjoy being given permission to take out certain VIP war criminals when their identities were revealed by a scan – usually they have friends around who must be distracted (or killed if you don’t mind running up the body count) which made for some rare moments where I had to game out how the AI would react.Project Myriam Life and Explorations

Phantom Covert Ops Free Download GAMESPACK.NET

That doesn’t mean it’s always easy: if you get cocky and don’t stop to recognize patterns in enemy movements you can easily find yourself taken by surprise, and you die from just a few shots. Likewise, a couple of boss fight segments killed me multiple times as I figured out how to avoid invulnerable attack helicopters and snipers. Of course, the real challenge is running up the score by completing a level quickly, silently, and non-lethally – that’s where the replayability comes from. On my first playthrough I only scored one A-grade in the between-mission report, so even though its campaign is only four or five hours long I could see myself replaying some to chase a few better scores. While there’s some distinctive architecture to the map, I didn’t see a ton of diversity to the levels because they’re all set in the dark of night within a dingy flooded Soviet military base. That doesn’t leave a lot of room for creativity in the design, especially since everything has to be accessible without the use of your legs. Some areas are even reused for multiple missions. It does introduce a few hazards like mines to keep you from getting too complacent, though those were so easy to avoid I never actually ran into one. It doesn’t help that even on the Rift S running off a GeForce RTX 2080 with the settings maxed out, Phantom doesn’t look fantastic.

SIMPLY GET A NICE PLACE TO SIT AND SETTLE IN.

Texture resolution gets obviously low when you get close to a wall or have to throw switches, and soldier animations are barebones. Notably for such a wet game, there’s not much by way of wake and splash effects – in the first level, for example, you use a large cargo ship to cover your entrance to the base, but there’s virtually no disturbance in the water behind it. The tradeoff is that you can play on the modestly powered Oculus Quest, so it’s not all bad. Your job, generic agent, is to infiltrate somewhere or other and stop the Russian terrorists from unleashing a fiendish thingy or somesuch. We aren’t really here for the plot or characters. There are some bad people, in a forbidding, abandoned facility. They need to be stopped. Thankfully, the whole place is flooded, and you’re a kickass black ops type. Stuck in a kayak. Yes. The unusual and excellent conceit at the heart of Phantom: Covert Ops is that the player spends the whole game stealthing around, shooting and hiding, in a kayak. What must have been a challenging elevator pitch turns out to be a superb way of utilising the virtues of VR, and sidestepping a lot of the problems that some people have with it. By making the player remain sedentary and yet still empowering them with convincing movement, it opens up the playing field a little to people who might otherwise find the immersion a challenge due to motion sickness.MORDHAU

Phantom Covert Ops Free Download GAMESPACK.NET

It’s canny, but more importantly, it works fantastically well. In real life, you plonk yourself on a chair with some arm room. Maybe you can even sit on the floor with your legs stretched out for additional immersion. Hell, why not go the whole hog and seat yourself in an actual kayak before donning the headset? Lockdown affects us all in different ways; they can’t touch you for it. In the game, you’re sat with everything you could need within arms’ reach; Silenced pistol on your chest, sniper rifle down the right of the boat, paddles to the left, and a pair of binoculars, which act as your scanning mode and camera, resting on your lap. They all snap back into their cradle positions when you let go, and everything functions as you might hope. The scope on the sniper takes a little bit of self-calibration to get used to, but once you’ve done so, it feels second nature. Like the general design philosophy in the game, everything feels designed to convince rather than be needlessly fiddly, from the simple but satisfying paddling mechanics to the straightforward, chunky act of reloading the guns. There are a couple of unexpectedly delightful treats in here. The first, thankfully, is the movement of the boat itself. Paddling and manoeuvering feel amazing. nDreams have completely nailed it.

THE APPEAL OF VR IS WELL-KNOWN.

It’s the best of all worlds, working as you might expect even if you’re au fait with real kayaking, but also accessible and functionally sound for the game, too. There’s something deliciously right about not quite making it into the reeds you use as hiding spots, and pushing off from some scenery (or frantically paddling in one direction) to conceal yourself before a searchlight sweeps over you. The movement is also quite pleasing at speed. There’s an elegant method of quick turning and even drifting in the water, which is excellent fun. The second is the real emphasis on stealth and non-lethality. The game stresses this during the first level – it genuinely wants you to distract and avoid most enemies rather than shoot them outright. Whilst it still gives you scope (haha) to utilise those rewarding headshots on some targets, the focus is definitely on infiltration rather than body count. It’s one of the things that increase the replayability of the levels, too, as the game scores you on just how stealthy, accurate and quick you’ve been, with many individual stats for each. There are also hidden objectives and collectables to find on your way through, too. While the game can be whipped through in about seven or so hours, the levels are designed to be revisited.

There are also online leaderboards; that perfect stealth run is dangled like a jaffa cake in front of you at every turn. I think it’s pitched just right. The playing time means that the water-bound gimmick never outstays its welcome before the game’s story runs its course, but there’s excellent value for money here too.  As an elite covert operative, you are on an infiltration mission. Sneaking into a compound, you find traces of an old enemy presumed dead years ago. Traces of a project thought bombed into dust. It’s up to you to find out more over a total of seven campaign missions. On the side of NATO and put up against a vaguely Eastern European enemy, it does feel a bit stereotypical. Then again, multiple AAA games do exactly the same. Phantom: Covert Ops is still doing better than many other virtual reality games by having a story and dialogue rather than a minimal setting, so although it’s not exactly breaking ground, I won’t hold that against it. It helped to keep me immersed in the game. While I don’t think the story would win any awards, I did like how character dialogue was used to keep the world alive. As you passed characters, they would sometimes talk. One that stuck out to me was a father bragging about his children to an exasperated-sounding woman who had heard it all before. Another was the radio talking about one of the soldiers being punished in an upbeat voice.

Phantom Covert Ops Free Download GAMESPACK.NET

This helped to keep the tone light, despite some rather serious moments and topics. Considering that much of the gameplay is trying to be slow and quiet, having an active world around you to keep you interested is certainly a positive point. This paired well with gameplay that always had me doing something, despite being slow and sneaky. Rowing your kayak along, you need to sneak past guards to take photographs for evidence, disable important equipment, and more. This involves actual rowing from a seated position. The first thing that you learn in Phantom: Covert Ops is physically moving the kayak around by moving the oars with your controllers. I personally found this very immersive as it felt very real. Leaning forward in my seat and rotating the oar slowly at times to avoid detection, or quickly to get past while a camera is facing the other way or a guard is distracted kept me quite engaged. When I’d accidentally gone too far it was a sudden scramble to row myself back into the reeds to hide or even occasionally to just make a break for it if I’d been spotted. Breaking into a secure area means guards. Fortunately for you, they’re not too bright and can be dealt with in a number of ways. You come equipped with a silenced pistol, a sniper rifle, and a machine gun. While you can certainly use those in the direct way to avoid detection, you are encouraged to avoid killing guards.ATONE Heart of the Elder Tree

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