E3 2009: The Agency impressions

by: John - posted: 6/7/2009 8:26:00 PM

Campy spy games are few and far between but Sony Online Entertainment’s looking to alleviate the drought with their next online MMORPG called The Agency. At E3, I had a look at the up and coming spy game that’s going to hit the PC and PS3 when it’s ready.

First off, the demo was being shown on a PC and a PS3 hitting the same server so while the demo allowed those playing on the PS3 to play with those on the PC, Sony Online Entertainment hasn’t made the decision yet on if this will be a feature at launch. I hope they do as there are few games that you can play on a PC with those playing on a console but the guys stressed that while it’s possible right now they don’t know if it will be on release.

In the Agency, you play a secret agent in one of two establishments or a mercenary. For the purposes of the demo, I just saw the secret agent portion of the game. The demo had two people playing as a team. They started out picking their role from three primary roles available. Depending on how you want to play you choose a role that suits you whether it is stealth, support, or others available. You can change your role if you would like though in case you start getting bored with one.

The game’s played in a third person view and the demo had all sorts of spy activities. I saw coordination with another as they conspired to take out enemies, distraction of a guard as the other got Intel on a camera, and hacking into controls. An unsuccessful hack results in your character being poisoned and two poisoned acts means death for your agent.

To help you get by the enemies, there’s a radar to show off those that are nearby. Not everything shows up though on the radar as turrets were one item that didn’t register. Even though you’ll have most of the enemies’ position, direction they are facing, and movement tracked on the radar, not every threat will show up so you’ll still have to be careful of where you go.

As with most spies, you’ll also have an alias where you can walk around amongst the crowd to try and do your job. Switching to an alias, this can be automatic or happen when you are in a dressing room, will give you new skills to play with. The demo showed a female agent switching to a black cocktail dress as her job was to infiltrate a party and take pictures of the security cameras. Now, there were some cameras that were in site of guards which the person had to their partner distracted in order for the picture to be taken. There will be objectives that require more than one or two people to achieve but these aren’t essential to completing the mission. They are more optional objectives that will give you more reward should you have enough people in your party to complete successfully. All the missions are replayable so if you decide that you would like to get all the optional objectives you can go back and do that.

Up to four people can be on a team so grab a few of your friends and try to prevent world domination from a criminal mastermind or cause as much mayhem as possible. The Agency is a campy spy game that should be something different in the MMO world dominated by fantasy games. Let’s hope they can release it with interoperability with PC and PS3s.