More ice than my mum's freezer...
Set in the frozen Artic circle, you play the role of White Fox, an ex-agent for a top secret government organization who left under cloud and has been wallowing in the bottom of a bottle for the last two years. Pulled out of retirement, you’re tasked with tracking down an old enemy and discovering what he has to do with the unexpected sinking of a Russian submarine way up North in the Barents Sea. To help you in your task you’re equipped with the latest gadgets and gizmos from noise making beacons to distract guards through silent ammo for the ultimate in stealth kills from afar. This offensive kit is backed up by an array of gadgets such as a PDA and sensory binoculars to find out how healthy your foes are and what equipment they’re carrying.
The first level in Aurora Watching is an unashamed training level, designed to take you through White Fox’s repertoire of moves before dropping you in the thick of the action. White Fox can be set to move at three different speeds, causing differing amounts of noise. You select which speed you fancy with either a flick of the mouse wheel or by hitting the ‘c’ or ‘f’ keys. One of your training missions is to move through an area in your stealth creep, then your walk, then a run. And, remarkably, it’s here that the first annoyance rears its head. You see, you have to run form square to square but the game insists on you being pixel bloody perfect as to where you switch between speeds. You’re supposed to change speed in the big square, but this isn’t immediately clear and change speed a tad either side of the centre of the square and you’ll be sent back to the start… annoying, very annoying.
Anyway, let’s forgive the over zealous trainer and her irritating, if slightly retarded sounding, speech and move on to the game itself. Play the game in easy mode and up in the top left of the screen you’ll be presented with a satellite map of the immediate surrounding area. This shows you where all the bad guys are on the screen as well as which way they’re facing and what state of alert they’re in. Now although this may sound like a cop out, knowing where everyone is, you’ll soon see that in Aurora Watching, you’ll need all the help you can get. You start off infiltrating a base with a view to working your way down to the sub base before eventually getting into the sunken sub itself, so here is where you put your skills to the test.
When you approach any object that you can interact with a set of brackets will appear, letting you know that you can do something with whatever it is you’re looking at. A right click of the mouse button pulls up a list of options for that object, you then select what you want to do. So a door has the sole option of open or close (if it’s already open) whereas a body might have the options to either pick it up to hide it or to search it for anything useful. At first this appears to be a sensible interface, but after a while it becomes clear that perhaps the Polish developers, Metropolis Software have been a little overzealous in adding this pop up system to everything… After all, the game gives you nothing else to do with a door except open and close it… the same with computers, you can either hack them or leave them alone, so why do we need two clicks? Surely just right clicking on them would be enough? It breaks up the rhythm of the game to keep stopping to select ‘open’ or ‘crack’ from a menu of… erm.. one.