An action strategy game with a Bond like protagonist
In the game you will play as Maximillian Remington or you can choose to play as his female version, Maxine. You are a CIA hired investigator and will be presented with a growing list of quests offered to you in a sandbox like environment. If you think that the game sort of feels familiar, you won't be wrong. The mechanics are pretty much a 1 to 1 copy of the Sid Meier Pirates! game, only with a different theme. Just like Pirates!, the game consists of the main freeform map exploration but conflicts and other action are treated as their own minigames. While Pirates! offered you fencing, dancing and boarding minigames, Covert Action instead treats you with infiltration minigames, secret message decoding, interrogation minigames and other CIA operations inspired minigames. The game is well polished visually and features simple controls. Whenever you are at a loss on how to handle a certain minigames you will be aided by tooltips and by a comprehensive explanation, but the gameplay during minigames sessions is pretty self explanatory. Given the many different minigames scattered throughout the game, you never get bored but neither do you get into a grove, so you might end up feeling a bit underwhelmed even after a few good hours of play. Nevertheless, for such a comprehensive list of minigames, Covert Action manages to show polish and a very well balanced difficulty curve. It's definitely an overlooked classic, so give it a try.
