Special shoutout to @SteveEag and @Angry_Kurt this week for pointing out the tweet at the start of the article below, talking about a fairly obscure game made on the original Mafia engine. Chameleon, made by Silver Wish Games and released in 2005 in a handful of Eastern European countries. Needless to say, after my recent run through and enjoyment of all things Mafia, I had to play it and then, of course, write about it. So I bloody well did.

If you fancy giving it a go, a fully translated version, all patched up, DRM-free and ready to work on modern hardware, can be found at https://archive.org/details/chameleon-2005.

Covert Covert Covert Covert Covert Chameleon.

It's no surprise that a game made and released in Eastern Europe is a bit on the buggy side. Hell, people even invented the term 'Eurojank' to describe the very specific kind of rough around the edges games that have this near uniform lack of polish. During my time with Chameleon I had a few moments where A.I. routines locked up and an interesting texture bug on a level that made most of them appear pitch black, which made finding my way around a lot harder than it should've been! The controls are clunky in a way you'd expect from a stealth game from 2005 and the actual mechanical stealth and combat is a little stiff and takes a bit of getting used to - finding out what you can and can't get away with is crucial to enjoying Chameleon. Finally, the dialogue is bad due to a combination of it not being the game developer's native language but also some predictably crap writing and even worse delivery. It's a bit of a tough sell due to the age of the game, the developer and likely the budget they had and, ultimately, the fact that even at the time it was probably a fairly rough around the edges experience.

Despite all of this I had a really good time with Chameleon! I enjoyed it quite a bit! Yes, the dialogue and plot are crap but they're simple enough to provide a framework for the events that take place and the locations you visit. The bugs I encountered were never game-breaking, despite being a bit irritating and forced me to restart one of the levels. The mechanics were slightly more interesting - I personally prefer more simplistic stealth where the AI is a little dim and can be manipulated. When the AI is super advanced and the stealth requires in the moment reactions and approaches, I tend to struggle. I'm not very good at dealing with that sort of thing. Here, the AI follows strict routines and provided you're in shadow or not directly in their field of view, you can wander right up to an enemy and take them out. Sure, it's like all the guards have blinders on but the more stiff, structured stealth makes each area feel like a puzzle game, where there's very clear things you can do to take out or avoid enemies and places you can hide. It's not the greatest shooting game but headshots are legit and the aiming, which requires you to equip the pistol to carry it but then ready it before you fire made it clear to me that its only really to be used as an extreme measure and, for that, I found it was good enough.

An area where Chameleon needs no caveats, however, is the atmosphere. The engine that powered the original Mafia game manages to provide quite varied and realistic locales for you to tackle missions in and all of them have a unique feel to them. It's a pretty diverse bunch of settings and mission objectives, from exploring the back streets of Belfast to find an IRA hideout, an all-action shootout on a moving train, sneaking into a Baltimore police station to steal confidential records, infiltrating a maximum security prison in Columbia to break a prisoner out and eventually end up in an active warzone in Afghanistan for the final act.

The core of the game is actually something of a hybrid between Splinter Cell and the original Hitman trilogy. Sticking to shadows, with your visibility indicated by a meter, sneaking into high security areas, disabling CCTV cameras and using some tech, like an under door camera probe, night vision goggles and silenced weapons is pure Splinter Cell, but unlike Ubisoft's Tom Clancy-branded series there's a lot of levels that also feature areas that aren't patrolled by shoot-on-sight guards. You can wander around civilian areas without any trouble, provided you don't do anything daft like pull a gun out. This means that many missions have objectives that have you dipping between safe and hostile zones. There's often multiple ways to find your way into an area and a bit of exploration can yield a much more straightforward approach to a particular objective.

There's a three level sweet spot in the middle of the game. The end of the Moldova level, which has you sneaking through a train depot, has you board a train and starts one of the game's few all-action levels. The limited and obviously very linear nature of a fucking train means that you don't get any situations thrown at you that the slightly wonky shooting can't quite cope with, so its a simple thrill ride. You then take on a hybrid level that requires you to sneak into a police station, disable the security and find the archives in the basement. The start of the level has you wandering the brilliantly realised Baltimore streets at your own pace before you decide on how you're going to enter the station, where it becomes pretty much instant-fail stealth as you dodge guards and hide from the view of security cameras. The next stage is the prison break - a night mission that has you tackling large indoor and outdoor areas either by utilising all the stealth tactics you've learned to date or by going loud and shooting your way in and out again. It's three back-to-back levels that really capture the best elements of Chameleon and showcase the variety in approaches and locations.

As I've said throughout, Chameleon isn't without its problems and either requires you to be forgiving of its flaws or have a particular taste for early 2000s stealth action games but when it clicks (and it really does click on those aforementioned levels) Chameleon delivers on its reputation as a bit of a hidden gem. The atmosphere each level delivers does a lot of heavy lifting and elevates it during its weaker moments but overall I found Chameleon to be a lot more interesting than the super polished but homogenous AAA stuff out there and can say that if any of this has resonated with you, it's absolutely worth your time.

THANKS FOR READING.

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