Burn unnoticed: Spymaster sneaks onto the App Store

Radio free Europe?

There was no fanfare, no advertising or media push around PlayRaven’s WWII espionage game Spymaster this week, which finally released worldwide after a long Canadian soft-launch. In fact, I didn’t even know it had launched until PT agent GiHub emailed me about it, but it’s out on the App Store and it’s free. But is it worth your time?

I don’t know yet. If you put a Welrod to my neck and demanded an answer right now, I’d say that it probably isn’t. That gives me no pleasure to write, because there’s lot to like about the game: the app itself is of the highest quality, and it’s dressed up with a neat faux-board game graphic design and some lovely music. The UI is fun to poke at and responsive. But the gameplay is a hostage to Spymaster’s free-to-play monetisation scheme, and in the couple of hours that I’ve spent with it, I’ve been regularly reminded that I’m playing a game on a needy cash register.

Spymaster is a game that captured our imaginations when we first heard about it in the spring of 2013, a game where you manage a network of spooks operating in occupied Europe, sabotaging rail facilities and narrowly escaping the attentions of the Gestapo: Football Manager for spies. Then we did an interview this January, and I’m you can pinpoint the exact moment in the conversation where Playraven break my heart and tell us it’s free-to-play.

I continued to hold out hope for two reasons: the first being my eternal optimism about all things video games, and the second being the precedent of games like Hearthstone and World of Tanks that make free-to-play work. But the vast majority of free-to-play games are an unpleasant, antagonistic experience, and I’m sorry to say that it looks like Spymaster is one of those. I’m more wary of the in-game monetizaiton than I am of the in-game Nazis, and that probably says it all.

I intend to stick with Spymaster for a while longer to see if my tune changes, and I’ll let you know this coming week if it does. I’ve grabbed a few screenshots as I’ve played, and those are after the jump.

Your spies are quite fragile birds, it turns out. But you can wait half an hour or more for them to heal, or spend real money to fix them up. This is Spymaster’s most galling aspect.

Setting up a raid — the more time you spend preparing, the lower the risk to your spies. But the more time you spend on the map setting up, the more Gestapo heat you draw.

The missions, once launched, are hands-off affairs that generate a little procedural story of what went down.