The game's story is inspired by that of Violette Szabo, a real life agent that worked for MI6 during the war before being captured, tortured and killed by Nazi forces. In the game, the player is placed in the knee-high boots of Violette Summer, as she slinks around German camps stabbing soldiers and breaking fuse boxes. The story is told as a series of memories Violette has as she lies seriously injured in a French hospital; some of the script in-game is reminiscent of Prince of Persia: Sands of Time, as the voice over talks about events as if they are memories. This only partially works, as the script is terrible and the actress's accent keeps jumping all over the place. It feels as if several different people had a crack at the script and the frankly bizarre conversations that the guards have will make you derisively chuckle rather than become further immersed in the world.

The game world itself is a mixed bag of basic geometry, overly normal-mapped texturing and dramatic lighting. The environments are bland and uninspired, with all of the typical World War 2 dock and bunker settings covered and ticked off. Players of other WW2 games will feel a disappointing sense of familiarity in these levels, often because the layouts feel like they are from the first Medal of Honor games on the Playstation. The levels are frustratingly linear and have none of the experimentation that other stealth games use and rely on. Each section is more like a puzzle than a stealth experience, as enemies have short patrol routes that trigger when you get near to them, therefore offering easy stealth kills without much challenge. After viewing the scene for a few seconds, the intended route between shadows and the timings of patrols is painfully obvious and an almost prescribed set of actions will quickly clear the area of guards that have seemingly been ordered to patrol only a few square metres.

The most interesting aspect of the levels is the artistic effect of some of the lighting. Instead of realistically lighting areas and dealing with gradients of shadow, the developers have chosen to fill the sky with intense lighting to set the mood and provide binary shadows so that it is clear to the player where they will and won't be hidden. In a mission that takes the player to the heart of occupied Paris, the sky is the orange of fire and sunset, immediately an atmosphere of a burning war zone. The opening shot of that particular level frames the silhouetted skyline beautifully and momentarily takes the player's mind off the inevitable tedium of playing through the level.

It is clear that Replay Studios wanted to make a clone of Splinter Cell, but didn't understand what makes Splinter Cell the stealth game that it is. The stealth games that have worked best are the ones that have given the player a linear route through the game but still allow each area to become a playground of experimentation and learning. Sam Fisher brings an unrivalled arsenal of toys and moves along on each mission, and the levels he creeps through allow the player to try a wide variety of tactics in each situation. Velvet Assassin is crippled by Viollette's incredibly small repertoire of moves and the fact that she has almost no gadgets whatsoever. Whereas Fisher can fully interact with the world by climbing, jumping and crawling all over it, Violette can only hop up on specified ledges and her two modes of movement are running or crouching, with very little analogue finesse to the movement speed. Lights are magically unbreakable and can only be disabled by finding a fusebox and hitting the button prompt to switch the lights off. This will make a guard come and take a look, making him an easy target for a silent kill. Some levels feature a surprisingly high number of fuse boxes in some fairly odd places and it all adds to the sense of repetition in playing the game.

Velvet Assassin has very little in the way of variety and each area will play out in mostly the same way as the rest. The player enters an area, eyes the patrols and then works their way between shadows to hit fuseboxes or guards before progressing. Every so often the player will be forced into an action sequence where they must use more powerful weapons than the standard silenced pistol, but this is more infuriating than welcome as the weapons have a split-second delay between pressing the trigger and the gun actually firing. Occasionally, the player can also dress Violette up as a German officer in what the developers probably hoped would be tense sequences to rival the disguise system in Hitman, but are actually a broken mess. When you don the uniform, a white bar appears across the centre of the screen that will shrink the closer you are to an enemy. Once it has completely decreased your ruse has been discovered and you will instantly be shot. Even if the enemy that caused the bar to shrink hasn't even been looking at you. Nazi telepathy strikes again.

Then there is Morphine Mode. The developers have been keen to stress that the character has not been sexualised and this holds up with some of her outfits but not when she is wearing the smallest nightie ever made. When this mode is activated the screen blooms out and then fades back down to show Violette – nearly falling out of her nightie – surrounded by falling rose petals. Let's not forget that the person this character is based on was beaten and raped in a concentration camp. That being said, Morphine Mode works as an excellent 'get out of jail free' card (no pun intended) that eases the frustrations of the stealth genre that some players naturally feel. If a player finds a guard particularly difficult to get round, taking a hit of morphine will slow time down to a crawl, allowing the player to run rings round an enemy and assassinate them at leisure. For all that is wrong with the execution of the stealth gameplay in Velvet Assassin, the inclusion of Morphine Mode is at least a helping hand that will help to usher players through some of the more infuriating parts of levels.

Velvet Assassin is a primitive and basic game even by last-gen standards. Splinter Cell came out seven years ago and had more features and intelligent level design than this clone. Whilst more features don't necessarily make for a better game, a bar has been set and certain things are expected of a stealth game. To the game's credit is does satisfy the basic joy of creeping through the shadows and silently taking someone out, but it doesn't elicit the sense of power that other stealth games manage, instead coming off as crippled and featureless. It certainly isn't a terrible game but it is so mediocre and lacking in mechanics that time spent playing it feels rather pointless in a world where stealth classics already exist.