Stealth action games toe a thin line between frustration and euphoric genius. The more unforgiving enemy characters are, the more satisfied the player feels when she kills them all without being seen. Push the line too far, though, and you'll cause the player no end of anguish. Velvet Assassin, proof of this precarious balance, is at times deeply rewarding and at times agonizingly arbitrary and irritating. In general, though, with careful attention to detail and a great deal of patience, you can conquer seemingly impossible rooms on the first try. The game passes the first test for a fun stealth action game: success largely correlates to effort.

Velvet Assassin attempts to mix things up with a moody, World War II setting and a buxom female lead. It is also very hard. Violette Summer possesses the resilience of a slightly thicker-skinned than normal human being, which is to say she doesn't bleed and can take a rifle butt to the face, but a couple machine gun rounds will drop her fast. Remaining unseen at her work is paramount. The chances of her surviving a head-on encounter with more than one guard are slim, and as far as weaponry goes, you'd be better off looking for ammo in Raccoon City.

Violette Summer was a real British spy during the war, and her choice as heroine emphasizes the theme of “real” war. The problem with emphasizing realism as a primary theme, however, is that it makes the bits of illogical absurdities all the more grating. No one is concerned when a dune buggy in Halo has a head-on collision with a jet fighter and emerges unscathed. Shooting puddles of gasoline to setting guards on fire in a game that emphasizes reality, though, is a bit more puzzling.

Once you delve beneath the marketing campaigns, however, you are rewarded with a perfectly suitable stealth action video game, and to its immense credit, Velvet Assassin makes no bones about what it is. Stealth gameplay has not been taken this seriously since the PlayStation release of Metal Gear Solid. There are moments when the only way to find your way past a room of guards is to study their patrol patterns for three minutes  The reward comes in the execution, when the soundtrack pounds like a heartbeat at the moment of contact, and Violette dispatches the target with a canned, but satisfying, kill animation.

Unfortunately, Velvet Assassin fumbles so thoroughly with its checkpoint system that all of this good will is rather wasted. There is no option to save progress during a mission, and checkpoints are spaced two or three rooms apart, if not more. Nothing kills the sense of empowerment faster than being forced to replay a section that was already, painstakingly, bested. It is a ridiculous thing to ask of the player, especially for a game that so neatly rewards the player for getting it right the first time. When a stealth game is so solid that victory is its own reward, threatening the player with a game reset is a lot like forcing a woman to have sex with you by gunpoint after she has already taken off all her clothes and tried to pull you into bed.

This propensity for ruining moments of subtle genius is not limited to the tactical planning portions of the game either. First of all, there are the action sequences, which are absolutely baffling. Equipping the heroine with an assault rifle and removing her stealth-cover in a game where guards can drop you in one shot does not lend itself to thrilling gun fights.

In fact, a great deal of Velvet Assassin is about contradictory mindsets. It is a game steeped in the disturbing, brutal violence of war and provides chilling reminders of horrors perpetrated by the Nazi regime - even as you read innocent, boyish letters to home from German troops. Its humanization of Nazi soldiers and bald, honest representation of their war-making is a powerful message. But then you find you can set guards on fire but shooting at pools of gasoline (why are they standing in oil, and why does a bullet set it on fire?). And then you murder a soldier while his friend is on patrol, and the friend never acknowledges his inexplicably missing buddy. Or, worse, you murder the soldier right in front of his friend's face, who doesn't notice anything at all because anything done in the shadows in Velvet Assassin is evidently done in a black void.

It is a game where the heroine is able to take down what must be entire regiments using nothing more than a few shadows and a knife but says at one point, “I need a weapon, at all costs.”

It is a game that takes its action very seriously, but sets the story within the ridiculous narrative framework of a wounded woman reliving her missions through morphine-hazed dreams.

Velvet Assassin insists on being boldly realistic about war and about sneaking around, but its plot and gameplay is riddled with enough logical inconsistencies to write its own Mystery Science Theater 3000 screenplay. And while taking down an entire room of guards without being seen is its own reward, Velvet Assassin robs the player of discovery by delivering a tutorial for every possible method of execution. Whether it makes sense to shoot a puddle of gasoline or not, it would still have been something fun to try on one's own. Instead, the manual (and loading screen tips) spell it out for you, along with other tactics like pulling pins from grenades on soldiers' belts or whistling to attract guards into your territory.

To illustrate just what Velvet Assassin could have been, it's worth discussing what's already there: a serious stealth action game that rewards careful planning and mercilessly punishes run-and-gun Solid Snake-style tactics. The action is also set to one of the most haunting video game scores since Silent Hill 2, and it all takes place within a narrative that reminds us that while the Germans were, indeed, humans, they could also be horrific brutes. World War II is made out to be what it really, and the brutal work of murdering men in cold blood fits the thesis rather well.

Velvet Assassin does not lend itself to prolonged gameplay sessions, but unless you are a game reviewer or a young child, that will probably suit you just fine. (And if you are the latter, by the way, you have no business playing this game.) Although the game lacks the coherency its dark theme deserves, it reduces the stealth genre to its quintessence. That essence, it turns out, is actually rather entertaining.