Agents was a pleasant surprise for me.  There was a lot of depth there that I didn’t expect.  In a Spy Versus Spy genre that I haven’t seen before, this game involves trying to avoid the other spy’s booby-traps, laying out your own, and trying to do both of these things while in search of important hidden documents.

The graphics and game controls are very nice.  Set in three different types of environments, you intuitively move from one area of a room to another by tapping where you want to go or what you want to search.  A really nice feature of it though is that you can rotate the rooms around and view them from any direction.  When you get close to a wall that might block your point of view, the wall fades away so that you see through it.

As you walk from room to room, you find area that sparkle.  These are areas that you have not explored yet.  By tapping on them, you examine them.  Sometimes, there is nothing there.  Sometimes, you find weapons or ammo for them.  And sometimes, if you are really lucky, you find one of the four hidden documents.  Finding all the documents themselves can be quite a challenge, especially on a large map of rooms, but it might get kinda old and boring.  That is where the other spy comes into play.  Your AI opponent is not only searching for the same documents, but is laying traps for you as well.  You not only have to worry about trip-wires with explosives tied to doors or between furniture, but any object capable of holding a document, you know, that stuff you have to search, is also capable of holding a bomb.  There is even remotely-triggered devices that can be set off from a different room.  But you can return the favor and do all this same stuff to your opponent as well.

And don’t worry about the game getting suddenly easier if you quickly kill your opponent.  That isn’t the end-game.  If you kill him, anything he has discovered is randomly replaced somewhere in the game and he randomly starts over in a different room.  You don’t win until you find all the documents and make it to the exit.

When you start a new game, you can choose which character you are playing, which of three different environments that you want to play (lab, office, or castle), and the size of your grid of rooms (3×3, 4×4, or a very large 6×6).  Besides the tutorial level, there are campaign modes, quick-play modes, multi-player modes (over wifi) where you either host or join a game, and challenge mode that uses the Crystal platform to play against different opponents there.

I did have two issues with the game.  First, in the tutorial, I got to a point where it said I had found all the documents, but it wouldn’t let me leave because it said I needed to find all the documents.  I went through all the rooms a couple more times and couldn’t find anything that I had not already examined, so I gave up on the tutorial.  The second issue was once I got into the game itself.  My map, as you can see in the bottom corner of my second screenshot, seemed to be disabled.  Maybe there is something I needed to do in order to activate it and see my location in relation to the exit and opponent, but it would have been nice if that was spelled out a bit more with some documentation or help.  It might have covered that in the tutorial, but like I said, I didn’t complete it and a FAQ inside the game or online somewhere might help.

I only have two suggestions for this game.  First, I wish the interaction/shooting/killing between the two agents when they find each other was a bit easier to control and had a bit more to it.  I’m not sure exactly what I’d do to change it, but I think it could be improved.  Second, the tutorial tells you to select certain weapons from your inventory to use, but the items are not really identified when you pull up the inventory.  They have different graphics and are a bit easy to recognize once you know what they are, but this is where some kind of FAQ might come in handy where each of the different types of weapons and different game play modes are described in a bit more detail.

Overall, I really liked this game.  If there was another player in the house so that I could personalize who I was playing against and blowing up with my traps, it might just make my must-have list.  But as a $0.99 adventure/puzzle game, I think it is definitely worth the money and recommend it.