Signal Ops Review

By – Armaan Khan

Signal Ops wants you to believe it’s a squad-based tactical game. You direct a team of 2 to 4 agents as they perform covert missions. Most of the time, you can pick your squad’s composition from a selection of half a dozen specialists, each of whom have a unique ability. Missions take place in large, open settings that seem to provide multiple routes to achieve your goals, and can be approached through pure stealth, pure murder, or somewhere in between. That sure sounds like a squad-based tactical game to me.

This is a lie, though. Signal Ops is really a puzzle game that uses squad-based tactics as a mechanic. The layout of the levels, the location/patrol routes of the enemies, the placement of power outlets (we’ll talk more about those later)—it’s all designed in such that there is really only one feasible path through a mission. Your job is to figure out what that path is.

In a way, this meta lie is fitting, because the game’s story is one of subterfuge and deceit. Your agents aren’t heroes, saving the world from scum. Rather, they work for a secret organization that has usurped power from the government and is now struggling to maintain it. As such, you’ll do some underhanded things. That’s not to say that you’re cackle, cackle evil. You and your crew aren’t bad guys, you’re just doing bad things. “Bad” being a relative term, of course.

Let’s talk about those power outlets. The “signal” part of the game’s title comes from its primary conceit. Your character always remains safely at home, while the agents under his command go out into the field. You keep track of them through a bank of monitors that shows what they see, and it’s through these feeds that you’ll control their actions in standard FPS style.

In order to receive the feed, one of your agents must carry a large radio on his back. Since the game is set in a universe filled with early cold war era technology, the radio can only transmit if it is plugged into an outlet. There is a battery that provides a limited amount of power if the radio is unplugged, but it discharges quickly and exists mainly to facilitate moving from one outlet to the next. What’s more, the radio can only receive signals within a certain range; if an agent goes outside the coverage area, you’ll lose his feed, although he can still be controlled both directly and indirectly (by having another agent tell him what to do).

Because you’re limited to the range of the radio, moving about is a chore. You end up plugging in, searching for the next available outlet, securing the path, and then—finally—transporting the darn thing to the new spot. If you find yourself at a dead end and need to go back, something that happens a lot, you’ll have no choice but to take the radio all the way back with you, one power outlet at a time. It’s a mechanic that becomes burdensome when all you really want to do is explore freely to get a lay of the land.

That exploration is an essential aspect of the game. Signal Ops embraces very old-school design paradigms, so it provides you with very little information beforehand. You’ll have a general map of the area, but the actual layout may be radically different from what you expect. What looks like a pathway between two buildings on the map may actually be impassable, blocked off by a fence, debris, or guards. Things like sewers, overhead walkways, and air ducts are not shown, nor are the internal layouts of buildings. Oftentimes, enemies will be placed in such a way that they’ll see you before you can see them. At which point they’ll set off alarms, attack, or arrest you.

Don’t think you can rely on some sort of indicator that lets you know more than you can see. Most stealth/tactical games will have HUD elements or minimaps that display enemies within a certain range or, at the very least, where they are likely to be based on the noise they make. Signal Ops has none of that. You’ll need to make a very careful visual survey of the area if you want to know what’s going on. Don’t think about getting into prolonged firefights, either. Your agents are fragile and their health doesn’t regenerate, so you need to be gentle with them.

The reliance on in-mission intelligence gathering, coupled with the need to always be in range of the radio, turns Signal Ops into a game of piecemeal trial-by-error puzzle-solving. Save-scumming became my best friend, because the best way to deal with any negative consequence was a reload. Agent got killed by a sniper you didn’t see? Sure, you could call in a reinforcement, but he’ll be unarmed so it’s best to just reload and save yourself the hassle. Picked the wrong path and ended up at a dead end? Reloading is faster than humping the radio back. Agent got arrested? You could rescue him, but you get the idea.

You might think this is leading up to me concluding the game is no good, but it actually kept me entertained throughout the 20 hours I spent with it. Yes, it was hard and frustrating, but it wasn’t the kind of difficulty/frustration that felt unfair and insurmountable. Every time I gave up and quit, I walked away with the feeling that I could beat it, so long as I kept trying. I never blamed the game or the designers for my failure, because I knew it was a puzzle, and every puzzle can be solved with a bit of thought and experimentation. At one point, I got out of bed at two in the morning to test a quick strategy I had come up with. It worked, and I went to sleep a very happy man. That’s the hallmark of a good puzzle game, and in that respect, Signal Ops succeeds.

Controls are mostly what you’d expect from an FPS: WASD, mouselook, et cetera. There’s no jumping or mantling, though; a knee-high wall will stop your agent in his tracks. Spacebar, which normally handles jumping duty in other games, instead activates your agent’s special ability. If the default layout is not to your liking, the most recent patch enabled the ability to remap everything.  You can also play with the Xbox controller, but I completely forgot to plug mine in to try. Oops. I didn’t miss it though, which is a testament to how comfortable the default layout feels.

The game does falter on the technical front. I experienced many clipping issues, especially around doors—I could push my agent partially through them, thus seeing what was on the other side. On a couple occasions an agent would plummet through the floor and die in the abyss that lay beneath the world. On one mission all the characters, both friendly and not, spawned on the wrong floor of a building. All of these were random occurrences, so quitting and reloading made things right again, and didn’t aggravate me enough that I’d condemn the game for their presence.

Conclusion—Is It Worth The Money?

I dislike hard games. I dislike puzzle games. I dislike games where the only way to progress is through trial and error. Signal Ops is all three and, yet, I enjoyed it. I think that’s because of the tactical trappings, which I can identify with. It’s not a game for everyone, but if you’re the kind of person who shops regularly at GOG.com, then you’ll probably like what it has to offer: old-school sensibilities in a modern package. If that sounds right to you, then it’s worth the $15.  I would also recommend voting for Signal Ops on Steam Greenlight.