Game Reviews

21 Days

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21 Days
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| 21 Days

If being stealthy in real life were anything like it is in video games, only spectacularly short-sighted people would be employed in the guarding-things industry. A compulsion for treading the same path over and over would be required too.

Stealth games are all about smoke and mirrors, giving us the illusion of being silent ninjas when all we're really doing is outmanoeuvring idiots. What developers need to do is hide this fact from us.

Unfortunately, 21 Days doesn't quite manage it.

Hide and no seek

The game mainly takes place in a prison, where your character has been thrown after a bank job gone wrong. Once inside you befriend a flamboyant mustachioed fellow who has a plan to get out, but inevitably he needs your help.

And so you work through the titular 21 days, at the end of which a helicopter is going to arrive that you need to hijack and fly to freedom. Each of the days is a level, and requires you to sneak past some guards to perform a task.

You move your jailbird by drawing a line, but it can be a slightly clumsy experience. If your finger doesn't start dead on the character, you'll end up just moving the top-down view, which isn't particularly handy if you're trying to dart back into cover to avoid the attentions of a guard.

Luckily the guards are so monumentally stupid that it doesn't really matter. You can stand close enough to one that your fingertips would touch if you stretched out your arms, but they still won't see you and your bright orange jump suit.

Stealth bomber

That, and some odd checkpoints, really break the spell that the game is trying to weave. And it's a shame, because the premise is a solid and interesting one, and the gameplay often does rise above the problems and achieve some real tension.

Too often, though, that tension is broken by a stumbled move or a bumbling guard. There's fun to be had with 21 Days, and moments where the stealth approach really clicks, but be prepared for the occasional disappointment too.

21 Days

There are a few problems with 21 Days, but if you can get past them, you'll find a decent, if frustrating, stealth game
Score
Harry Slater
Harry Slater
Harry used to be really good at Snake on the Nokia 5110. Apparently though, digital snake wrangling isn't a proper job, so now he writes words about games instead.