Where has Signal Ops been hiding? We last spotted it crouching behind a Spotlight on Greenlight headline in December, but let it slip outside our cone of vision during a time-of-day conversation with a stranger. Now it’s right there in the middle of GOG, wielding a $12 price tag.
That’s the sort of game Signal Ops is, you see – one of joint espionage and timed distraction. It’s an optionally co-op stealth shooter made unique by the addition of your colleagues’ viewpoints to your HUD, and a sense of humour. The humour isn’t visible on your HUD, of course. Only in this launch trailer.
Signal Ops fills its wide-open levels with oblivious NPCs – soldiers, civvies and marching bands – just waiting to be engaged in how-do-you-dos while the other stoic men and women on your surveillance feed creep across the cobbles behind them. Players – alone, or in twos or threes – will need to position radios throughout the map to maintain communication, keep to the shadows, and be ready for a punch-up.
“You work for a secretive government agency and lead your field agents from the relative safety of the control room on various espionage missions,” explain the developers. “Stealing secrets, sabotage, assassination, and all that sort of thing. This is no corridor shooter. The levels are open and you are free to tackle the objectives in the manner you see fit.”
Its scruffily stylised, post-war aesthetic and tone look like the work of a British Double Fine, too. We’d better keep a wary eye on its actually-Vancouver-based studio: Space Bullet Dynamics Corporation. Don’t let them out of your sight.
Thanks, PC Gamer.