This is maybe the most compulsive spy-themed multiplayer fun we"ve had since GoldenEye on N64; as you"d hope, there are a number of parameters to mess with so you can handicap good players, give yourself more lives to play with, etc.
The brilliant lighting system of the single-player game remains, so you can shoot out lights and wait for your foe in pitch darkness (although both players have a variety of useful vision modes to rely on, whilst mercs also have a torch to fall back on.) As producer Domitille Doat put it to us: "When we decided to do the multiplayer mode, we really wanted to do it in a completely different way, an unexpected way.
"The idea of saying we"re going to have FPS meets action stealth; the required a lot of work to balance the gameplay; it was hard for us to get, but we think we"ve succeeded in coming up with maps where both the spys and the mercenaries can enjoy each other as much as possible." Levels include a museum, a cinema, and a hospital, and each one is littered with fences to climb, tunnels to crawl through, rooms in which to secrete yourself and innocent looking areas in which to set up traps of such dastardly proportions that even Muttley would be struck dumb.