Sneak King (Xbox) - Guest Post

Old Man Hardgrit thinks he's got Shameless Fast Food Advertising Week all sewn up. He's wrong.

Bam!

Yes! Sneak King!

The sneak-'em-up that was sold by Burger King alongside other greasy objects. In Sneak King you play as the Burger King himself, sneaking up on unsuspecting innocents and offering them lukewarm food. But is that all he does?

The game is made up of separate challenges like Banjo-Kazooie: Nuts & Bolts; there's challenge icons dotted around the world. Pick one up, read what it says, and give it a go.

For the first level, I have to 'deliver some meals'. Okay. Meals it is.

I delivered a packet of onion rings! Time for a dance!

It took me a while to work out how to sneak up on people. You have to wait until they're hungry, then a hunger icon appears above their heads. Only then can you jump them with your slimy hands.

That's a bit disturbing. Can the King read minds? Or worse, is he a master mentalist, having trained himself over many years to recognise even the slightest body signals?

There's loads of places to hide. In boxes, under cars, behind doors, etc. The King doesn't seem to make a lot of effort in hiding himself. I suppose he only uses as much effort as he needs; he's completely invisible here.

Now... where is everyone? I've been waiting here for ages! This level is misleadingly big!

People who spot me point and start cheering. That's not the response I expected. I wanted fear! FEAR!

You can see here the vision range of the bystanders. It's not that big at all. They have absolutely no peripheral vision. They can hear you if you run beside them, but that only causes them to start to turn towards you. You can run up to them, and then start running in spirals around them until they forget about you.

When you successfully deliver a meal, you get a couple seconds of invulnerability from being seen. You can't see the folks' vision cones during this time though, so it's easy to think you've escaped only for the cones to reappear and find that everybody was staring right at the crazy man in the mouldy costume the whole time.

Another satisfied, mystified customer!

When you surprise someone, you get a skill-chance thing which determines what kind of 'flourish' you use to present your meal after you pull it out of your butt. There's only one animation for each of the four levels of flourish, and it's a lot easier to get the best one than it is to get any of the others due to how fast the gauge moves. I'm already sick of them all.

"I love my job! Where to next?"

You get bonus points for the hunger level of your prey. As they wander around, the folks get more and more hungry unless they suddenly collapse into a diabetic coma. Nobody seems to care when this happens. Even when there's guys talking to each other, the ones left standing just keep talking.

For maximum points, you need to follow suffering people until the very last moment before they fall, get as close as you possibly can and then dramatically reveal that only fast food can deliver them from their woes. And you get more points for delivering consecutive meals without ever being seen once.

Because everyone loves having to restart the level because making one mistake invalidated the entire thing.

Meanwhile, a young woman heads for a portable toilet.

BUT THEN.

"Hi. I'm the Burger King. I... uh... made this for you. In there."

Mission complete!

Or, rather, I completed the minimum number of challenges in order to get shut of the level as soon as possible.

My reward is a spinning newspaper article telling me how amazing the King is and how fantastic sneaking up on people to offer them food from God-knows-where is.

"MMM. FOOD, YUMMY. I AM LIKING THIS. Please don't kill me."

The King, no longer satisfied with the denizens of the construction site, decides to head for more populous places.

His Majesty seeks the company of barely-intelligent robot people. People incapable of refusing his foodesque surprises. Let's go to the source: The Sims itself!

The King does a wobbly-arms Azumanga dance and gets things off to a flying start.

I'm glad he's got a new set of flourish dances for this area, but it's still tricky to get him to do anything but the worst or best.

Damn it.

Why would they define a challenge along the lines of 'Deliver 3 meals from hiding places' if nobody's ever going to walk next to my amazing hiding place?

I'm running out of time here!

"Who are you!? What are you doing in my son's treehouse? And what have you done with my son!?"

No, wait, he's thinking about burgers.

There's little variety in the challenges. The King offers hungry people food, and that's it.

One level mixed it up and challenged me to try and be seen by everybody, but I couldn't work out how to do it. It took me about an hour to accidentally discover that the King has superhuman strength and can punch over certain large objects. The game does give you clue icons to tell you what you can interact with, but they only appear when you're very close and the look the same as the 'hiding place' icons.

No shadows on the King. In 2006! Not even fake circular shadows. Boo.

Having filled the hunger gauges of everybody at home, the King decides to follow them all to work at the construction site.

I know these levels were picked because they've got lots of neat hiding places and they're the last place you expect to see a guy dressed as a king, but they're also kinda dangerous.

I AM NOT HERE.

GO ABOUT YOUR BUSINESS.

I am the sneakiest sneak who ever snook a sneak.

When surprising people from a hiding place, you don't have to press a button in the split second between emerging and the bystander seeing you, the game does it all for you. You do have to watch the King slowly clamber out of the hiding place every time though.

In first person view, you can hear the King breathing through his mask.

I don't know what to say.

The King likes to do unskippable animations when you complete a mission. I know I keep mentioning these unskippable animations but it's looking like the game is 50% waiting perfectly still and 50% the same unskippable animations over and over.

Apart from the flourish fanfares, there's only one piece of music that plays throughout the game. It's a really indistinct cartoony theme that keeps threatening to turn into a tune. You don't even get a 'bom-bom-bom' sneaky music when you're tiptoeing behind someone.

"Master! I've done all you asked! I don't want to be the King any more! Why won't you release me?!?!"




Mission complete. One zone left. You only have to do half the challenges in order to continue, which is nice.

"A witness from the scene noted that yesterday afternoon he was simply standing at the site when he received a polite tap on his shoulder. No words were exchanged, but..."

"... the King flashed a reassuring smile."

This is why humanity's FMV license was revoked, by the way. The intro video (and title screen) is FMV, and these are photographs.

We're in 'Downtown'! I don't think His Majesty will last long dressed like this. This really isn't a good idea at all.

It's awfully bright for the middle of the night, don't you think? It doesn't seem to have affected the bystanders' vision any. This level's just one great big square, so most of the challenges can be solved by simply running around in circles, feeding anybody in your path who gets hungry.

There was a demo of The Club which was like that; running in circles shooting things. What's that Game & Watch game where you have to wait for the things to appear, then move into position to splat them? I think it was... Vermin?

Huh, The Vermin Club. Pretty good description of BK, actually.

Jazzhands, suckers! Eat my burger!

Bloody creepy jazzhands... Mo-capped hands... Brr.

Just thought, nobody I've given food to in the entire game has eaten it. It just disappears from the King's hand a few frames before the animation ends and that's it. That's ruined the entire experience for me! Why doesn't anybody want to eat my delicious food?

"Boo!"

"*COUGH* *COUGH* URGHGH. Gimme a minute. Arggh. Caught me fuckin' cloak..."

"Why are you running? Come back!"

"COME BACK I SAY! I have food!"

And so, the King was arrested by the NYPD and was locked away in a safe, far away place where there are friendly people who can help him. The end.

Not really, but I like my version better.

And that's more or less all you get. I don't know whether to be relieved or frustrated that the game didn't end with an advert for Burger King or the King Games series!

The sneaking works... more or less. I wasn't expecting it to have multiple characters doing independent things like Hitman. I've seen retail games with less effort put into them. It sort of looks like a launch title or an early multi-platform title, yet it was made in 2006.

If anything, Blitz Games haven't taken this joke far enough. There's no extremely sneaky or creepy things to do. I just run up behind everybody and activated them. The bystanders don't seem to care much that you're there at all. There's no dialogue at all (all the people just make gibberish sounds), apart from the newspaper videos. Playing up the 'the King is creepy' joke would've gotten old extremely fast if done badly thanks to repeating jokes, etc. but I don't think anybody would expect to be playing the game for that long anyway.

Sneak King is just big enough to be 'a real game', but that's all. It distracted me long enough for me to reach the 'end', but there's no way I'm going to go back and finish the challenges I missed or didn't get the top grade on. And now you don't have to play it!

Shameless Advertising Rating: Just below maximum. You play as the Burger King. You deliver Burger King food. Whenever you start a mission, your mission brief types the exact names of the meals IN UPPERCASE and makes sure to include a description of just how delicious the food you're going to be delivering is. It's published by King Games, which uses the BK Grill media.

They could have only made it more shameless if the loading screen was a BK logo and there was a song about BK playing in the background. There's also no BK shops present in the game.

Clown Rating: Nope. No clowns whatsoever. Does this mean I win?