CounterSpy, a new action-stealth side-scroller for PlayStation 4, PS3 and Vita by San Francisco startup Dynamighty, starts off impressive enough, dazzling you with stylish military bunkers littered with secret plans and campy propaganda pamphlets and throngs of vigilant soldiers brandishing guns, grenades and rocket launchers.

It's a glass raised to Ian Fleming by way of Get Smart, glossed by a swank cartoon-like veneer, starring spies that slink like bendy stalks made of latex to a soundtrack of tremolo-washed electric guitars.

As an exercise in period caricature, it looks and sounds fantastic.

But after you clear your first few levels, pilfering intel and dispatching dimwitted enemies, the gameplay starts to loop discouragingly, its randomized levels recombining with less and less interesting permutations, its tactical possibilities dwindling to busywork.

To put it another way, CounterSpy gets too boring too fast, and the meta-game—about stealing secret plans to keep a pair of homicidal Cold War-era countries from nuking the bejesus out of the Moon and knocking it into the Earth—isn't enough to save it.

Dynamighty

The pitch must have sounded promising: a random level generator strapped to Metal Gear Solid-ish stealth gameplay, folded into a potboiler about an escalating back-and-forth arms race between the usual Cold War culprits, weighed against a ticking DEFCON meter.

That threatening five-stage klaxon ratchets up if you alert the enemy to your presence while on assignment, then holds its position between missions unless you find ways to bring it down again. Trigger DEFCON 1 while in a level and a timer kicks in, leaving you 60 frantic seconds to sprint to the end and touch a control console, or else the missiles launch and it's game over. The goal is to find all the plans scattered across a slew of bases before tripping DEFCON 1.

The trouble's with the monotonously breezy levels, randomly assembled jumbles of rooms, corridors and retro-futuristic control rooms that take roughly a dozen minutes each to creep or gun your way through. You're either sneaking or shooting, but there's little nuance to either, and the game's handful of unlockable weapons and stealth abilities are just different-looking screwdrivers attacking the same kind of screw.

A high-scoring jaunt through a level goes something like this: Sneak up and stealth dispatch guards, neuter or elude security cameras, and probe every locker, safe and ventilation shaft for intel or loot. It's a vanilla box of tropes, devoid of twists.

Even the gunplay feels anemic. CounterSpy offers a mix of sideways and over-the-shoulder shooting that boils down to three activities: crippling cameras, sparking explosives and shooting guards. But challenges that require firing your weapon left or right are either too easy (CounterSpy's security cameras are fish in a barrel) or too unpredictable, since guards will routinely spot you from off screen before you've spotted them, then start firing before you've had a chance to take cover.

Dynamighty

The over-the-shoulder view kicks in when you opt to crouch behind a barricade and fire at soldiers patrolling the level's 3-D background. It's a little like turning to face a shooting gallery. After playing a half-dozen levels, it feels too much like a shooting gallery, like Spy vs. Spy meets Duck Hunt. Worse, there's nothing interesting about the way the bad guys do battle: they're just feeble ballistic loops, popping off rockets or grenades or sprays of bullets at such predictable cadences that you have to work to lose.

The only semi-interesting goal involves CounterSpy's rival spy challenges, wherein the game randomly throws up another player's high score in a given level and challenges you to beat it.

Had Dynamighty fleshed this out by adding traps or puzzles, they might have salvaged something. But since the levels aren't timed and scoring well comes down to scouring every location, you're in a stylistic straightjacket, beating or equaling your rival's score by simply being thorough.

There's just too little here to recommend buying Dynamighty's debut. It's cliche to gripe about style over substance, but that's CounterSpy's unavoidable problem.