WinBack: Covert Operations (N64)

While hiding behind cover is always useful in a firefight, specific shooting games embrace it with dedicated mechanics. The heyday of the cover shooter was the mid-2000s where high profile series like Gears of War and Uncharted made it vital to your survival, but WinBack: Covert Operations back in 1999 was seemingly the first game to really codify the systems those future successes would use. Rather than merely hiding behind corners or standing behind barriers, players could press up against the object so they could then lean slightly out of cover or pop up briefly, all while the camera keeps it attention on the action instead of the obstruction. Perhaps the most surprising part of WinBack: Covert Operations’s cover mechanics though is how cleanly they’re done right out of the gate even if the game in general can be a bit rigid.

 

WinBack: Covert Operations, also known as Operation WinBack or just WinBack, sees you playing as Jean-Luc Cougar, a member of the Strategic Covert Actions Team. Jean-Luc and the rest of S.C.A.T. are called in after a terrorist group called the Crying Lions seize control of the GULF system, an orbital laser they threaten to fire should their demands not be met within three hours. While Jean-Luc has a whole team backing him up, an attack on their arriving helicopter leads to them splitting up, the player spending most of their time on their own but still running into teammates for story scenes that often end with one of them meeting their untimely end. WinBack: Covert Operations definitely wants you to feel like the threat the enemy poses is serious, which is one reason why that three hour time limit is treated very seriously. Drag your feet across the game’s 31 stages and the laser weapon will be fired, locking you out of a better ending. Luckily, there is a point at level 23 where you can earn some extra time, which helps because some of the final levels can nearly be an hour long themselves, but the game also prompts you to save only after a mission is done so you can always retry it for a better time if you’re worried about missing out on a happier conclusion.

 

For those familiar with cover shooters, the idea of there being a persistent clock urging you to move quickly can sound almost incongruous. If you try to be quick, you’ll often run into the line of fire, enemy weapons usually able to take you out fairly quickly if you foolishly ignore the ample cover opportunities scattered around the GULF system facility. A death will require you to restart the current stage or head back to a checkpoint with infinite continues so you can try and try again, but you do need to be consistently careful to survive, the timer adding some tension to firefights as you want to clear them quickly but can’t stick your neck out too often. It’s a rather effective way to make the danger actually feel palpable despite the many video game elements working in your favor, although a little more leniency could have helped since there are definitely moments where it’s a little unclear where to go or the game has you backtracking across a large area with many options on where to go. WinBack: Covert Operations can feel like it wants you to hone your approaches so you’re more worthy of being a special forces team member, but even if the game was better at signalling where to go it can sometimes linger in the same places too long.

Free aiming in WinBack: Covert Operations is generally a bad idea unless your target is so far away they haven’t seen you yet. While it’s nice for picking off oblivious enemy troops, when they’re firing at you, you’ll be utilizing a lock-on system to guarantee your shots can hit. It’s reliable enough that you can understand if your shot didn’t land due to something like distance or movement, but mostly you will be able to hit your targets after activating the lock-on. However, unless you adjust a bit so it’s a headshot, the enemy won’t go down quickly. Lining up a headshot can make things a little deeper than just locking on and firing away, but even if you do just want to rapidly pepper a room of bad guys, there’s still strategy and timing involved because of your vulnerability. You can only heal with health kits found throughout the facility or by completing a stage, and while the game isn’t too stingy, you’ll definitely need to make use of all the cover to survive.

 

With a press of the A button, you can press yourself against a nearby wall, allowing you to peek out the side and fire at whoever you’ve decided to target. Crouching behind crates works similarly and there’s even a dodge roll for those moments you quickly need to get to cover, but many enemies also will try to stand in protected positions and choose their moments to fire. They’re not too smart, making repeated attempts to fire even if you aren’t moving, but that’s to ensure you can actually find openings since otherwise you’d just be pinned down without any option to progress. Instead, the danger of other enemies, picking how long you peek out, and making sure you find a good position to target them all is what makes firefights in WinBack: Covert Operations interesting and often tense. You have a pistol with infinite ammo you can use for quick kills, but you also occasionally get bullets for your shotgun, machine gun, and even the rare rocket launcher best used for the game’s admittedly simple bosses who are often just regular people with heavy weapons. The shotgun and machine gun ammo isn’t too common though so it’s almost more like a way to get you out of a bind or speed things up if you’re worried you’re taking too long, and making the use of the stronger weapons more tactical continues to play into WinBack’s strengths as its regular play doesn’t feel too exciting with its stop and start approach to combat.

 

This third-person shooter definitely has some elements that don’t work as well as its cover mechanics though. There is the option to sneak up behind terrorists and attack them to quickly take them out, but the game constantly misread my attempts which lead instead to me revealing myself in a vulnerable position. The game has far too great an interest in instant death lasers, and while this can work in a limited capacity where it helps shape a dangerous room, other times it feels like the window to pass through the moving ones is so small that you’ll be retrying it over and over hoping you get the timing right next time. Some levels also can start to get too deep into flipping switches and approaching innocuous computer consoles to set things in motion that you might not even understand the purpose of, WinBack’s longer levels easy to get lost in as you’re trying to parse what is even required to progress. It can break up the standard cover action well at times, sneaking past powerful turrets or riding across a gap while shooting at enemies below feeling a bit more creative, and there are definitely moments where reshaping the environment to help you is done well since its scope is more apparent.

WinBack: Covert Operations also offers a multiplayer mode for up to four players depending on the mode. While your slow and sometimes stiff movements in single-player are fine since you’re often not moving in the midst of a firefight, cover during multiplayer fights is a bit less exciting since there’s nothing forcing you out of cover regularly or a smart way to break a cover stalemate. Couple the lock-on focus with the fact players are briefly invulnerable to damage after taking a hit and the straightforward Deathmatch can feel clumsy and slow. While that is a last man standing sort of fight, others are a bit more interesting in design. Point Match gives you points for any shot landed which can be a bit more active if still prone to cover stalemates, but Lethal Tag only lets one player score and it’s whoever is holding a special cube. If they land a shot they score a point, but if they avoid damage for a time they also will accrue points, meaning both sides want to be aggressive but the other player in this two-player only mode is incentivized to kill you and take the cube for themselves.

 

Quick Draw and Cube Hunt might actually work a bit better than the other modes despite not being traditional gunfights though. Floating colored cubes are scattered around the small stages, the players needing to collect them all to win. Quick Draw involves shooting the 7 cubes in the right order, but Cube Hunt involves simply picking them up. However, sabotage can run rampant in both modes, either by stealing the required cubes or shooting the other player to make them drop their collected cubes. You’re incentivized to travel and put yourself at risk so the other player doesn’t mess up your cube collection and the odd choices like the multiplayer mode’s temporary invulnerability after injury make more sense when you’re protecting a collection rather than trying to kill each other. WinBack: Covert Operations still won’t hold a candle to more energetic games with smoother ways to incentivize aggression between players or flush them out of hiding, but it can be worth a look for players who will have honed their handling of the cover system to clear the story in time.

THE VERDICT: For the first cover shooter as we now know them, WinBack: Covert Operations is not just competently put together, it understands why cover is important without making it an overly effective crutch. You are safe behind cover, but the story’s stakes means you don’t want to linger long, incentivizing quick and professional firefights where you need to find the right spot to hide and pick the moments you open fire or use your strong weapons. This approach doesn’t transfer to multiplayer so well and WinBack definitely stumbles with its sometimes aimless level designs and overuse of lasers, but it sets up a good amount of skirmishes where its shooting system is limited in the right ways to make things tense but manageable.

 

And so, I give WinBack: Covert Operations for Nintendo 64…

An OKAY rating. WinBack really shouldn’t have gotten so convoluted with its level designs as it definitely holds back an otherwise effective range of possible scenarios where you can use cover in combat. It’s not all hiding behind boxes or walls, the facility having sewers to tromp through, rooms full of machines or desks to utilize, and outdoor spaces that even get train cars and multiple vertical layers involved. Sending you through the same spaces repeatedly kind of kills some of the enthusiasm for combat for certain stretches though and the lasers feel like a cheap way to force retries when they rub against the weak movement controls. You usually don’t need to be agile because the action focuses so heavily on holding your ground or only moving when it’s wise to do so, so Jean-Luc is essentially designed to be useless out in the open but incredibly capable once you’ve taken a smart position. The reliance on the lock-on system is part of this, popping soldiers with your pistol not meant to be hard on an individual basis but the level layouts give enemy groups ways to apply pressure despite your reliable aim. The pistol’s need to reload often and the weight of using a better weapon helps pace things well too to avoid you running in guns blazing, and yet the threat of the orbital laser fire does mean you want to get moving so it can force some errors if you’re impatient or using a weak strategy. WinBack: Covert Operations still feels like it needs a general clean-up, things like the awful sneak attack detection come up as outright issues and bosses could be made more interesting since they’re often too easy or involve unclear elements like if a certain boss’s flamethrower will actually hurt you when it hits.

 

WinBack: Covert Operations having the mechanics that would define the cover shooter subgenre would make it worthy of some curiosity on its own, but it feels like a lot of thought was put into them rather than being some clumsy first step into an idea better known games would utilize. Gears of War and Uncharted definitely figured out more compelling ways to present things and smart ways to evolve the concept, but WinBack seems to understand where some of its limits lie and it builds around them with things like the ticking clock or limited weapon options so it’s not too easy or too slow. If anything, it’s elements like area design that needed cleaning up more, the movement and shooting certainly rigid at times but it’s in service of making things tactically interesting.