Operation Tango is a short role based coop game about being futuristic spies. You can play as the Agent, moving through the level and interacting with the environment, or the Hacker, providing support by accessing systems and files from a remote location. Both roles are equally fun and challenging.
The story is somewhat loose, but sufficiently ties together the levels of the game. Your agency is hot on the heels of a terrorist leader and its your job to get closer to him and his intentions. This means that you are primarily recovering information, but with the stakes getting higher as the game progresses. Eventually, this leads to actual interfence from your target and a big showdown to stop their plan.
The characters are interesting style wise, but don’t really have any back story or much personality to go with it. This unfortunately means that you don’t particularly care how they fare, or even that they succeed at all. Instead, you celebrate your own cleverness and perseverance through the game.
Visually, everything seems to have a somewhat comic book feel, especially the cutscenes. This creates a high contrast environment to help pick out important details. While there is no voice over, the subtitles are large enough to read, with contrasting backgrounds. To make things more interesting, some puzzles require symbols that you must describe to your partner, but these are also easily seen on screen.
The puzzles are the real star. Although there is no tutorial, the first level has fewer puzzles and less ways to fail compared to others. As you progress through the game, the difficulty does increase little by little. This increase can take the form of more puzzles in a given level, more ways to fail, or tighter time constraints. By the end, you do feel like you accomplished something, even if it is short overall at only 6 levels.
Overall, I quite enjoyed my time with the game, playing through it as both roles. I felt satisfied but still a little like there could have been more as those two playthroughs only took about eight hours total. I would recommend it to anyone with a coop partner in mind, whether a friend, family member, or casual acquaintance that enjoys the type of game. You can even invite someone to play with you that doesn’t own the game!
I received the game on Xbox from the publisher with the expectation for coverage of some kind. I am mostly blind, so some things I have trouble with may not affect your experience with the game.
