David Wolf - Secret Agent

Someone's serving you a combination of a spy movie and a racing game just the way someone in a small studio in the eighties actually came up with it — without shame and without compromise. David Wolf is exactly this: a weird mishmash where between shooting at enemies you suddenly find yourself driving a car.

It's an action game from 1989 for PC, where you play as agent David Wolf himself. You get the picture — he's got a few missions revolving around spy work — infiltration, gathering intel, eliminating those who clearly deserve it. But then comes the phase where you get behind the wheel and have to disappear from here because half the city is chasing you. There's a timid ambition in it, one that was waiting for computers to get powerful enough for decent physics.

The gameplay unfolds in classic MS-DOS graphics — pixel art of the kind you know from games that were made under heavy time pressure and a tight budget. The controls aren't complicated: you shoot, destroy whatever you see, then you drive away. The details aren't particularly clean — cars handle like they're on ice, the shooting feels like the bullet diameter is three centimeters, but you can explain this inaccuracy by the fact that the original creators simply didn't have time to polish it. The racing sections are more confusing than fun, but that's precisely why you remember them.

David Wolf enters the collective memory more as a curiosity than as a classic. It was one of those games that really tried to do something different — blend sandbox action with racing — except the blend didn't quite work. It's aged mainly in that the graphics and playability are simply what they are: basic, unrefined. Today you look at it with that knowing smile retrogamers give to their peers' attempts.

If you're in the mood to try something truly from the old guard — something that isn't polished, isn't weekend entertainment, but has in it that very audacity of seventies ideas programmed into a nineties computer — David Wolf deserves a chunk of your emulator time. It's not a weekend game, but a Friday night game with a beer, when you feel like actually enjoying how weirdly things were made back then.