Contributing to this problem is an increased number of non-essential hotspots in the busier locations. Normally having more interactive options is a good thing, but there’s very little payoff here, as the character commentary is neither interesting nor helpful. But of course you’re forced to click on every bookshelf, door, and window, because you never know until you try… and then you’re sorry you did. A more important issue is that the handheld screen size often makes it hard to distinguish what smaller objects actually are. Fortunately, the game includes a hotspot highlight option, which shows all interactive items at the touch of a button. There are only a couple times I’d say this feature is really needed (good luck finding a footprint at night that wasn’t there during the day), but due to the ratio of useful:pointless items, it quickly became something I relied on simply to save myself the frustration.

Where Dual Motives really sets itself apart, for better AND worse, is in its use of the touch screen in a variety of minigames. Apart from one game of darts, the word “minigame” is somewhat misleading (though that’s the one the game uses itself), as really it’s a collection of contextual activities. Whether cracking safes or making rubbings, the game offers exactly the sort of hands-on physical exercises that DS adventures should excel at. When done properly, that is. Yeah, that little caveat, and here they aren’t. All the goodwill earned from such promising actions as using the microphone to fire a blowgun or the touch screen to signal in Morse code is lost either through repetition or horribly finicky controls. Shaping a paper clip to pick lock tumblers may be quite interesting the first time but is dreary filler by the increasingly-difficult fourth, and even that is way better than the unresponsive fistfight controls, let alone what may be the singlemost wretched touch screen experience I’ve ever encountered in trying to manipulate the airflow from a fan. You’d think with a physicist as your main character that the game’s physics would at least passably resemble real-world ones, but you’d be wrong.

It’s a shame that the minigames are so poor, because the more traditional puzzles are entirely uninspired. Along with a single short Mastermind challenge, there’s the standard collect-and-combine inventory routine, but this is generally used for the dullest of errands. As one character says to Russell, “You help me with some menial tasks and I’ll tell you a little story afterwards.” Let’s face it, this strategy is commonplace in adventures, but the better games at least make an attempt to disguise it. And when not on the latest fetch quest, you’ll usually be trying to cause distractions to divert someone’s attention, occasionally using the exact same solution multiple times or with only small variations. This is a perfectly valid goal considering the situation, but it’s heavily overused here.

Creating distractions would be easy, of course, if allowed to run amok, but there are tight restrictions on what Russell and Audrey will do. With the threat of treason hanging over his head, Russell is still reluctant to do anything too bold or risky, even if it makes total sense to try. Audrey’s idea of helpfulness is to tell you that some efforts on her behalf are stupid, even when they’re not. This is merely the game’s way of forcing you to play by its rules, but it cheapens the experience in the process. You can only do the things the game wants you to do, and in the explicit order it wants them done, even if there’s no justification for such linearity. When trying to pick up someone’s boot to match a footprint discovered earlier, I expect better from a game than to offer me, “What would I do with those boots?” Come on, professor, it’s not rocket science.

Or maybe that’s the problem. Russell is a brilliant physicist working in a secret military facility, and he spends his game time doing Joe jobs and poking around empty rooms and skulking outside the local tavern. For the most part, he could just as easily be the site janitor who’s lost his keys and now on a mission to find them. There’s little challenge befitting a man of Russell’s intellect (or the player’s, if not getting hung up on one of its rigid puzzle triggers), and there’s even less sense of tension or intrigue. This is further undermined by the mystery itself, which drops in some ludicrous leaps of logic that defy all belief. The consequences are eventually ramped up (off-screen) late in the game, but the situation still lacks the gravity it demands. It’s all so superficial; a spy thriller dressed up like a day at the office.

Certainly the lack of cinematics, animations, and voiceovers contributes to the shallow nature of the story, but as a handheld adventure, it’s understandable that corners were cut in presentation. What’s more disappointing is the limited number of locations, and the rather plain selection of those offered. The realistic graphics are decent enough, but the vanilla angles and muted colours do little to spruce things up with any variety. The switch from day to night midway through the game is a nice touch, but no substitute for new and interesting places to go and things to see. In fact, the overall environment is so small that the map becomes redundant, as it’s almost as many clicks to utilize the zip feature as it is to click your way to your destination at any given time. Except, of course, for the one location added secretly to the map with no way of reaching otherwise, despite being part of the same facility grounds.

Rounding out the disappointment is the game’s aural element. While rarely a strong point on the DS, Dual Motives certainly isn’t the game to buck the trend. The soundtrack consists of a limited number of orchestral tracks that range from acceptable to poor, though much of the time is spent in a preferable silence. Kudos are given for different footfall sounds on varying surfaces, but less so for all being way too loud, and less still for the notable lack of other sound effects in general.

All told, it took me a little under eight hours to finish Undercover: Dual Motives, which would have been an acceptable length in a better game. As it is, the meagre storyline, uninspired puzzles, and limited exploration already seem stretched at such a modest play time, and even fans of Operation Wintersun will find this handheld successor a shallow and unrewarding experience. The game does offer some creative uses for its DS-specific features, but sadly even these are handled too poorly to commend wholeheartedly. I’d like nothing more than to encourage more developers to embrace the DS as a viable adventure game platform (not just for ports), and I credit Sproing for being Western pioneers in this regard. However, not even dual motives of my own can make me hold this game up as a positive example of what the genre can be.