Phantom Covert Ops: For stealth diehards only
Mat Pawluczuk·
3 MIN READ
Short verdict: A six-year-old game from the Oculus Rift era. While it was well received at launch, the overall concept did not age well. The PCVR version has nice high-fidelity graphics, but overall consider this one only if you truly love stealth games.
Game mechanics
Phantom: Covert Ops was released in 2020. At the time, it got a 75 score on Metacritic, which means that the game was considered good enough but far from perfect. In July it was included in the Horizon+ subscription bringing it to a new audience and causing renewed interest. The main premise of the game is straightforward. You are a special ops soldier tasked with infiltrating a flooded Russian base with a kayak. You have to stay undetected, carry out acts of sabotage, gather data, and occasionally kill some VIP targets.
The entire game takes place in a kayak, and all mechanics revolve around it. You hide in tall water lilies, swim through tunnels, and avoid floodlights. Guards patrol the area, so you need to observe and follow their patterns to remain undetected.
This is the bread and butter of all stealth games, and at the time, making the player sit in a kayak was a way to alleviate motion sickness, ensure the game can be enjoyed sitting down, and provide a novel way of locomoting without teleportation or roomscale mechanics.
Dated and restrictive
Unfortunately, what was considered fresh and innovative in 2020 seems desperately out of place in 2026. It feels very restrictive to be confined to a kayak and play through what feels like a breather level that many games add in between normal missions for variety. Only here, it is not one or two levels that are in a kayak but every single one.
The game also requires a strong suspension of disbelief, turning it into a make-believe stealth game where you follow certain game mechanics just for the sake of it. Why are all the guards so obsessed with patrolling the canals and water basins, instead of walkways, stairs, and bridges? All the distraction mechanisms, guard alert levels, and floodlights, suffer from the same problem and many situations have to be dealt with in a contrived way that seems riskier than it should, simply because it has to be performed from inside the kayak. From a logical point its all completely unrealistic.
Locomoting also feels clunky. Moving around in a kayak often requires back-and-forth movements similar to how you would maneuver a car out of a parking spot. There is an option to paddle sideways and do narrow turns, but overall it is a laborious process that does not feel satisfying at all.
If there is one thing worth praising, it is the graphics. The game was originally developed for Oculus Rift, and it shows. Those who have the option to play Phantom: Covert Ops on PCVR should add at least two extra points to the final rating, because of how immersive and fun it can be to explore places that look so detailed. For Quest users, however, there is nothing to offset all the issues mentioned earlier.
If you are a stealth game fanatic, the game might appeal to you. It is not as good as Espire or Assassin’s Creed Nexus, but it does scratch that itch, albeit in a very rigid and mechanical way. Everyone else should wait until it is either free on Horizon+ or heavily discounted. The game famously made $1 million in revenue right after launch, but nowadays its retail price of $29 feels completely out of touch.
Link: Meta Store (PCVR and Quest)