Operation: Tango
PC, PS4, PS5, Xbox One, Xbox Series
There’s something inherently laggy about verbal communication. However good your mic, however reliable your connection, having to push a thought through the language centres of two brains often proves too slow to, for example, warn a teammate about the flash of a sniper’s scope before the bullet has entered their skull. Actions speak faster than words, and Operation: Tango is the latest asymmetric co-op puzzler to make a virtue of this friction.
Spaceteam, Keep Talking And Nobody Explodes, the We Were Here series – these are all games about incomplete information and flawed communication. It’s a lot like the Buddhist parable about the blind men trying to describe an elephant, except over voice comms. Operation: Tango introduces a fresh theme, casting one player as a field agent and another as the hacker who serves as what Spider-Man: Homecoming termed ‘the guy in the chair’, but works in much the same way.
If you’ve played any of those games, you’ll recognise many of the metaphorical elephants here: long lists of complex instructions to shout at one another; strange symbols that only one of you can see; simple movement puzzles where you each have half the controls. It often plays like a greatest hits compilation for the genre, but
Developer/publisher Clever Plays Format PC (tested), PS4, PS5, Xbox One, Xbox Series
Release Out now
does add two things of note. First, a firmer structure: its six missions are gathered into a single spy-fi caper, as you pursue a mysterious cybercriminal across the globe, infiltrating offices and stopping runaway trains. It’s fluff, told through cutscenes assembled out of static images, but it brings welcome context to each problem.
The bigger change comes straight out of this theming, and specifically the spy-and-handler dynamic. The field agent is consistently embodied in three dimensions, while the hacker mainly sees the world as flat schematics, with the occasional peek through the eyes of a security camera. This contrast is played up in segments where the agent tries to evade patrols or pursuers, while their companion shouts instructions. We accidentally recreate that moment from The Matrix where the operator tells Neo to take a left (“No, your other left”) many times over.
The result is a co-op game that’s alternately tense and funny, and occasionally both. It’s a fairly short ride, with the odd presentational issue, but in truth, the real game here exists less on your two screens than it does in the conversation it prompts. Imagine linking your brain to a friend’s via an old-fashioned telephone cord, stretching it taut, then giving it a flick. The resulting twang? That’s where this game lives. And at a time when we could all use more personal connection, it seems cheap to quibble about anything else.