Overview: The Agency: Covert Ops is brand-new role-playing Facebook game based on Sony Online’s upcoming MMO. It’s got a variety of things to do – puzzles, minigames, turn-based combat, character customization, and house decoration, in addition to the usual missions and leveling up. It’s very polished and well worth a look.

The tutorial guides you smoothly through creating your spy, doing your first few missions, talking to the boys at the lab for some new equipment, and so forth. It’s a good overview of the flow of the game, and it’s paced so that you can play for quite a while right off the bat before you need to wait for anything. You’ll do typical missions, where you just click a button and spend “cover” (energy) and get the results, although on some missions you may need to try several times to get the right result. But the interesting missions are the ones that trigger a variety of minigames.

There are combat missions, where you choose a rock-paper-scissors-like combat move and match it up to your enemy, turn by turn. You’ll play a fast little platformer, running and jumping from rooftop to rooftop to avoid security guards. You’ll unscramble words to “decrypt” passwords, and search rooms for hidden objects to gather data. These are varying degrees of fun, depending on your tastes, and they all provide a very welcome change from the typical Facebook game where there’s really only one mode of play.

The Group Missions require additional agents, whether they’re your real friends or you buy them with Station Cash. They’re set up to take a certain amount of real time – you can run a half-hour mission or one that takes a couple of days. They’re entirely optional, but a good way to give you some incentive to check back in – if you don’t remember to pull your agents out, you’ll pay a penalty – and also a good way to get some cash and influence when you’re away from the game.

You can customize your character to a pretty high degree with clothing, weapons, hairstyles, and even tattoos – but you’ll have to unlock most of the items by finding components in missions and checking in every twelve hours for your lab boys to give you some. You also have a headquarters that you can furnish and decorate – the items available range from a prison toilet to a personal robot, so you can set up your spy with whatever lifestyle matches their cover. The fanciest of both types of items require Station Cash, but they’re entirely cosmetic.

The Agency: Covert Ops is a very well-executed game with a lot to explore. It’s nice to see one of the really big online game players getting into the Facebook space and using their expertise to make a great little game. The spy theme is a nice variant, although amusingly, very similar in feel to mob themes, and the graphics are distinctive and clean. Definitely give this one a try.