The original, published by Eidos Interactive, offered only single-player play, and no game saves. Covert Strike added multiplayer play and limited save game capability.
Chris Ryan, a former Special Air Service operative best known for being the lone successful escapee of Bravo Two Zero, served as a consultant to the game.
The game's plot features a rogue Chinese General, "Wu Xing" as the primary antagonist. Xing orchestrates various events (such as armed robbery of advanced prototype technology from the Russian mafia) in order to get electromagnetic pulse (EMP) weaponry on a space rocket that he has launch control over.
The game was banned in China after six months of sales (having passed censor inspection with an incomplete copy of the game that lacked the final six levels of Chinese content), because it was perceived to damage the Chinese army's image.
The game is divided into 19 missions. The story is presented in cutscenes, shown before and after every mission, with animated characters rendered in real-time and pre-recorded speech. Missions have objectives that must be completed before the mission ends.
Straightforward approaches are not encouraged, with stealthy and covert movement giving the player a better rating, rank and chance of survival, with the highest attainable ranking entitled 'David Jones'.
Multiple paths exist for every mission, with the most obvious and daunting being a noisy gunfight, because in every mission Jones is outnumbered. Every mission presents an opportunity for large groups of enemies to be bypassed or sneaked past, undiscovered. Certain missions even require entire operations to be carried out undetected.
At the start of a new game, a difficulty level can be chosen, changing the number of bullets Jones takes before dying, the intelligence of the enemy and group AI, and the number of save-games available.
