Venus & Braves, Generation of Chaos III, Advance Wars 2, Disgaea, Final Fantasy Tactics Advance, Fire Emblem, Onimusha Tactics, UFO: Aftermath, Dynasty Tactics 2, and Front Mission 4. All turn-based strategy games. All at least partially reviewed by me. Some good, others not worth the bits they are comprised of. While the merits of each individual game are debatable, what isn't up for debate is the fact that this is one of the best times ever for the Strategy and Strategy-RPG enthusiast.
The best part is...the games keep coming! After completing Front Mission 4, I had Naruto Konoha Senki waiting, and this game, Silent Storm. The shrewd guys over Encore Publishing sent me a copy after checking out my UFO: Aftermath review and figured I was probably an Strategy enthusiast, and that I would like this particular game. Well, they were right on both counts! Silent Storm bests UFO: Aftermath on the PC, and falls into the upper echelon of not only the Strategy games, but games in general.
Story
You assume the role of a generic ranking officer in World War II. You can be from any of the 5 major nations involved in the conflict (yeah, I know. No Montenegro?! What's up with THAT?! Stop hatin' on the little guys) and you'll have a set of missions that involve you fighting whoever the enemy is, and eventually trying to track down some behind the scenes guys who are trying to profit from the war and have super double secret technology.
The theater of operations is Europe and Russia, so if you're playing a character that's from the US or Japan, you won't be taking any missions on Japanese or American soil. You start off with one basic mission, then, you're given a squad of six, and the story rumbles along from there.
Gameplay
If you've played X-Com, you'll know the basics of the turn-based system here. You have a certain number of action points, which you can spend to move, shoot, lob grenades, pick locks, heal, whatever. Your weapons will have different shooting modes, ranging from Snipe to Full Burst. You also have a range of poses and movement modes.
Characters have a sight range and radius, as well as a hearing range and radius. Enemies that you can hear but not see are represented on the screen as red textureless models, which could be enemies or civilians. You can use the sound of the target to try and squeeze off a shot at it, but sometimes the icon represents the last position you heard them at, and they've since moved to a different spot. There is nothing worse than unloading a full clip on a tree, that you heard an enemy go behind, only to cut down the tree with gunfire, and find an enemy standing off to the side a few feet, with a full clip of his own and a turn coming up.
You can choose to maneuver as a team (if you feel like losing once the computer decides to actually USE one of its grenades) and even fire as a team. While it's generally overkill, there are just some situations where group fire is more efficient.
My favorite thing about Silent Storm is the destructible environments. Houses frequently have four or five levels and there are enemies all over the place. It's great fun to use the enemies on the lower level to "clear" rooms up above by opening up with a machine gun from the floor below and offering some surprise backup for your unfortunate teammate who walked into more than he could handle on his turn. You can do some SERIOUS damage to a house in this game. One good explosive grenade vs. wooden floor equals something that you can't buff out, and Mr. Clean isn't going to fix it. Don't wanna take the stairs? Machine gun through the ceiling and climb up; that's what real men do anyway. And Lockpicks? Those are for nerds. The guys who manufacture the Panzerfaust make an excellent lock pick. It's called "The Panzerfaust".
I've been wanting to do this in games for soooo long now. Why do I need a keycard to open up this sliding glass door? I have a ROCKET LAUNCHER! I blow up tanks. Your sliding glass door is no tank! Some people will complain that this lacks subtlety and there is a certain grace that should be applied. Most of the time they don't really finish the sentence before they're sent flying backwards through walls, but for those people, you can actually try something complex, like pick the lock on a door, open it, and place a claymore in an archway you know an enemy will be traversing, then draw him out by sniping his friends on the roof, and when the backup comes to assist...they're MINE! HA HA HA! (Come on...not even a pity laugh?) So play it cool, Solid Snake style...or play it cool, Arnold Schwarzenegger style. I mean, if it's good enough for the Governor of mighty California, it should be good enough for you, right?
Level advancement is a bit strange. You have bars that tell you how far you are from levelling if you look at a character's info, but the player's never told exactly which actions makes those bars go up. I notice my Medic levels much faster than my other characters. Then, much like in Diablo, they can access a group of abilities to choose to upgrade their character, like giving them better skill with a rifle, or greatly increasing the enemy's difficulty to hit them after they've moved. Unfortunately, not knowing what actions gain you this mythical experience kind of makes it hard to level, or evenly distribute out advancement. It's all very weird.
Graphics
The graphics are a bit dated. There's a lot of really neat effects with all the destruction and the odd ragdoll physics. I was having fun at one point because I had taken up one of the weapon emplacements and had begun mowing down the hapless recruits who decided to investigate. I began seeing which poor sod would get shot back the farthest from the recoil, or end up in the strangest pose, etc. While the ragdoll physics are completely unrealistic, they're also pretty funny.
There are little touches, like the way a building looks after you've completely leveled it, or the area specific blood textures that show up when you wound someone. But, for the most part, this feels like it could have been made three years ago. The opening movie runs achingly slowly. I've never even watched it the whole way through because it plays at something like two frames per second, and there isn't even anything that impressive in it, mostly text and audio.
Sound
The music's not too terribly bad, but some of the voices are. Dani, the medic, is horrendous. She's supposed to be funny und Ghermann, like the characters that Francis from Malcolm in the Middle works for, only she isn't funny or German sounding. The enemies run out of things to say very rapidly, and so I usually just shut the sound off altogether.
It's not just the voice that's bad, it's the script and the timing, too. The Asian characters have a stock set of Confucian sounding things to spit out like, "Perseverance is key to success,." And, "I am humbled by my achievements." These lines are delivered in stilted English, and are about as funny as Carrot Top. One of the other characters, Javier would be sitting still, and say, "I learn something, so is not waste of time." It's nice that every character has a different sound set, but can we actually get them to say something applicable? Also, Nival...don't try and do the "ethnic" thing. Just get some of the Asian or Hispanic testers you have on staff to just speak lines in English.
Gripes
First, and foremost, there are an UNACCEPTABLE number of spelling errors that riddle the game. I look at spelling errors as the first mark of whether or not a developer cared about making a good game becuase those are the easiest bugs to fix. You don't even need to be a programmer. Fixing text bugs should never cause something to compile wrong, they should never result in other bugs, and they can all be fixed in under a day.
And yet, from the get go we see, "Allies Solider" on every one of the Allied soldiers. You have an Enfield Rifle, and an Enfiled Rifle Clip. Names of towns are spelled wrong. When the neutral characters move it says, "Allies Turn" when they aren't your allies. I can honestly probably count the passages of text that don't have any spelling errors on them with both hands. This is just wrong. Plain wrong.
Why is the AI for the civilians SO DAMN STUPID? They go out of their way to get themselves in the line of fire, and once they're there, if you don't move, they won't either. What exactly are they doing? I was playing one mission where I was attacking a railroad station. It was surrounded by barbed wire walls, so I blew a hole in a section of walls with a rocket launcher and established a position at the corner I had opened up. Once the barbed wire came down, civilians were CLIMBING THE WALLS TO GET INVOLVED IN THE FIGHT.
The AI for the enemy isn't much better. I've never seen an enemy medic, so when you put someone in Critical condition, nine times out of ten, they act dead. They pass their turn and just bleed until you shoot them again. I've seen a lot of enemies and will pop them from outside of their range of sight...and they just stand there until I kill them. Code something in so that if an enemy gets shot, he at least goes to look for cover.
The explosion radius for items is pathetically weak. On one particular level, I had four unarmored men next to a red "exploding" barrel. It blew a HUGE hole in the ceiling for massive damage. Oh yeah, and it killed two of the men. The other two...unharmed. I've had other things happen, like, I'll blow up a truck, and the two guys who were hiding behind it are completely fine.
The weapon supply is ridiculous; you have maybe twelve different rifles. The difference in damage between the weakest and the strongest doing max damage is maybe ten points. Why include such a huge variety of guns if they aren't going to do anything different? Sure, it's nice to have them all, but I'd like the variation to be there for a reason other than me having to pick up seven different kinds of ammo. If they added a second "accuracy" stat, if might be useful, but all I've seen is the "Handling" which is either Easy or Hard, and a range stat which varies from 44 to 48.
The character creation options are confusing and don't seem to offer much in the way of actual customization. Basically, it seems like if you wanted to make either an Asian, Arab, Indian, or African character you'd use the customizable guy, otherwise, you'd just stick to the default options. I'm kind of disappointed with the lack of ability to customize the character's outfit, as well.
These gripes all seem kind of severe, but on the plus side for Nival, they're all really easy to fix. Some game balance, testers and better voice actors clean the majority of this section right out. That means you can dedicate the real programmers to logging hours trying to figure out how to make this game run faster. The slowdown gets to be atrocious, especially when you have an enemy character spot you and perform an interrupt. The good news for Nival is that this is a turn based game, so they can get away with a little frameskipping. It doesn't really detract too much from the fun for the turn-based crowd, because they expect a slower game, but it'd be nice if I didn't have to take a break and lift weights in between turns.
Overall
Silent Storm is the best squad-based tactical game available for the PC. If you liked X-Com, this will probably fit the bill for you. I'd really like to see Nival put in another two weeks on this project and wipe the entire Gripes section right out of this review, because it should be damned simple for them to do if they really wanted to make this as good as possible. A decent effort, but it feels like they just stopped trying at some point. Overall, this is an excellent game, but a little light on polish.
