Well, my SpellForce review came in a little later than I had anticipated after I developed an unexpected and severe addiction to playing the Lineage II open beta. Fortunately, another game came along that drew me away from the siren song of NCSoft’s upcoming MMORPG. That game was a little turn-based, squad-level tactical shooter from JoWood Productions and Encore Software called Silent Storm.
Now, I know that a good many gamers see the terms “turn-based” and “tactical” and immediately say, “OK, this game was made for the kind of uber-strategists who have the patience to play chess via e-mail”. I know this because the turn-based strategy genre has remained a niche category despite fairly universal acknowledgement of the excellence of its classics like X-Com and Fallout. But seriously, if you were ever inclined to put down the action-RPG you’re currently hacking your way through in favor of game that rewards your ability to calculate odds and synthesize the strengths and abilities of a squadron of soldiers, Silent Storm just might open your eyes to a whole new world of gaming.
Since it’s set in a sort of sci-fi revisionist history of World War II and mostly involves squad-level combat, you might not think of Silent Storm as an RPG. I was pleasantly surprised, however, by how many “RPG elements” you’ll find in the game. You start out the single-player campaign (unfortunately there isn’t a multiplayer option at this point) by choosing to fight for the Axis or the Allies and either choose from a series of pre-made characters, or customize an avatar for yourself.
If you choose to make a custom character, he’ll be a specialist in one of six classes: Medic, Sniper, Soldier, Grenadier, Scout, and Engineer. Each class has its own skill tree that you’ll use as you level up, and obviously each serves a specific role within the squad. You’ll then get the opportunity to tweak his abilities and his appearance. When tweaking, you can’t really stray too far from the parameters of his specialty. A sniper is going to have a high dexterity, for instance. Tweaking your avatar’s appearance, however, gives you an impressive array of options. It’s almost like using a police artist’s tools, as you decide where your character’s chin falls between weak and pointed, how battle weary he appears, and the angle of his eyebrows. You can even give him burn scars.
Once created, your character will be thrown into the game’s story and given the opportunity to prove that you’ve understood the tutorial by killing off a few low-level enemies. But once you have done so, you get shown to your base, are given a brief idea of where to start looking for missions and set loose upon the enemy. Certain missions advance the plot and are indicated by blinking icons on the regional map screens, but you are free to pursue them whenever you tire of playing random encounters and hunting for better weapons in side missions. There is a bit of restriction to the order that you can play missions in that you have to find clues in early missions to unlock later ones, but that’s just to keep you from getting in too far over your head.
Also around to keep you from being overwhelmed are the crack squadron you assemble at your base. There are at least two characters representing each specialty class to choose from, and each have their relative strengths and weaknesses. Each also has a fairly unique personal biography and personality, though they sometimes lapse into cliché or stereotype. Still, I’ve seen movies with less convincing average-Joe-turned-war-hero characters than some of the ones you find in the game. I’m really bad about treating my NPC allies as cannon-fodder, but I found myself becoming attached to some of these characters and restarting some maps dozens of times rather than letting one die.
Partly it’s because of the in-mission dialogue written for them, although the writing is sort of schizophrenic. Sometimes it’s atmospheric and gives you deeper insight into your squad mates, like when you ask the British Engineer to do something particularly onerous, and he reminds you that he’s a grandfather. Sometimes it’s fairly witty, like when the same character opines that the Germans “shoot like they bomb, anywhere appears to be satisfactory”. Then sometimes it’s corny “our goose is cooked!” or downright goofy “good night… mommy!”. Otherwise, though, the voice acting is pretty good. Astonishingly good compared to JoWood and Encore’s Spellforce, in fact.
Likewise, the graphics and music give that extra bit of polish that keeps you from being distracted by the gameplay, which is of course the star of the show. Like most games of its type, Silent Storm uses a gameplay system in which actions are assigned a certain amount of action points and each character gets a certain amount of points to spend during his turn in a combat round. If you haven’t played this type of game before, here’s basically how it works. Your character moves around in real time until an enemy soldier spots him. The soldier initiates combat and spends a few action points to crouch, then a few more to fire a round at your character. The round misses, and the turn passes to you. You now get to decide how you will spend the action points allocated to you. Will you crouch and return fire, or dash into the nearby forest and hide behind a tree to reload?
Of course, with five soldiers at your command, you will have to make these decisions six times a round, and wait for both nearby enemy and NPC allies to take their turns before moving to the next round. This method of gameplay is either frustratingly slow because of the down-time involved while waiting for the computer to make its move, or incredibly engaging because of the amount of control you have over your characters’ ability to react to things happening around him. If you get hooked on it, you can easily one-more-round yourself into the wee hours of the morning.
Most missions center around finding the most strategic way to kill every enemy on a given map. Others have you looking for clues, however, or a specific target that you need to capture for information. One fun mission involved my squad being surrounded by Allies who had been told we were spies. Shooting our way out of the house and then finding the real spy was very tense and exciting despite the downtime and took me a few tries to accomplish without losing a squad member.
That’s the other thing about this kind of game that helps to create rabid followers: the ways in which you can accomplish a mission are limited only by your imagination. It’s sometimes fun to replay a scenario just to see if you can do it more efficiently, or by causing more destruction. And with the game’s physics engine, the latter option may become the most popular. Pretty much everything in the game can be destroyed, and although the game claims to be incredibly realistic in that regard, you can often create more havoc than you intended. One time, my squad was fighting enemies near a guard tower. Since my sniper would never have been able to climb it without getting killed, I positioned him behind it for a little cover. I figured he would be able to shoot between the support beams of the tower, because he’s supposedly a good shot, right? Unfortunately, when I instructed him to fire on a soldier on the other side of it, he blew out two support beams, causing the whole tower to collapse on him, killing him instantly.
Again, either you’ll find that anecdote to be indicative of a huge balance issue in the game that should have been worked out, or a humorous lesson in the parameters of your particular field of engagement that can be used to your advantage in later missions. I personally thought it was hilarious and thereafter enjoyed turning my heavy machine gunner into a human wrecking ball, crushing Nazis under the weight of their ill-conceived architecture.
If you are looking for a realistic World War II experience, though, this should be the first indication that Silent Storm won’t be the game for you. Later missions involve the use of prototype Nazi weapons called Panzerkleins, which are basically mechanized suits of armor. You won’t have much luck against enemy soldiers wearing them unless you are wearing one yourself, so you’ll have to accept the anachronism or stick to the early missions.
To me, the fun of the basic gameplay overshadowed any of the niggling problems with balance, realism, or production values and, as mentioned, was engrossing enough to pull me away from the highly addictive world of the MMORPG. I was tempted to say that even if you found something in this review that made you think twice about buying Silent Storm, you should definitely pick it up when it hits the bargain bin. You know what, though, buy it at full price anyway. We need more games like this and that’s the only way to see more of them.
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