Silent Storm Review
Every so often some company releases a game so absolutely fantastic that verbose, arrogant assholes like myself have no actual words to describe it. Silent Storm is one of these games. Oh ye gods is this game a marvel. Are there things wrong with it? Sure. Does it rock all ass anyway? Hells yes. This game is seriously my new favorite game. It has displaced Final Fantasy Tactics. My entire scale for tactical RPGs has jumped to entirely new heights of standards.
In case you weren't aware, Silent Storm is a World War 2 based tactical RPG. If you're sick of World War 2 games, well, deal. They're like their own genre now. The fundamental theory is that your character, which you make yourself, is the head of a secret operations unit, and you wander about performing missions of varying kinds. Saying more will largely just spoil the plot.
First off, let's get a few things out of the way. Silent Storm is not a game for every fool walking down the street; it's a meticulous, time-soaking game that takes both profound amounts of effort and computing power to get the most out of. The game has requirements and restrictions up the wing-wang, and brings my computer to its knees. My computer is not easily brought to its knees; it's a pentiumIV 3.2 GHz with an ATI Radeon 9700 Pro and a gig of memory. The fact that my computer can only efficiently run the game if I set every graphical setting to 'medium' or lower is pretty crazy. Probably if I had 4 gigs of memory, as my system is capable of, I'd be able to play everything at 'high.' But as is, the game just isn't too feasible unless I play it at lower settings. What's funny is that a housemate of mine tested it on his old 800MHz computer, with a GeForce4, and it worked about as well on all low settings. I'm not sure if this means my computer needs a refrigeration system, or if the game has quite a broad range of capability, but regardless, I'm betting the game can be adjusted to be playable on most computers within 5 years of age. If you have the computational horsepower, the game does look quite pretty when you pump it up to its max graphics settings, it just runs like crap.
Now, for the gameplay. The gameplay is beautiful, if you have the patience for it. Players of the Fallout games are familiar with the concept of AP, action points, ruling their ability to perform actions during battles. Silent Storm took a cue from Fallout Tactics, and then proceeded to mold the system into what I will affectionately call 'the greatest tactical RPG system ever.' APs can be spent over multiple rounds to perform large, complex actions, such as taking a perfect shot at an enemy officer's head or defusing a mine, or perhaps performing surgery on a critically wounded comrade. Or you can take quick actions and spend a few AP per shot, taking a lot of inaccurate shots with a pistol or carbine. The modularity, the simply cleverness of the system is what makes the gameplay so cool. It takes a highly precise, numerical system, and manages to make it seem quite realistic by figuring out a great sense of 'time' to turns. In terms of system, the game sports a fairly enclosed skill system, each of which improve with use rather than random level gain. Coincidentally, a clever player can find numerous loopholes to improve skills by a ridiculous amount in the game. The simplest of them is the 'target practice' idea, in which you find some object you can take aim at, and just exhaust all your ammunition shooting it. So, if you want, the game can be made far easier by basically spending a lot of time early on to improve your skills in varying engine-exploiting ways. The different classes, funnily, have very little true difference, save for some initial skill bonuses, and what special abilities they gain by leveling up. Funnily, you have have an engineer with just as much sniping capability as a character in the sniping class. Which brings me to my next point: the classes are highly varied, but from a certain fundamental point, there's no distinct advantage of taking one over another in the long run. Even though a sniper gets some minor bonuses along the way with rifles and inflicting critical hits and such, most classes can compensate with skill. From what I observed, the Engineer is the best overall class, with Sniper, Soldier, and Grenadier coming up next. The exception to the aforementioned statement, though, is the medic, where there really is a distinct difference; only medics have can use high-power healing equipment, so you'll always want one medic around, even if you don't bother carrying snipers, grenadiers, or what have you. Oh, and the scout just sort of sucks all around - unless you like the hide skill a lot. But snipers can do that just as well.
One of the other things that makes the gameplay astoundingly good is the sheer interactivity of the environments. Almost everything is destroyable and functionable in some way. Can't unlock a door? Break it down, or blow it to pieces. Don't want to walk in the front door? Blast a new door in a sidewall. If you don't want to go to the top floor of a building to flush out the last few nazis, just blow down the building. Basically, the game gives you a great deal of power to affect your environments, and you can use that to make some pretty interesting tactical decisions. There are, of course, limitations - your characters sometimes can't get around or across the damages they've inflicted on a building, which can sometimes strand your forces, or even make it impossible to complete a mission. Something that I feel needs to be added into the expansion is the ability to leap over holes in the floor. It'd also be nice for the engineer to be able to make patchwork repairs, allowing for passage across, around, up, and down damaged buildings.
In terms of missions, the game is fairly varied until you get to the later parts, where it starts to veer off from the major setting and plot a great deal. The difficulty setting you play at makes a large difference, too, in how manageable your objectives are. This is a major complaint of mine about the game, perhaps THE major one: on easy, your objectives are laid out in a logical manner, whereas on medium and hard, you are not told your objectives until you've stumbled across them, and sometimes you're never even really told what they are, making completing some missions inordinately difficult. Although I understood the whole 'self-guided investigation' idea behind the plot progression, hiding objectives from the player is just annoying, and is ultimately what I feel will turn some people off to the game as a whole. What would be nice would be some sort of personalized difficulty level - something that would allow you to choose AI intelligence, etc. and also decide to have objectives revealed or not.
Despite my above talk about needing to play the game on medium graphics settings and such, the game is very well done graphically. For a functional game involving large, complete urban settings, the game is very good looking, and sports well-detailed character models with good textures, rag-doll physics, and some awesome little effects. Watching a building crumble after you've blown apart a supporting wall is pretty awesome. Shadows from trees and objects are also quite nice. On a close visual level, the game probably won't make you stare in wonder a while, but it's really well done none the less.
The game is not a wonder for music. The music is pretty unvaried, and mostly just background stuff to keep you from thinking it's too quiet. Battle music sets the pace well, and get across the general tension and mood of the combat, but really isn't stuff you're gonna listen to outside of the game on your own interest. It's just plain mediocre - fine for its intention of setting the mood and keeping the ears occupied between explosions and rifle shots, but just not great music. Other sounds - explosions, machine guns, rifle shots, bullet ricochets, etc. are mainly well done, though a few individual weapons really don't sound that great. The machine guns all seem sort of quiet - they lack the sheer volume and power that I'd expect a machine gun to produce, especially on fully automatic. I can get a single round from an MG34 not blasting straight into your hearing from across the map, but when someone opens full auto with one of those babies, you should hear it. Instead, you get a lot of dull thunking noises in rapid succession. Bleh. And then... there's the voice-acting. As with most games home to voice acting, you get a very mixed bag with Silent Storm. Some voices - the Russian male, the italian and german females, and a number of your squadmates - all have perfectly good voice-acting. But some is just plain awful, especially when it comes the british voices. There's also the general problem that, for a game with so few actual voice acted parts, there's an awful lot of chatter, so you'll get pretty tired of the voice-acting long before the game is out.
I can't give the game grand points for plot. They tried something interesting, I'll give them that, and it does work, but it also doesn't portray a particularly grand story. Basically, Silent Storm takes a tangent in World War 2 and focuses on a terrorist organization developing special weapons for whichever side you're not currently playing a campaign for. You wander about, investigating, collecting clues, and generally finding more about this organization, until eventually you take them out. It's not a particularly clever, inspired, or interesting plot, and it really didn't do much for me. I honestly would've preferred if the game had been more centered around pulling off behind-the-scenes operations in World War 2. It's not as though we haven't had bits like that, but at least that would've felt less like a complete departure from history, and more like a vaguely plausible chain of events.
Character wise, the game gets big bonus points, though. First off, the game sports a very involved character creation system, allowing you to customize a considerable amount about your character. There are a number of different character models you can choose from, including some civilian wear, so if you want to look like an FBI guy, you can. You can only choose from a few voice sets, unfortunately, so you're pretty much locked into a few key roles. Furthermore, the classes are quite varied in actual usefulness, so I found that I would completely ignore two of the classes whenever creating a character.
The game has quite a bit of replayability. Six classes means you can experiment with the available special abilities and find a style that best fits your preferences, while the game's pseudo-random clue collection system throughout the campaign helps make the game somewhat different every time. There are random encounters if you want to fight some arbitrary enemy soldiers, and there's a considerable number of environments and locations to look through. Basically, the game can last for a long time.
Overall, the game is fantastic. It lacks in some areas, but if the modding community seizes this game and makes a mighty single player campaign or two, it'll be absolutely amazing. Superlative!
Final Scores:
Replayability - 9/10
Gameplay - 10/10
Characters and Story - 6/10
Graphics - 9/10
Sound and Music - 7/10
Overall - 10/10