 The year is 1943 and the war rages on. A disaster is about to happen and, guess what, you’re the only one who can stop it. So get your coffee ready, stick your eyes on the monitor and let’s proceed.
Many of you probably remember Jagged Alliance. For those who don’t, your loss, you’ve missed one hell of a game. Well, Silent Storm is JA’s big brother and, as you’d expect, is here to take its place and claim the crown of RTT, which it fully deserves, being a wonderful mix of action, RPG and strategy.
I’ll start by congratulating the Nival Interactive team for SS, the game who brought me back the Fallout atmosphere and turned me into a night zombie with red eyes and shaky hands.
After an interesting intro movie, the first thing we get to do in the game is creating a profile and selecting the side for which we’ll play the campaign: Axis or Allies. We’ll have to create the main character, choosing his name, surname and nickname (hm… Bunny sounds pretty well and being able to customize even his smallest detail: body, eyes, nose, lips, skin color, even the scars on his face. When asked about his profession, we’ll get 6 choices (just like in most of the games, I wonder why scout, soldier, sniper, medic, engineer or grenadier. To help you skip consulting the manual, here is a brief description of them: the scout is the fast, intelligent, stealth soldier, an expert in hand-to-hand combat, pistols or melee fights.
The soldier is the Rambo-type character, making wonders with the sub-machine and machine guns and stopping only to re-supply with ammo (Hollywood style unlimited ammo would be nice On to the sniper, the guy who’ll only greet you with a bullet, excelling with scoped, but also unscoped weapons. We also have the medic, who can also shoot a gun when he’s getting bored of bandaging, treating and plastic surgery. The engineer deals with mining, mine clearing (if you’re lucky enough not to blow yourself up) and lock-picking, thus providing you access to some new objects and places. The grenadier is pretty forward, fill his backpack with grenades, C4 and other tasty things and send him to give your enemies a taste of them.
You have set up your character, so it’s time to face the campaigns.  As I’ve already said, you have to choose from only 2 of them, but very long and full of surprises. You can recruit up to 5 more teammates from your HQ, getting again to that 6 fatidic number. You’ll wish to get a balanced team because some of the missions will be difficult, or even impossible to complete without this. So no excess of soldiers or snipers, or I’ll see from where you pull out the blood donor card when you reach a mine field. According to the missions you completed, you’ll get to choose some new ones, thus reassuring us the campaigns can be played any times we want.
Let’s proceed to the excellent engine powering the game, unscripted and based on “rag-doll physics”, meaning that an enemy killed on the upper floor might count the stairs to the ground floor or check the gravity and impact effects on the crates accidentally placed behind him. Or, if you find yourself in a dark, cold corridor, filled with rats and enemies ready to burst in upon you and with no place to hide, you can perhaps equip a machine gun and drill a hole into the wall to crawl in the room near to you or, with a well placed grenade, make the wall suffer small structure modifications and cover you with dust, the thick cloud formed allowing you to sneak in there.  Simple and efficient. Try to shoot an enemy located beneath you. You’ll most likely make a hole in the floor and your enemy will be as good as dead, unless he’s Neo and can dodge the bullets. Also try not to shoot objects that can explode, because you can tear into parts trucks, cars and even oxygen tubes. It happened to me once, when trying to hit a wooden door, to accidentally hit an oxygen tube and notice that, after the smoke disappeared, a nice slice of the floor also vanished into the air, fortunately the stairs remained intact and I could keep advancing in the level.
I got caught in technical details and haven’t told you what your teammates can do. Besides shooting from different positions (running, standing, crouched or proned), they can shoot single, quick rounds, but with small chances of hitting the target, they can shoot more carefully, at the price of more action points, but hitting their target more often. You can use short or long bursts, according to the number of bullets you are wiling to spend on your enemies. The sniper has an extra choice of aiming at their target for a longer time, with bigger chances of hitting. You can shoot your enemies in head, arms or legs, causing them severe wounds which will usually make them bleed or take them out of the battle. |
