S2: Silent Storm

The Good
Tactical turn-based strategy. Ragdoll physics. Destructable environment. A plethora of weapons and perks and classes...I believe this game is one of the best games released this year, if not one of the best games to come out in the last five years.

Silent Storm takes place in 1943, World War II. You play as the Axis or the Allies as you battle through storyline-based missions and random encounters in the style of such classics as X-Com and Jagged Alliance 2. Those of you who played those squad-based classics will feel right at home in Silent Storm.

Almost everything about this game I absolutely love. It has its faults, of course, which I'll get to in a moment, but the great things about this game certainly outweigh the bad. The best part about this game, undoubtedly, is the destructable environment. And this ain't just your "shoot the barrel to blow open x door" type stuff. Nearly everything is destructable, from doors to windows to walls to vehicles to towers, and very little of it is scripted destruction. Bullets will punch actual holes in wooden walls, grenades will blow actual holes in the floor. Roofs will cave in if there's no enough support, stairway railings can be broken, whether by bullets or a falling body. And to top all that off, this game features some excellent ragdoll physics. Deaths aren't just animated sequences anymore. You shoot a guy at the top of the stairs and he might come tumbling down it. Or get up close and go full-auto at him and watch him flail backwards. An explosion will send bodies flying. Take out a soldier from a sniper rifle, hitting his arm, and he'll spin around as he dies. None of it is predictable, none of it is scripted animation, and it adds more to the game than any squad-based game I've played.

Not to mention how the desctructable enviornment actually aids you. Door locked? Don't have any lockpicks? Blow it open! Know there's a hidden cellar below you? Blow the floor apart and jump down. It also affects you negatively. For instance, one of the very first level as the Axis features a battle in a small village with two or three houses. I snuck my sniper onto the top floor and he was using a balcony as a sniping spot. As the battle heated up, more and more bullets were flying at him, and eventually the balcony took too many hits and collapsed, sending my sniper to the ground where he really got assaulted. There were occasions where I knew there was an enemy hiding behind the door, so I blew it open with a machine gun, killing the dude behind it and obliterating the door and the wall in the back of the room. There were some other, more hilarious moment, such as this time I shot a soldier with my sniper from a great distance away. The bullet went straight through his head and blew out a very small part of the wall behind him, and the force of the bullet wedged the soldier's head inside the hole. Later on, the platform the soldier was standing on was destroyed, and so he was suspended in the air by his head which was stuck in the hole!

As you exercise your skills, you gain levels and perks, which just make the game all that much cooler. The type of perks you can get depend on which of the five or six classes you can choose from are. Engineers get bonuses to lockpicking, mechanics, etc., while a sniper can gain the ability to get a critical hit 25% of the time (or 100% at a very high level). Your scout can get sneaking and assassination perks, etc.

Weapons aplenty! Whatever soldiers you kill will drop what weapons they were using, along with their grenades and amunition. You can bring these back with you to base for later use, or use them right on the battlefield. Personally, I get annoyed when I see a rifle lying there on the ground but I'm not allowed to use it for some reason.

Levels range from village battles to farmlands, to snowy wasteland, to mansions, enemy bases, and more. Every level has so many different strategic options to it, depending on what class(es) you're playing. I played with one soldier of every class, and utilized their abilities every way I could. I would pair my scout and my assault guy together, sending in my scout to sneak into the house, kill who he could silently, and having my assault guy take out everyone else -- those that might have spotted the scout. I used my grenadier to blow open doors my engineer couldn't lockpick, or to just annihilate a group of soldiers at once. I placed my sniper high atop buildings and elevated areas to take out soldiers too far away to do anything about it, and paired with him was my doctor who doubled as a slightly less effective sniper. Some levels could take more than an hour to beat, but when I played, I was so immersed by it all that the time went by just too quickly.

The Bad
There are, however, some things about this game that aren't great. Such as the AI, I suppose. We haven't reached a point in gaming evolution in which the AI is smart enough to really give you a run for your money, but dammit, we should be striving for that. The AI in this game isn't terrible, really. They'll take cover, they'll run when they know they're outgunned, but they never form tactical groups or anything like that unless it's a scripted part. After a level or two it becomes pretty predictable.

There is a very large flaw about the destructable levels, and that's that often times you'll have to recover a "critical clue" somewhere in the level, and if that clue happens to be in a part of the level that you blew all to hell, it's impossible to get it and you'll have no choice but to restart the level. That seriously hurts the game, as half the fun just destroying the level!

About three quarters into the game there is a very large transition in which a certain element comes into play. The panzerkleins. Big mech-like suits that are pretty cool at first, but quickly lose their appeal, I think. Suddenly you must change all your tactics for the remaining 25% of the game, as no longer are you fighting just regular soldiers, and no longer will you be able to use most of your guns. Instead the game turns into a panzerklein vs. panzerklein game. It is fun in many ways, but the panzerkleins are very slow, and you really don't have a choice but to use them. You can still go on foot, but to do so is very difficult and in my opinion not worth it.

Some of the mechanics of the stat system are awkward, to put it lightly. It would appear that you gain skill in certain areas by doing certain things (i.e. sneaking exercizes your stealth skill, sniping exercizes your sniper skill), but the amount in which it gains seems to vary from level to level. I remember one particular level in which I gained a level up almost every time I ended my turn, even if I didn't do a damn thing, whereas another level I didn't gain a single level when I pushed my soldiers to their limits. Also, the "familiarity" of weapons is pretty strange. For every point of familiarity your soldier has with a weapon, he gains +2% accuracy...however, the second you remove the weapon from your primary weapon slot, it drops back down to 0. It would appear all your soldiers have ADHD and no short-term memory.

Also, the game forces you to run anti-aliasizing, which looks fantastic on high-end machines, but really forces lower-end machines to sit on the sidelines.

The Bottom Line
This is one of the best games I've played in a very long time. The strategy, the destruction, the ragdolls...almost everything about this game is everything I've wanted in a game for a very long time.