As for how combat actually WORKS, well, once again there is quite a bit of complexity, and a lot more going on “under the hood” than meets the eye. Shooting at an enemy is as simple as selecting a character with available APs and clicking on the victim in question, but at this point, numerous tactical considerations must come into play. Is my character actually in range to hit the target? Is the accuracy percentage high enough to ensure I won’t just be wasting ammunition? Can I change stances or move to another location to improve my accuracy with the AP I have remaining? If I attack, will my character be subjected to return fire, and if so, will I be able to move him back behind cover? How much ammunition does my character have left available, and in his current clip? These are just a few of the thoughts that players will have running through their heads before they start making with the shooty-shooty, and the outcome of a battle will usually be determined by who can position their characters best, manage their available AP efficiently, and shoot at the enemies with enough accuracy to determine a hit.

But fiddling with poses and positioning isn’t all there is to it. A bunch of other options open up even further tactical considerations. Characters can initiate a “Hide” action to go into stealth mode to try and sneak up behind enemies (who may hear the footsteps and come looking). Obstacles on the terrain will also obscure vision, meaning that a given building or hut could be full of soldiers, yet one would have a hard time knowing it from the outside. Visibility actually plays a heavy factor in combat, as while you can still shoot what you necessarily cannot see (if a decent angle is provided, characters can reliably try and snap a shot off on a target seen not by them, but by another friendly character), an enemy that is behind cover will be much more difficult to hit. Sometimes there will also be instances where your characters will know (hearing) an enemy is nearby, but nobody has actually seen him yet. In these situations, a shadowed icon will appear at where the character “guesses” the enemy to be, giving players the opportunity to either try their hand at a blind attack that will most likely miss (grenades are handy here), or retreat to a better position.

There’s so many other things I could delve into in describing the depth of the gameplay (such as “criticals”, which impede a character’s performance based on where he was hit, or the ability to execute locational attacks to the head, legs, or arms for different effects), but probably one of the coolest features of Silent Storm is the ability to annihilate the terrain. I don’t just mean the basic ability to blow up the occasional wall, I mean that every object in the game (aside from the ground itself) has a pre-set number of hitpoints, and sufficient firepower will cause just about anything to be destroyed in a vicious manner. Tree blocking your way? Mow it down with a BAR! Want to gain entry into a building without knocking on the front door? Whip out a rocket launcher and carve your own hole in the wall! Find a locked door or supply crate? Shoot it open! Ridiculously enough, every little square block that makes up a building also has its own hitpoint rating, allowing you to dissect a building piece-by-piece in any order you choose until it eventually collapses. Since the combat is multi-level (buildings can go several “levels” above the ground, and some even have basements – there are controls built into the interface to focus on each level respectively), this means you can effectively wander into a building, shoot at the ceiling, and, if your aim is true and weapon powerful enough, cackle as an enemy tumbles down from the floor above as a result of the woodwork he was standing on suddenly being ripped apart. I’ve honestly never really seen destructible environments be used to this great detail before, and Silent Storm offers a truly awesome experience in this regard. It’s definitely something everyone is going to have to see.

The gameplay is fairly slow-paced and yet highly addictive, with all the complexity anyone would expect out of a turn-based strategy/RPG hybrid, but there are a few elements which pull down the experience a little. First, while the AI itself is quite well done and presented a fierce fight in the later areas of the game (and even surprised me in the beginning), they are prone to occasional acts of stupidity. Sometimes I would witness enemy officers waste their APs pulling out a pistol, reloading it, spinning around in circles (honestly), and then crawling over to a fallen soldier’s body to pick up the machinegun he was clutching. Since he had blown all his APs on this futile maneuver, I had no problem blasting his head open the next time my turn came around. Enemies are also fairly easy to lure into ambushes (possibly a good thing, depending on your perspective), as they appeared to be very sensitive to “sound” contacts – so all a player has to do to send an entire enemy platoon out of its nice secure bunker is run around a little outside and go seek cover, then simply lie in wait. On the bright side, the game isn’t TOO difficult – at least some of the time, but if the player’s main character is killed or rendered unconscious, it’s an instant game over. Kind of annoying when one notes all it takes is a blind step around a corner and a face full of MP40 burst-fire to the head to finish him off. One thing I’m incredibly thankful the developers integrated is a user-adjustable save limitation. On the standard difficulty levels, the player can save any damn time he wants to, while on the higher modes, he can only save when not engaged in a battle. An excellent design choice that appeals to both ends of the market. Bravo, Nival!

There are a huge number of weapons to play with in Silent Storm, ranging from the popular MP40, all the way up to obscure (and quite wacky) laser weapons. Yes, lasers - as I said earlier, this is a form of “alternate history” approach to WW2. Just about anyone will be able to find their favorite toys at least once during the game, and a whole bunch of unexpected weapons make an appearance too. Shuriken, katana, throwing knives, and many other unusual tools are available for use, but probably one of the craziest elements to be introduced to the latter stages of the game is “Panzerkleins”. Panzerkleins are essentially mobile battle armor that can be used by characters to make themselves nearly invulnerable, as well as deliver shots so powerful that it sends corpses flailing and bouncing across the map in a ridiculous manner. The only real way to stop them, in fact, is to employ laser weapons, which kills the pilot and makes the Panzerklein available for anyone to use. The downside to these things are that they can’t fit into small areas (hint: blow a hole open in the wall) and that they move fairly slowly and are impossible to sneak around with due to their noise level. To be honest, I found Panzerkleins to be a little unbalancing to the gameplay, and they kind of ruined the atmosphere and difficulty of the game after they had been introduced. Panzerkleins (and their pilots) are essentially nearly impossible to damage with conventional bullets and rockets, so a player-controlled variant can whip some serious ass with absolutely nothing to worry about. A big chunk of Silent Storm’s community feels that the game could definitely have done better without Panzerkleins, and I agree. Nevertheless, this is only a minor hitch in what is otherwise an excellent game.

I think about the only other hitch here is the lack of multiplayer. Silent Storm would have been completely awesome if it supported internet play and a variety of versus maps (objective-based gameplay would have been awesome here with all the tactical options), and some form of co-op play would have been even better. Unfortunately, the only hint of multiplayer is a buggy kind of “hot seat” mode, which isn’t even officially a part of the game and was left accessible only through the console. Quite disappointing, but I hope that the planned expansion pack for the game does something to rectify the issue.

The graphics engine in Silent Storm is very powerful, very detailed, and also very demanding. While I actually got the game running on the family P3/800mhz/GF3Ti200 rig, the framerates were constantly terrible and the game a little difficult to play. Nevertheless, at least it ran. However, the sheer amount of detail in the game (EVERY single projectile fired is tracked and analyzed extensively after impact to determine what kind of effect it should have, be it a casual bullet decal, a blood splatter applied to a specific area on a character model, or an object being blasted apart) definitely makes it resource-intensive, and I wouldn’t recommend trying to run it on anything less than a 1.4Ghz system with at LEAST a GeForce 3 and 512MB of RAM. Anything less and you’ll be pushing the graphics level down too much just to get decent framerates to enjoy this game’s true beauty. Stability was great, at least, and the game played nicely when I abusively alt-tabbed out of it at random to check up on things during a battle, so at least there’s that. The game engine here is definitely quite well written and handles demanding environments beautifully – players should just ensure a somewhat beefy system is available to support it properly. By the way, my compliments to whoever handled the animations for the characters – seeing my soldiers smoothly run across the terrain, climb over a fence, drop to a crouched position, casually strafe over to the cover of a rock, go prone, and lay down covering fire was enough to give me goose bumps.

Another element Silent Storm handles nicely is that of audio. Weapons have the perfect level of kick and “oomph” to them that will instantly satisfy any gun-nut (I’d sometimes pick up a machinegun, set it to full automatic, and rip into a building just to hear the sound effects), and all the proper sounds are played to accommodate events occurring in an environment. Tossing a grenade into a building will usually result in a wave of loud, pleasing noises as chairs and tables are destroyed, doors blown open, windows shattered, and unfortunate enemy soldiers crippled or killed. Matching the sound effects is Silent Storm’s music element, which has a variety of dynamic tracks that starts in a soothing background ambience, breaking into some great action tunes as soon as an enemy appears. Sometimes the cuts between the “all clear” and “action” themes were a little too spontaneous for my liking, but I hardly ever noticed it. The music is very well done and feels perfectly suited to the game atmosphere, so players who can’t properly enjoy their games without some nice tunes to go with them will probably not be disappointed. The only issue in regards to Silent Storm’s audio aspect is the voice acting, which ranges from “passable” to “bwa hah hah hah hah”. With so many different personalities to the game, I suppose ensuring ALL the voice talent was solid would be a difficult chore, but some of the spoken dialogue is just hilarious to hear in action. If there was one thing I’d change about Silent Storm to make it a better game, it would be the addition of proper multi-player, but a change in voice talent would have been nice as well.

When I look back on my experience with Silent Storm, I find myself with a strong urging to just load it back up and play through it all again. With the two separate Allied and Axis campaigns, six separate player classes, HUGE variety of maps, weapons, and items, and all the different gameplay possibilities available, the replay factor for this game goes through the roof. Despite a few errant problems, strategy fans should rest assured that this is the game to get. If you buy only one turn-based title this quarter, make it Silent Storm. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I need to go see how many corpses I can send flying at once through careful deployment of an HE grenade.