Should this game honestly be as inconsiderate as living the life of a military representative? Anyone know 'fun'?
In Operation Darkness your typical task is to move a set of Wolf Team members--ranging from 10 to 20 original characters--across a map against an array of Nazi soldiers, one problem being that almost the entire time you have to combat against obstacles that are stringently superior--such as tanks--that you can never recreate on your own playing field. Aside from the camera also having its own noticeable faults it is impossible for you to retain a character's original position once they are moved to a new spot on the map.
The weaponry at the disposal of the enemies are also quite ambiguous (ex: a shotgun may seem to be the same as a rifle or carbine so the directive you choose for your characters' movement may easily end in disastrous consequences without ever being aware of it before it actually happens) and each time one of your characters attacks a foe there is a probability system of determining how much damage the opponent will receive from your attack, and as that probability can only be eliminated once your at a certain distance from your opponent you will be encouraged to be as close as possible to your opponent, making it so that your entire unit will inevitably have to spread out, ignoring an emphasis on organization.
Oh and did I mention that if one of your original characters is shot dead the entire mission will have to be restarted without any intermediate checkpoints at all? Each mission takes at least one hour so this wasn't exactly a smart emphasis by any means, or by any respective means mind you. Even if you threw in an unoriginal character that is all the way to level 20 he will disappear forever if he happens to be killed, meaning all that hardwork is gone for good unless you would be willing to restart a hour or two into the past, both options almost being equivalent in loss.
The graphics seem to have been taken straight from an Xbox port to the 360, for each character doesn't have any mouth movement, texture on their model, they move without much fluency, their movement seems quite choppy without differentiation, and the environments you take part in are bland without much of any strategic element to them at all. At least one positive are the artwork images of the original characters as they speak to one another before the beginning of each mission, but that doesn't really constitute the overall graphics any more than an orange from an apple.
We also see voice acting in each pre-mission briefing; the voice acting is usually acted by ordinary people with too much stereotype and unnecessary story add-ons that don't contribute very well to the overall plotline at all. Essentially what Atlus did here was amass characters together with their own semi-original storyline for quality purposes but not explain the intricacies behind how it would really make any difference whether their stories were explained and how far they would be willing to realistically go for a mere special agency team against the entire German militia.
I could have gone exceptionally further but you should have an understanding by now that this game is even more worse than mediocre. I honestly wanted to enjoy this game very much but only resented my decision to purchase it once I had realized how much cohesion and quality it lacked to the point of being disgusting.
The bottomline is that games are not meant to severely reprimand you when small faults are made that can't be always avoided in one situation to the next; if I wanted to be punished for stupid irrational reasons than maybe I would have considered serving in the military again, but both variables don't exactly denote 'fun' very well now do they? That's a problem since they are from entirely separate universes but pretend to be exactly the same.
Atlus should have learned that if they really wanted realism the movement of a person's mouth would pretty much have to come first since we all know the importance of language, maybe that or getting frustrated over something you are not obligated to take part in at the first place that is meant to be interpreted as seriously as the gap between life and death. This game had so much potential too. If From Software could have been the lead developers instead of Atlus we would likely have seen a great game instead of a quasi reality trip straight from the 20th century.