As you may know from consulting our previous coverage, Silent Storm is a turn-based strategy game that takes place during World War II. The last time we covered the game, we provided a general overview of it by describing how it looks, how it plays, and so on. This time around, we've been able to play through a good portion of the Allied campaign (as the game features campaigns for both the Allies and the Axis Powers), so we'll take a more in-depth look at some of the characters, skills, and weapons you'll find in the game.

Your team tracks the involvement of Helmut Koch in a secret organization.

Silent Storm is a turn-based strategy game in the same vein as Jagged Alliance and X-COM. You command a squad of soldiers in different missions, and these soldiers have action points that determine what they can do in a given turn. Moving and shooting require you to spend action points, so you often have to decide whether to fight or flee. In the Allied campaign, you play with an elite squad of six soldiers in a special operations investigation. You first create your character, and then you build your team by adding five other members from a preset pool of characters. There are six character classes in the game, so you can have one of each in your team if you wish. There are three to four characters for each class in the pool, so you have to pick team members based on your preferences. For example, one medic may have a higher medical skill than the others, but he or she may also have fewer action points than the others. This character wouldn't be as much of a help on the front line as the other medics, so you wouldn't want to hire him or her if you plan to use every character in your assaults.

The skill tree is what truly diversifies the classes. Each class has a unique skill tree with several branching paths. You can get a new skill every time you gain a level, but you'll never be able to get every skill in the tree. Again, you'll have to choose which skills will best fit your playing style. Take the medic, for instance. One path makes your medic a more efficient fighter, while another increases your medic's ability to treat wounds. If you prefer to take your time and carefully complete each mission, you may be able to finish each one without sustaining any serious injuries to your troops. In this case, you wouldn't need an exceptionally good medic. You might, instead, opt to improve your medic's fighting ability to deal more-damaging critical hits--a random occurrence in battle that inflicts an exceptional amount of damage on enemies. In any case, when a soldier's vitality points are reduced to zero, he or she is merely rendered unconscious. You can't revive characters during the mission, but they'll be alive and kicking in the next one.

With enough action points, you can do almost anything--like unloading a submachine gun into a German soldier's face.

The Allied campaign follows the investigation of a captured German agent. You go from mission to mission seeking clues about his role in a clandestine operation. But you quickly discover that he is involved in a secret group that isn't affiliated with the Germans at all. In fact, the group seems to be playing both sides of the war for an unknown purpose. Furthermore, the group has been abducting scientists and gathering technology. Your investigation takes you all the way across Europe. You search houses in England, infiltrate factories in Germany, and look for missing scientists in remote regions in Russia. The environments vary in each mission, so you need to prepare accordingly. If you think you're going to fight in an open landscape, then perhaps you'll want to equip rifles, because they have a longer range. However, if you're fighting in a factory, submachine guns may be a better choice, since they're compact and can deliver short bursts of fire.

Silent Storm appears to be a pretty long game. Each mission can easily take an hour or more to complete. We've logged in more than 15 hours in the Allied campaign, and the end still isn't in sight. The game presents you with several assignments on a map of Europe. You can choose which mission to play in any order, but sometimes it's advantageous to complete one before another. The pacing seems to work well, too. At one point, it seemed that our characters were becoming a bit too powerful, but then we discovered that the secret organization had been building armored suits called "panzerkleins." There are Allied and Axis panzerkleins, so, presumably, the secret organization is pitting the two sides against one another. We were actually able to use the panzerkleins after discovering a few in a warehouse. These suits of mobile armor seem extremely powerful, and they can even be equipped with special machine guns, rocket launchers, melee weapons, and other offensive gear. One enemy soldier ran right in front of our panzerklein and unloaded a barrage of MG 42 fire to no effect. We swung a giant, mounted saber and made short work of him, however. Yet we weren't able to enjoy our superior firepower for long, since we later found ourselves up against enemy panzerkleins. Still, these powerful armored suits are bulky and can't be used indoors, so even withthem in your arsenal, you still often need to depend on your team's skills and weapons.