Silent Storm Hands-On Preview

There haven't been many turn-based tactical squad combat games lately. Games like Jagged Alliance and X-COM let you control small squads to complete missions against overwhelming odds. However, Nival Interactive's Silent Storm, which is being published in North America by Encore (and in Europe by JoWood) will attempt to revive this genre of games. From what we've seen of the game from a nearly complete version we've played, Silent Storm seems to borrow gameplay mechanics from previous games and combines them with new ideas, and the result is promising.

In Silent Storm, you'll be able to play as either Allied or Axis operatives.

Silent Storm's setting is loosely based on World War II campaigns. The year is 1943, and the Germans have a presence in Great Britain. It isn't a huge military campaign, but there are plenty of clandestine operations occurring within the country that draw you in on either side. You can play as either the Allies or the Axis. The Allies are trying to discover exactly what the Germans are up to with their secret weapons program, and the Germans are trying to oust the British from their homeland.

You start off by creating a character from six preset professions. These include grenadiers (grenade experts), snipers (marksmen), soldiers (heavy-weapons experts), scouts (stealth and espionage operatives), engineers (who specialize in explosives), and medics (who are adept at treating wounds). Or you can choose to make your own class by adjusting a variety of skills. Each side has three nationalities that don't have much of an effect on your character besides starting equipment and voices. You can then tweak your character's look and speech, much like you'd expect in a modern computer role-playing game such as Baldur's Gate II. Your first mission on either side is a solo adventure that ends up being a training mission that shows you the ropes of the game. The German mission is easier because you fight off four poorly armed bank robbers with a submachine gun. After you complete the mission, you head back to headquarters where you can choose up to five teammates to join you, treat your wounds, arm everybody to the teeth, and head out on your next mission.

At this point, it seems like a good idea to build your team by picking one soldier from each class. They each have special skills that will increase your chances of success. Also, your characters gain experience and levels on the field--and this experience lets you advance along a skill tree that resembles the character development of Diablo II. New skills become available after you choose their prerequisites, but since you can put only one point into each skill, you don't have to worry about continuously adding points to a single skill to strengthen it at the expense of learning new skills. Each class has a different set of skills. For instance, the sniper has skills that will let you make critical hits with every shot, while the scout has skills that will allow you to detect enemies at a greater range. Each class has something to contribute in a battle, so one isn't necessarily better than another.

You'll be able to customize your soldier's skills and weapon loadout.

In our time with the game, we encountered a variety of missions, each of which opens up a new location on the map. So far, we've been tasked with preventing a bank robbery, discovering important documents and freeing a prisoner, and locating a scientist, among other goals. You'll actually recover a lot of different documents, because the game's story revolves around figuring out what the enemy is up to. There are also random encounters that appear on the map in stationary locations--they're set up so that you won't be attacked unexpectedly, which is a welcome feature indeed. These random encounters don't advance the story, but you can use them to gain experience for your characters. And at this point, it seems that you won't have to worry about weapons and ammo, since the armory at your base has plenty of ammunition for you to pick up, and everything is free because the game has no monetary system.

The weapons we've played with so far have been standard World War II weapons: pistols, rifles, machine guns, grenades, and a lot of other heavy-hitting hardware. Weapons from different countries use different ammo, so you need to make sure you pick up the correct ammo for each specific gun. Fortunately correct ammo types are highlighted when you select something in the menu. Characters can each carry two weapons on their person, but they can carry more in their inventories. Some weapons are easier to handle than others, and there's a "familiarity rating" on each weapon. Characters that constantly use a certain weapon will become familiar with it, which increases their effectiveness with that weapon. Weapons have different firing modes and shot accuracy modes. A BAR can fire a single shot or a burst shot, or it can fire on full auto. A rifle lets you make a snap shot, or you can spend more action points to make your shot more accurate.