With the innovative Silent Storm Engine, players will have satisfying experience with Silent Storm.
The Silent Storm Engine is basically the core of the game. Silent Storm is a war themed turned-based tactics game. Players send their troops into various locations and need to achieve certain objectives like rescuing a captured comrade, retrieving certain top secret files, killing the base leader or simply wiping every single enemy troop of the map.
The battle system is split into turns. During your turn you can control your troops, while during the enemy turn, you can only watch the random funny stuff, occasionally deadly, that the enemy troops do. If there are neutral (such as civilians) or allied troops in the map, they will also have a turn. With the The Silent Storm Engine each character has AP (Action Points). AP determines how much you can interact with a certain soldier. The actions of moving, shooting, opening doors and windows cost AP. The Silent Storm Engine also features the ability to customize your characters - you can spend ability points (earned by leveling up, and leveling up happens when you gain a certain amount of experience points, which are earned by performing actions) on certain boost like the non decrease of accuracy during night or the improvement of the chance to inflict critical wounds and many, many more. The Silent Storm Engine also determines how the environment plays. Bullets destroy certain things like doors and windows and can pierce through them (and therefore hit the target), meaning if you know there is an enemy behind, for example a door, you can shoot the door and maybe, just maybe you will hit your enemy. During the battle you can also suffer what one could define as status ailments. AP reduction - your character has his AP points reduced or Bleed - your character looses health between turns until it dies. All the elements and features that come with The Silent Storm Engine provide an entertaining experience, yet, a little boring sometimes.
Sometimes, in most of the maps and as you play the game, a map can contain tons of enemies as well as tons of allies. This can lead to long waiting turns. Having to wait for 8 civilians to hide and run around like crazy and having to wait for 20 enemies to perform their actions can result to up to 4 minutes or more of staring at your screen without doing anything.
You can bring a wide variety of weapons to the field. Your inventory functions like the one from Resident Evil 4 and Resident Evil 5. As you use a certain weapon, your accuracy rises as well as the damage caused by it - this is addressed as weapon familiarization. However, stop using a certain weapon and your weapon familiarization goes back to 0.
Upon a New Game you are to create a main player that will be your squad leader. You can customize its appearance and its clothes. You can also chose between a handful of jobs - sniper, scout, soldier, medic, and grenadier. Each has its weakness and strengths and having a balanced team is recommended, although snipers are the players favorite, mainly because they can hit targets with high accuracy rates from afar. However, it's also necessary to have a medic to heal your troops on the field, and a grenadier to take out groups of enemies. Scouts are mostly for maintaining stealth, which can avoid you a lot of bloodshed but isn't THAT special. Soldiers are a combination of all of the above. They have a decent average accuracy, can use some healing items and throw grenades with some skill.
So, create your player and you're off to the campaign. Recruit troops, complete objectives, same old.
On the last part of the campaign you will face human controlled robots called Panzerkleins. These Panzerkleins are very strong and can wipe a soldier with a single shot. Certain maps have Panzerkleins you can capture but mostly, Panzerkleins cause unbalance - they're hard to destroy and having huge attack power. However, they have lousy accuracy, limited ammo and most importantly, every action costs a huge amount of AP.
Your troops (and the enemy troops) say some funny stuff during the battles and during certain situations. Stuff like "I wasn't expecting you" when they spot another enemy they weren't expecting. "That definitely won't inspire confidence amongst my men" when they miss a shot with high accuracy or stuff like "I surprise my expectations" when they hit a target with low accuracy. Each character has unique appearance and has a unique voice. Stuff said also varies from character to character, so you won't get bored of what they say easily. (meaning character A says "I wasn't expecting you" but character B says "More enemies" and character C "There is trouble" ..)
You can just forget about the story. To tell the truth I never understood it myself, nor had the effort of trying to.
The game also comes with certain bugs - troops stuck on certain maps, houses blowing up and killing everyone with a pistol shot and grenades that occasionally heal, instead of causing damage.
With good gameplay, average graphics, great sound effects, attractive price and decent replay value (various difficulties), I consider Silent Storm to be good.
Price: 8/10
Graphics: 7/10
Sound: 9/10
Gameplay: 8/10
Replay Value: 7/10