There are few games that attempt to emulate what the Jagged Alliance franchise has done. The sophistication of the latter (and its lack of sterling commercial success) does not make it easy for other developers who had considered making a similar game to make one that is very close in spirit.
Nival Interactive is one such developer. It had the initiative to make a game that is rather similar, but not enough skill or talent to create something that would rival Jagged Alliance. The result is a game that has combat mechanics that are plenty satisfactory, but little else to give the player a sense of ownership of the protagonists' efforts.
Nival Interactive's attempt to design and utilize its proprietary engine also results in a glitch-affected game that could otherwise have been very impressive for its time. It also did not tie up loose ends in the coding of the game, as will be elaborated on later.
Before the player can play the game proper, it already makes a poor impression with its documentation. For example, its manual is hampered with poor translation; the Readme files are worse.
Fortunately, the in-game text and voice-overs were given much better treatment, probably due to publisher JoWood's efforts. (There will be more on voice-acting later.)
Another issue that the player may encounter before being able to play the game itself is that it has poor scalability. Silent Storm was made for machines and computer configurations of its time and before that - but not anything after. Post-launch support for the game also dried up because its developer, Nival Interactive, has been brought apart in a series of asset trading.
This leaves the player with the less-than-ideal solution of resorting to third-party work-arounds that may render the game unstable or worse.
If the player can start the game proper, he/she will find that the game's premise is set in a fictional variant of World War II, in the year 1943. While the backstory of both sides of the war (Axis and Allies) resorting to covert operations to gather intelligence on the enemy, conduct sabotage of enemy infrastructure and perform other forms of espionage is somewhat historically true, any other plot elements of Silent Storm is, of course, fictional.
The player character takes on the role of a male or female veteran of war that had shown exemplary initiative in performing and completing the mission at hand. He/She has been recruited into one of the special operations branches of either side, and later assigned as the leader of a team of similarly exemplary soldiers.
Regardless of which side that the player takes, the story starts out with a few missions concerning some peculiar activity among the enemy that would not be mentioned in this review because it constitutes as spoilers. The player's team eventually collects intelligence that points to a third party in the war that is trying to exert its own dominance over the world, because the story designs do not want to portray the Axis as the usual villains.
The story would be refreshing if it is seen through a World War II lens, but there is little panache in how it is presented and develops. Of course, this can be a bit understandable if all the player character and his/her team, as covert operatives, are expected to do is to perform missions while military intelligence digests whatever scraps of information that had been found.
Still, having the enemy's nefarious plans revealed through intelligence reports that are presented through the display of cardboard files with text printed on them can be rather underwhelming.
The player character, his/her team-mates, and superiors never make any comment on whatever plot is being unfolded before them, making them feel rather detached from the story. That is not to say that they are devoid of character (far from it), but their lack of acknowledgment of the progress of the story can be disappointing.
What is not disappointing though are the game mechanics. As has been alluded to earlier when the significance of the player's team to the story is mentioned, Silent Storm is a squad-based, turn-based strategy game. The game emphasizes this main design by having the player start outright with a mission upon the commencement of a new game.
Incidentally, this decently suspenseful mission serves as a minor tutorial of sorts, that teaches the player the value of having the player character hidden away from the sight of enemies and behind cover as much as possible, while making use of any means necessary to get a good firing position on them.
Speaking of tutorials, the game also has a tutorial mode to teach the player about the basics of the game. Information about more advanced features of the game is included as intel items that can be collected from maps in which earlier missions take place. Their placement is somewhat odd though, as they don't seem to help much in getting through the immediate area; the end result is that they break the fourth wall more than they do teach the player anything.
Before elaborating on the designs of the game's mechanics, its real-time gameplay has to be mentioned first.
While the game is officially a turn-based game, it also uses real-time gameplay to speed up the more uneventful segments of missions, such as getting the team from one place that has been cleaned of enemies to another that has also been purged. The real-time mode appears to be only there for purposes for convenience as many actions appear to be only performed in turn-based mode, and which will trigger the latter mode upon being taken by any character in the map if the game is still in real-time mode.
Of course, such a game design is not new; this has been used in earlier turn-based games such as the original Fallout games.
However, the range of actions that causes the game to shift from real-time to turn-based mode can be wider than a player would like. While shooting a weapon at anything to harm it does understandably trigger the transition from real-time to turn-based mode, actions like setting a mine/booby-trap and disarming a mine/booby-trap do too. Considering that setting and disarming mines/booby-traps are things best done outside of combat, that their triggering of the turn-based game mode seems unnecessary and annoying even.
There are also glitches that affect the transition from real-time to turn-based mode. Examples of such glitches include any action causing the triggering of the turn-based mode just after a fight has been resolved and the game has returned to real-time mode, not just the ones that normally cause a trigger. This is even more annoying than the design oversight above.
Such flaws in the design of the transition from real-time and turn-based and vice-versa can make the game rather unfriendly to play at times.
Returning to the mechanics of gameplay, the turn-based game mode has the three sides - which are the player's team, AI-controlled Allies (which also control the movement of neutral characters such as civilians) and the AI-controlled enemy - taking alternative turns to make moves with whatever characters that are under their control, in any order of characters as is even convenient.
The turn-based mode also imposes the mechanic of Action Points on every character in the map, be he/she player-controlled or AI. Every character has an action point rating that determines how many actions that he/she can perform in their turn. Veterans of Fallout and Jagged Alliance may be quite familiar with this system.
Having characters taking actions like shooting weapons, running, changing postures and many others will consume action points, eventually reducing them to zero upon when the characters can do nothing further.
Instead of spending all Action Points that characters have, the player (or the AI) may choose to have these stored, so that they can be used in opponents' rounds. However, whether these characters can use these Action Points or not in the opposition's turns depends on their Interrupt skill and, of course, the game's digital dice (more on this later).
If they can successfully pass their Interrupt rolls, they get to perform actions of their own within the opposition's turn itself. This is not limited to just the shooting of weapons, but also any other kind of action.
A lot of tactical potential from this system of interrupts could have been unlocked - if not for it being dependent on digital dice rolls that can go ever which way, regardless of the characters' interrupt skills.
Each character has his/her own set of statistics, which are split into two types: attributes and skills. Both of these are denoted in numbers, or to use the more appropriate term because these game features have RPG-like design elements, levels.
Attributes are the primary statistics of a player character. These include some typical RPG tropes like Strength (which governs melee damage, grenade throws and the ability to use heavy weapons) and Dexterity (which typically governs the mobility of the character and his/her finesse with weapons).
There are some statistics that diverge from the usual tropes, such as Intelligence, which governs the rate of gain of experience (though this would not be as consequential as one may think); Action Points, which is decoupled from Dexterity; and Vitality Points, which are hitpoints but is an expedient but still appropriate primary statistic of its own.
Primary statistics are practically passive statistics that always matter all the time regardless of what the character is doing. On the other hand, skills are rolled against when the player performs actions that are associated with the skill.
Skills govern not only whether a character can perform an action or not, but also the effectiveness of his/her action if he/she can perform it. To illustrate the former case, certain items require certain skill levels, especially Engineering- and Medicine-related items like Surgical Plasters and Hanks of Wire (yes, there are items with such a name in the game).
For the latter case, "Burst" is the best example of a skill that can be used to elaborate it. Burst is the skill of the character at controlling weapons that can be fired in bursts or full-auto. While the Shooting skill does affect the first shot fired, Burst determines how far the subsequent rounds scatter as they travel; there are few other factors that govern the scattering, though Strength is one of them (but a minor one compared to Burst).
Certain other actions that the character can perform are affected by factors other than skill that are just as significant. The act of shooting is the best example to elaborate on this.
The Shooting skill may govern the firing of a weapon, but whether the rounds fired hit or not is dependent on other factors, such as any cover that the target has, the posture of the target, its elevation, the character's Dexterity and Strength (and even Intelligence, in the case of sniping shots and certain sci-fi weapons) and critical conditions that the character or the target has.
That there are so many factors would seem to suggest that the game has a lot of sophistication in its mechanics. This is undeniable, but ultimately, every action that a character performs that may bring harm to enemies or good (or harm) unto allies is subjected to digital dice rolls, with the factors that have been mentioned acting as modifiers to the roll.
In other words, they are not reliable insurance against bad luck. Again, shooting weapons is the best example to illustrate how the fickleness of digital dice may damage the player's experience in Silent Storm.
A character can achieve a 100% probability in hitting a target, but that is pretty much the only certainty that the game gives if the player is using well-developed characters. Even if the shot hits, the game makes dice rolls on the damage that would be done, and depending on characteristics of the target, the hit may do a lot of damage (e.g. critical hits) or no significant damage at all.
There are other actions that are affected by the fickleness of the dice, and one of the worst-affected of these is the act of defusing mines. Not only is there no percentage of success shown at all for a bomb-defusing action, the only way the player will know whether the action is successful or not is if the bomb is safely removed or blows up in the character's face; there is no outcome in between.
Of course, one can say that as a turn-based game, it should be understandable that Silent Storm has to resort to probability-based mechanics for (somewhat) balanced gameplay. However, the disappointment here is that Silent Storm does little to alleviate the malaise that is typically associated with probability-based mechanics, which is the fickleness of the digital dice used.
There may be some respite to be had from the mechanic of character classes. Every character in the player's team, including the player character, has an adopted profession which will determine which ability tree that he/she obtains, and thus give each character class the uniqueness that it needs to be considered different from the others. (Otherwise, every character has the same sets of attributes and skills, which can be developed freely in any which way - more on this later.)
In another game design that is an apparent attempt at implementing RPG elements into Silent Storm, every character can gain combat experience from completing mission objectives and neutralizing enemies. This experience typically goes into a meter with a threshold, which when breached lets the character gain a level and an ability point to go together with it. This ability point can be spent in one of the nodes in the character's ability tree chart.
While such designs are tried and proven, they are of course not really remarkable at the time.
Anyway, these nodes represent bonuses that can be taken to make the character's actions more likely to be successful, and/or if successful, greater effects in the results. They may also grant other bonuses, such as reducing the amount of action points that characters expend when performing an action.
If there is an issue with the designs of the ability trees, it is that some of the nodes in the trees, especially those for the Engineer, give away plot elements involving sci-fi armoured suits.
Perhaps the biggest appeal and ironically the biggest problem with the RPG elements of Silent Storm is that they use the mechanic of experience-gaining that had been seen in games such as the Elder Scrolls series. Characters gain experience in certain skills and attributes (and not necessarily just one) as they perform actions associated with these statistics; this experience is independent of the one used for character levels. When experience thresholds for these statistics are reached, the characters gain levels in these.
This mechanic is somewhat believable, as emphasized by the female version of the main player character when she mentions that "experience is the best education" upon reaching a new level with any statistic.
However, this mechanic may not seem so believable once the player realizes which events cause the character to gain experience. By exploiting these events, some skills can be prematurely trained to fantastically high levels by spamming certain actions repeatedly. For example, the player can have all characters shooting repeatedly at a point on the ground to build up their Shooting skills.
Such exploits have been seen in other games that use a similar mechanic (namely the Elder Scrolls games). Doubtless, they are cheesy and comical to look at, and also happen to damage gameplay balance.
Nival Interactive may have included features that make it even easier to perform. One of these is that the stores at the main base of the player's faction can restock ammunition and certain other supplies indefinitely with the press of a button, allowing the player to stock up on the materials necessary for an intensive action-spamming session to build up some skills artificially.
There are some attempts to mitigate the consequences of these exploits though. Chief of these are that skills have maximum levels that are governed by the characters' levels, their primary attributes of Strength, Dexterity and Intelligence, and their classes.
Silent Storm makes use of the map of Europe and those of individual European countries to show the locations that missions will take place in. The main map is the Theatre map.
This map shows the continent of Europe, where the European theatre of World War II occurred. The player can move his/her team into any one country to reach mission-critical areas and initiate missions in these places, or return to the main base for resupply and triage.
In addition, the player can have his/her team camp anywhere in the map for that country. This places the player's team in a small map, with no characters other than the player's team members. The developers had intended the camping mechanic to be a way for the player to gain some respite such as healing injured characters in between missions and redistributing gear.
Yet, there is no incentive to do so, as it is actually more convenient to simply return to base to heal and rearm. There is no penalty for choosing to return to base instead of camping either, other than the risk of running into random encounters (more on this shortly).
This ultimately means that unscrupulous players will notice that the camping mechanic can be used to aid the exploit mentioned above. It is very easy for players to return to the main base, rearm, move out, camp outside to spam actions and repeat to their hearts' content.
As a side note, health that has been lost in battle due to wounds and that has been recovered with healing items will diminish over time as the player travel around in the country maps, but the ease of how the player's team can return to base to fully and permanently heal makes this minor mechanic rather forgettable.
Random encounters are represented with icons that appear on country maps as diamond-shaped tokens with the head of a helmeted soldier. Moving the player's team (also represented with an icon, albeit yellow) onto these icons places them into the same map with some enemy forces, and his/her team usually has to eliminate them before they can move on.
There are no end to these random encounters, because they appear and disappear without any pattern (as befitting random encounters). However, they are an inexhaustible source of combat experience (and some loot). The player can make use of these to power-up his/her team such that they become too formidable for the enemies that appear in story-centric maps, which can damage the game experience.
The mechanic of random encounters has minor but starkly apparent glitches too. One of these is that some random encounters place the player's team into the map together with teams of enemies and what appear to be civilians, but the game may sometimes tags the civilians as enemies as well; the player has no choice but to gun them down too before the area is considered safe enough to leave.
However, it has to be mentioned that there may be some value to be had from pursuing random encounters. While most random encounters will use maps from a limited selection, which can lead to repetition, sometimes the player may get some random encounters that amount to Easter eggs, such as a map that is a tribute to the original Fallout series.
As for the maps that story-centric missions take place in, they tend to be a lot bigger, have more details and more objects to interact with. Some can be rather impressive, such as a multi-storey mansion complete with an attic that conceal snipers, a basement with a lot of military supplies and a rocket launch silo in the backyard.
In these missions, the player has to complete objectives such as capturing a certain character or retrieving certain pieces of intel. The objectives often start out vague, as is understandable because the team goes into the mission with only a rough idea of what they should be looking out for. These objectives eventually flesh out as the player explores the map.
Unfortunately, the game does not give any prompt of any kind that the objectives have been updated, posing a risk that the player may accidentally sabotage his/her efforts if he/she does not check the objectives regularly, though doing so breaks the immersion. There is no option to display objective statements on-screen without having to open the tab for objectives either.
While missions tend to have multiple objectives, only one or two are considered critical and have to be completed; the rest can be overlooked without jeopardizing the progression of the campaign. This is especially the case for missions that require the retrieval of intelligence information; the player needs to only locate and retrieve one of them to complete the mission and unlock another mission-critical map.
Of course, considering that completing as many objectives as possible unlocks maps that can be played in any order and also other rewards, it should be in the player's interest to complete as many objectives as possible. However, this is not always possible, due to design oversights in mission and map designs.
Examples of such oversights include intelligence items that are somehow locked within map objects like desks and tables. This should be understandable, except that characters are not able to interact with desks and tables in any meaningful manner. Instead, the player has to destroy them to release said intel, which can seem rather cheesy.
Other flaws include scripts that trigger too early. For example, mission-critical enemy NPCs that had been scripted to run away when their accompanying forces have been reduced to only a few men may actually choose to run earlier, making it hard to get to them.
Certain missions occur in two maps, both linked to each other through an object that has scripts to trigger the switching of maps; the player can switch maps as long as the mission has not been completed (or failed utterly). Unfortunately, the scripts to place the player's party into one map from the other are not reliable: they may appear to work properly the first time around, but if the player attempts to trigger a map switch again after having triggered it once already, the game may place team members in areas outside the borders of the map, or fail to introduce their models entirely.
Even the designs of the main base highlight the flaws in the programming behind maps. In the main base, only the main player character may talk to the staff there to access features like armament stores, lists of recruits and triage, but that the player's entire team go into the small rooms of these staffers means that the player has to have his/her main player character move around his/her own comrades to get to the staffers. This is of course a minor complaint, but Nival Interactive could have noticed that the other team-mates do practically nothing but take up space when they are in the main base.
The interesting traits about the game engine may also cause problems to the completion of missions; there will be more on this matter later.
The game's World War II setting helps Nival Interactive design the aesthetics of the items in the game, but Nival Interactive appears to have either deliberately or conveniently left out the fact that all of them can be lumped under a few categories as defined by their functions. The number of these categories does not reflect the variety in the aesthetics of the items. Some items also lack the description of their functions, and the manual does not contain such information either.
The best examples of items to illustrate this complaint are the aforementioned Engineering- and Medicine-related items.
There are many of such items whose names and appearance appear to suggest that they do different things. For example, there are the Mine Probes, Hanks of Wires and Wire-Cutters. While a player would be able to guess what the first does, only a player who has some trivial knowledge of bomb-defusing would know what the latter does. The third is of course meant for the cutting of wires, though whether these are the wires for bombs or the wires for chain-link and barb-wire fences (which are in the game) is not certain. That said, all of them do one thing - defuse mines and traps.
A similar complaint can also be said about the game's weapons. Many weapons share the same roles, with variations in their statistics and permutation of firing modes (all of which are not unique to any one particular weapon), and some are in fact straight upgrades of other weapons, which happen to use the same ammunition. Of course, this is completely understandable with respect to the setting of World War II, when a lot of variants of the same weapon archetype were engineered.
Anyway, the selection of weapons that can be equipped can be mostly lumped under the following categories: pistols, submachineguns, bolt-action rifles, heavy machineguns, grenades and missile launchers.
There are some weapons that are out of the norm, such as throwing knives, which can usually be retrieved after being thrown, regardless of whether they hit the target or not. (That said, they simply do not embed themselves in the targeted enemy if they do hit; instead, they bounce off after applying damage, which can damage the player's sense of belief. They can also be spammed to farm levels in the Throwing skill.)
There are also three different kinds of grenades: light and medium ones, which can be thrown rather far reliably, and the outrageously heavy and powerful ones that are very risky for anyone but a character with high strength to use, but very rewarding and very utilitarian if they do explode at where they are intended (there will be more explanation on the utilitarian bit later).
There is also a sci-fi gun that won't be elaborated much here because that would be inviting spoilers. It should suffice to say that it is capable of penetrating through cover of any kind to hit a concealed target, which can be a great source of glee.
(However, it has to be mentioned here that this weapon appears to have been introduced mainly as a counter against the aforementioned armoured suits. There are other weapons that can penetrate cover - just not as thoroughly as this sci-fi gun.)
Despite that most weapons can be lumped under a few categories, most of them appear to do what they do satisfactorily. Yet, there are complaints to be had.
Certain later-game pistols such as the Webley Scott revolver and Colt 1911 handgun can do a lot of damage, yet they cost the same amount of Action Points to use as earlier pistols; such designs make them straight upgrades, rendering earlier pistols useless and obsolete.
Submachineguns and missile launchers are very inaccurate weapons that are difficult to use without very high Shooting skills. This is especially the case for missile launchers, which even with very, very high Shooting skills, only have percentages of hitting that are higher than 50% at very uncomfortably close ranges. This makes them almost useless against anything other than environmental objects (though the player will notice that he/she would use them mainly against the environment; there will be more on this shortly).
Rifles can be rather overpowered. They tend to have versatile firing modes, long range and have rounds that penetrate at least one layer of cover. This makes the defeat of enemies by spotting them with a hidden Scout character and having other characters who are armed with rifles shoot them through cover rather easy to perform.
It should also be noted here that other than the two actively equipped weapons, characters do not appear to be able to equip other gear, though whatever that they have in their inventory slots do appear on their person, which is a neat graphical design (though the player would likely open the inventory screen to check what they have left anyway).
It has been alluded to several times before in this review that the environment can be damaged, altered or even circumvented in various manners. This is possible because Silent Storm's proprietary game engine allows for the creation of highly destructible environments.
Any object in a map that is not adjacent to its boundaries can be damaged or blown apart with certain gunfire. Such an object tends to have several different variants to its model, such as a tree having several forms that shows its branches and leaves being torn and blown away as it takes gunfire of any kind, eventually leaving behind a stump.
Walls can also be damaged to bring whatever they are supporting crashing down, or to make convenient holes that the player's team can move through, circumventing choke-holes that would have been the location for enemy ambushes. Also, locked doors and containers (e.g. lockers, crates and chests) may be a hassle to pick open, but if the situation calls for expediency and not subtlety, the player can shoot or blast them open.
Certain objects like doors and containers can also be booby-trapped to make them explode upon being destroyed or interacted with, though setting booby-traps is probably more useful for the purpose of training a character in the Engineering skill, because it can be quite a hassle to lure enemies over to interact with these when it is easier to just bait them into a crossfire zone.
Such malleable environments open up a lot of entertaining strategic/tactical options and give this game the uniqueness it needs to make it stand apart from other squad-based strategy games.
However, it is not without problems.
One of them concerns the fact that this game engine, simply called the Silent Storm engine, is nascent. While the game engine appears to be quite stable if the player approaches missions like a covert operations team would, i.e. destroying environmental objects whenever it is expedient and/or efficient to do so, it does not accommodate for particularly violent approaches that involve the use of a lot of burst-fire and explosive weapons.
Such weapons create a lot of decals on environmental objects and character models, namely pock-holes from bullets and blast marks from explosions. The decals stay in the map and add to the memory overhead, causing the game to slow down whenever the player goes over heavily affected places in the map. They are also added as information into a saved game, increasing its size on the disk.
The player may also unwittingly destroy environmental objects that his/her team needs to use to get from one place of the map to another, namely ladders and stairs. Of course, there are still work-arounds for this, though these typically require a lot more alteration of the environment, e.g. blowing holes in walls, ceilings and floors just so characters can climb through them.
The game is purely single-player, meaning that the player will be mainly facing the AI as opponents (and as allies/neutral parties).
The AI is quite fairly decent; it is more than guaranteed to punish a careless player that blunders into rooms or other places that had not been scouted or examined for any possible ambushes. However, the AI is quite helpless against any careful and shrewd player, especially one that notices that some of their behavioral patterns can be exploited for very easy wins.
As an illustrative example, there is the AI's tendency to check out disturbances. When obvious disturbances like explosions and gunfire occur within earshot of enemy characters controlled by the AI, the AI will detach some of them and send them over to investigate.
They do perform the necessary precautions, like going into sneak mode and crouch-creeping to reduce their profile while they approach the location of the disturbance, but the player will notice that he/she can have team members with high enough Spot skills to detect even sneaking enemies. The player can then set up ambushes of his/her own and funnel them into killing zones.
Of course, the AI has been designed such that it will retain certain characters under its control to stay behind to ambush any of the player's own characters, but these are preordained and are far from being randomly selected. This is apparent in random encounters, where the AI often lacks hard-coded scripts that force it to retain some characters behind to guard strategic approaches.
That is not to say that the game is easy of course. The AI is very good at making use of nearby cover, and often has characters making of postures and the impressive strafing feature (more on this later).
The player can of course increase the difficulty setting, which does the usual tropes that are the imposition of additional, artificial difficulty. In the case of Silent Storm which has probability-based mechanics, this means that the enemy AI gets better rolls while the player gets lousier ones. There are also other handicaps, like removing visual indicators of the last known locations of enemies that had been detected.
Otherwise, there do not seem to be any substantial difficulty-increasing options that would make the game more rewarding to play.
There are also deficiencies with the AI of neutral characters, especially those of civilians.
Most civilian characters will stay put where they are, but those that do move around cause problems. Not only do they lengthen the game by taking up time to perform any actions that they want to perform, they also tend to get in the way, such as standing or crouching in narrow corridors and stairways, or even hanging off a ladder.
More often than not, the player will need to have them killed so that they can be moved out of the way; thankfully, models of corpses are not considered as environmental obstacles (though they still have hitboxes that may lead to problems that will be mentioned later). Unfortunately, there are missions that require the player to prevent civilian casualties (which lead to outright game-overs if they occur), though these are thankfully rare.
For a game of its time, Silent Storm is a very good-looking game. As mentioned earlier, some maps can be impressive, and even the relatively more mundane ones still look good, with plenty of environmental objects and textures like trees, roads and guard posts, among other things. In terms of map details, Silent Storm will not disappoint.
Shadows, lighting and particle effects like those for explosions, blood sprays and bullet impacts, are also pretty good for a game of its time. Silent Storm also makes use of the then-latest DirectX graphics to shade models with shadows and generate the muzzle flash of weapons.
However, it has to be noted here that later machines and software configurations are incompatible with the code that creates the graphical pizzazz that this game can achieve.
Animations of environmental objects are sparse, and even these are very stiff and tend to have clipping problems. In contrast, the animations for character models are amazing.
There appears to be a lot of motion capture that has been done to design the animations of characters with. Every action that they perform that requires bodily motion is very believable, with climbing motions being particularly impressive. These animations are not just for show either; they have gameplay ramifications.
As an illustrative example, animations can be stopped midway and undone if the player deems it necessary or convenient to do so. Doing so of course makes the game look wonky, such as having a character that had been climbing something reset his/her animations or a running character stop in mid-run, but this certainly helps the player reconsider moves that would have been a blunder if they cannot be stopped halfway.
Perhaps the most impressive animation for characters is that of strafing. The player (and the AI) can toggle the strafing feature for any character, which makes him/her move about while still looking at the direction that he/she was looking at before he/she started moving. Such an action is very convenient and quite believable to look at.
Characters in Silent Storm also have decent lip-synching, though this is quite unremarkable for a game of its time.
If there is a complaint with the animations, it can be found in those for dialogue scenes. In these scenes, the polygons of the heads and shoulders of the conversing characters are shown on opposing sides of the screen. However, only their lips are animated, making the conversation feel very wooden. Glitches may even cause these polygons to be situated on the same side of the screen, making the conversation feel awkward as well.
There are a lot of characters in the game, but the variety in their aesthetic designs is not as numerous.
While the player's team may be composed of characters of apparently different ethnicity and genders, those of the enemies' are not. While generic enemies of the same type do have some different models, these models recur frequently with little to no variation in their appearance, especially that of their faces.
Technical performance may be affected if there are too many character models in an area, dead or alive. This becomes even more likely if the models have a lot of wound decals. That character models turn into ragdolls with hitboxes upon their death may also cause problems if their models cannot settle; this is especially problematic if corpses pile up, as they tend to do if the player funnels enemies into killing zones (as mentioned earlier).
(This reviewer has even experienced crashes that always occur if there are too many ragdoll corpses piled into a small hill.)
Other complaints about the graphics that should be mentioned include weather effects. While these do look quite believable, e.g. raindrops or snowflakes trailing down from the skybox whenever a rain- or snow-storm comes, they do occur rather suddenly and also stop just as suddenly, giving the impression that they are not integrated well into the graphics-coding of the game.
Silent Storm attempts to instill some personality into the characters in the game by giving them voice-overs. This can be seen in the roster of characters that the player can recruit into his/her team, including the main player character himself/herself.
There may be some cheesiness to be had with the non-English speaking characters, as their accents can sound rather funny, such as Abala, an Indian medic on the Allies side, who has a lot of grammatical guffaws. Some of the expressions used, such as the "our goose is cooked" statement that generic German soldiers tend to make, can be quite unfamiliar or even seem silly to some players.
The most prominent sound effects of the game are typically gunfire, a lot of which appear to be recreated with quite some faith towards how the weapons of World War II sounded, though there are liberties taken, such as re-using the same gunfire noises for multiple weapons. Then, there are of course the more sci-fi of weapons and military hardware, though these still do sound satisfactory sci-fi.
Much of the environments in Silent Storm are quite still, though there are ambient noises like turbines whirring and engines humming.
It is when these environments are damaged by the rigors of combat that they emit more noises. Crumbling structures do so in a satisfactory cacophony of falling and cracking masonry (though in terms of gameplay, they simply disappear from the map in a puff of dust and smoke without leaving behind much debris), while there are several different noises to go with the impacts of bullets of different calibers.
Of course, there are also the sounds of flesh being rent apart with lethal munitions. (There happens to be gore in this game, which can be seen when characters are blown apart into unrecognizable bits by explosives.)
The soundtracks in the game are composed with the usual instruments that are associated with war-time music, e.g. bugles, drums, fifes and woodwind instruments. They are thematically appropriate and are also tuned to play during changes in mission situation, such as switching over to more ominous songs when the player's team has spotted/has been spotted by enemies and have to engage in battle.
In conclusion, Silent Storm could have been an excellent turn-based strategy game with very good RPG mechanics and a rather impressive game engine which showed that destructible environments can gel well with squad-based gameplay, but a myriad of flaws that damage the game's experience and technical issues with its game engine prevent this from being so.