Hammer & Sickle Hands-On - Early Impressions

The much underappreciated Silent Storm had deep strategy and absolutely crazy physics to offer when it crept onto store shelves last year. After so many years of strategy games in which players carefully guided soldiers into hostile territory to infiltrate enemy bases, Silent Storm offered the highly refreshing alternative of letting you blow up entire buildings and bring them crashing down on the enemy. And now publisher CDV and developer Nival Interactive, the creator of Silent Storm, are working on Hammer & Sickle, something of a successor to that game. However, while Silent Storm took place in World War II, Hammer & Sickle will take place in the wake of that conflict at the beginning of the Cold War.

Rather than play as a squad of Allied operatives like you did in Silent Storm, in Hammer & Sickle you'll play as a Soviet operative who fought in the war, and you catch wind of a new plot hatching within the borders of a defeated Germany. Unfortunately, your investigation quickly goes south, and even though you're an elite Russian operative, you find yourself unarmed, penniless, and most importantly, without any kind of identification papers in a heavily patrolled region. Once there, you'll find that the plot, which is being executed by an unknown party, is actually a very high-stakes bid to pit the United States against the Soviet Union in a nuclear war. And, of course, it's up to you, and whichever teammates you can recruit from your original net of spies, to prevent this potential conflict.

You'll begin the game by choosing to play as one of six different character classes--each of which has different specialties in battle. The grenadier specializes in heavy weapons and explosives, for instance, but isn't as fast as the nimble scout, whose specialty is close combat. Even though your character will enter the Cold War with a specialized set of skills, you'll later end up recruiting a party of specialists that have abilities that complement yours. Interestingly, each character you recruit will not only have different skills, but will also have individual personalities that will make him or her more or less likely to work with you and your squad. This idea is similar to the cult-classic strategy game Jagged Alliance, in which your squadmates didn't always see eye to eye (and let you know about it).

And like in a role-playing game, you'll even encounter characters that will offer branching dialog trees when spoken to, along with cinematic sequences with full audio speech between missions. Even simple conversations, along with how you resolve your missions, will have far-reaching effects on gameplay, both in the areas you have visited and in others you haven't. For instance, if you happen to dispose of local law enforcement in one area, you may find that all other areas are swarming with cops later on. Unfortunately, since you'll play as a top-secret operative, even the Soviet government has disavowed any knowledge of your existence, so outside of your network of spies, not even your fellow soldiers from the motherland can be trusted. You can improve your chances of getting past the guards by disguising yourself in uniforms. You can also choose to try using stealth by hiding, or you can go in guns blazing. The game will be powered by the engine behind Silent Storm, a game in which you could basically blow up anything. But Hammer & Sickle will be less about random destruction and more about stealth and tactical decisions. But for good measure, there will be some 90 weapons total in the game, most of which will be modeled after historical weapons, plus some fictitious experimental hardware. (However, it sounds like Nival may have decided against including panzerkleins, the overpowering mech suits that appeared in Silent Storm.)

The game will actually model day-and-night cycles that will be more conducive to certain missions. Stealth missions might be easier at night, while key intelligence contacts may only be on hand to talk to during the day. While the missions will be highly open-ended (you'll just be given an objective, like freeing a prisoner), you'll have the option of completing them in several different ways--and your methods may affect later missions as well. Your performance by the end of each mission will be carried over to the next (no "clean slates" as you complete one mission and head into the next).

The game's interface seems similar to Silent Storm in several ways. Like in that game, and like in tactical games like Jagged Alliance and Fallout, you'll be able to explore the world and talk to characters in real time, while the game switches to a turn-based mode whenever a battle begins (started by you or by your enemies who spot you). Your character can still run (which is the fastest, but noisiest, way to move on foot), walk, kneel, and crawl on his belly, and when you enter combat, your actions are still limited by action points, which you use up by moving, changing your stance, or firing your weapons. Since stealth will be much more important in the game, Hammer & Sickle uses the same icon stealth system seen in Silent Storm. For example, an icon displays nearby enemy soldiers in threat range first as an ear icon (meaning that you can hear them but not see them) and then as a faint red 3D model that indicates what direction the enemy is. We found even the early missions to be challenging, since they required us to carefully creep around clusters of enemy guards who were each facing in different directions.

Combat in Hammer & Sickle seems at least as tactical and as challenging as that of Silent Storm, if not more so, since many of the game's missions will focus on infiltration and recon rather than assault and demolitions. We tried a few different missions in which we were vastly outnumbered. In cases like these, it becomes crucial to decide exactly when and where to open fire, because once shots are fired within earshot, the guards come running, and any disguises you might be wearing become useless. Like with Silent Storm and the games that inspired it, you'll be dealing with different ranges and percentage chances when using your various weapons, depending on the weapon properties (obviously the straight-shooting M1 Garand rifle has longer range than the MP40 submachine gun, though the rifle lacks a damaging burst-fire mode), your character's skills, how far you are from your target, and how much cover your enemies have. Like in the previous game, your characters' inventory will actually weigh them down and cause them to move more slowly (and have fewer action points in battle). So as we found in later missions in the game, we often had to choose between picking up new weapons and traveling light.

While we weren't able to see a great deal of Hammer & Sickle, what we did see appeared to be very promising, indeed. The game has apparently already been completed in Nival's homeland of Russia, so the North American version is currently being localized. The game already looks excellent, and without the distraction of panzerkleins, it should offer a much more tense and realistically paced challenge befitting the Cold War era. Hammer & Sickle is scheduled for release later this year.