Night Watch Updated Hands-On - Story and a Final Look

The hit Russian movie Night Watch is soon going to be a game as well. CDV and developer Nival Interactive have a turn-based combat game based in the fantasy world of Night Watch that's due to arrive in stores next week, and we got our hands on a near-final version of the game to see how vampires and the supernatural translate to the PC.

If you've seen Night Watch, then you're already aware of the complex universe that it's set in. But even if you haven't seen the movie, the game will try to bring you up to speed quickly. In Night Watch there exist supernatural "others" who live among humanity. Centuries ago, they forged a truce, and to enforce the treaty, the forces of good patrol the night in the form of a Night Watch, while the forces of darkness patrol the day in the form of a Day Watch. You'll play as a fledgling member of the Night Watch as mysterious events that threaten the treaty begin to unfold. The game's story doesn't seem to be an exact retelling of the movie. Instead, it seems to offer a different perspective on the events.

The game begins with you playing the character of Stas, a young man whose mother is dying of cancer. In order to afford the expensive medical treatment to save her, he agrees to carry out an assassination of a young woman. However, when he hesitates, he's drawn into the shadowy conflict and discovers that he's really a good other, and that the dark others were trying to get him to unknowingly break the truce by having him commit an evil act. After that, he's recruited by the Night Watch to help figure out strange events that portend an end to the truce.

In one of the first missions, you'll be tasked with investigating an incident on a Moscow subway, and when you reach the subway station, you'll be challenged by a belligerent police captain who is also a vampire. When we played an earlier version of the game, we chose a nonviolent solution to this situation by leaping down to the subway tracks and circling around the police. However, this time around we confronted the vampire police captain and bluffed our way past the guards. (We also tried to attack him, but our early level character was so ineffective that he basically laughed it off.) Still, it appears that there will be multiple solutions to the puzzles that will be geared toward your kind of play style.

The heart of the game is combat, especially since Night Watch is built on the engine used to power Silent Storm, one of the better turn-based tactical combat games of recent years. However, you won't get to use guns or rifles or any sort of traditional weapons in this game. In the supernatural world of Night Watch, everyday items can be enchanted to have powerful properties. A flashlight can emit a laserlike beam, or eating an enchanted apple can heal a character. There are also powerful magical spells that you can cast, or you may have shape-changing abilities at your disposal. Early on, you'll have to choose a class for your character, which will affect your playing style. Shape-shifters are the frontline fighters, sorcerers are more of a support class that creates magical weapons and equipment, while mages are the magic users. Whatever class you choose, you needn't worry about missing out on the other class abilities, since you'll quickly form a party and different characters will often bring a variety of abilities to the table. Of course, as your characters level up, they learn new skills and abilities. You'll have the option of selecting which skills to learn, or you can follow the game's recommendations.

Since it's a turn-based game, combat unfolds in a simple manner, though it has plenty of depth. During your move, each of your characters move, attack, or cast a spell, depending if they have enough action points to perform the task, or mana points to power the spell. When you've expended all your action points for the turn, hit the turn button and the other side then gets to make its moves, and the process is repeated over again. Combat takes place on two levels in Night Watch, as there's also the gloom or dusk, a shadowy dimension that others can travel to, rendering them invisible to those in the normal, everyday realm. Staying in the dusk drains your character's mana though, so you can't stay in it forever. But it does offer some advantages, such as being able to move faster than you can in the regular realm.

From a visual perspective, the game hasn't changed too much since we last saw it. The Silent Storm engine is a few years old now and it shows, so Night Watch won't win any awards for graphics, though at least it should run well on older systems. It's apparent that the main draw to the game is its tie-in to the Night Watch movie, which was a big hit in Russia and other nations. By expanding on the story, Night Watch aims to deliver a deeper look into the setting of the movie. The game is scheduled to ship next week.