Reviewed by: Giant
Developer: Nival
Publisher: JoWooD

There’s been a flurry of games issued from the Russian development studio Nival Interactive recently with a strong emphasis on both accuracy and strategy. This is my second review of a Nival game, the first being Blitzkrieg, and I must admit I’m starting to like their style.

Silent Storm is a team based, tactical game set during the events of World War II. You can play as the Allies or the Axis side, leading a mixed team of various specialist troops through either one off scenarios or through the full campaigns.

As you would expect from them there has been a large amount of attention to detail applied to the weapons and equipment included within the game, not to mention to the combat model. You can choose to take different kinds of shots from snap shots, to ones where you spend several action points on one shot to guarantee success. You can also aim at various body parts, ranging from the standard headshot, the body, and both arms and both legs individually.

As you play though the game your soldiers gain experience which grants them abilities which improve their performance, from being able to shoot as well at night, to causing more critical hits with shots. As you progress through the campaign you gain more and better weapons for your arsenal, giving you more choice and making you more deadly. One nice feature is that as a character uses a weapon he gains familiarity with it that enables them to perform better.

You are able to choose a character from any of the 6 classes on offer: Sniper, Scout, Soldier, Grenadier, Engineer or Medic. Your character can be customised or you can choose any of the 6 pre-generated characters. You can then choose up to another 5 pre-generated characters at a time to accompany you on missions. The meat of the campaign is the storyline missions which, although linear in nature, appear more or less at random on the local map for each stage of the game. Frequent random missions appear on the local map as well and make up the majority of the missions you will play giving the opportunity to gain experience for your characters.

Whilst playing a mission the action at first starts out point and click, with no turns to interrupt the movement, until an enemy is located. This enables the player to get the opening stages of the missions over and done with quickly. Once an enemy is located the game drops into turn-based mode with each character having a given number of 'Action Points' to accomplish actions with each turn.

The turn-based mode works well as it allows the player to actually be strategic rather than having to rely on raw click speed to win. The turn-based nature does bring me to my biggest gripe about the game though, no matter how much I love turn-based games the one thing I hate about them is waiting for the enemy AI to finish its turn. In Silent storm this is exacerbated by the fact that the AI can take up to 2-3 minutes to finish its turn. This does tend to turn Silent Storm into a game that you can’t have a quick game of, with a single map often taking an hour or more to complete.

The campaigns present the main storyline from the opposite sides of the conflict, and although it starts out fairly conventional WWII fare, it quickly becomes almost Sci-Fi in nature. I won’t say any more on the story as I don’t want to spoil it for anyone, but if you’re expecting only a WWII squad level game just be aware that it doesn’t stay that way for the whole game.

Graphically the game is gorgeous, the levels are well designed and obviously labours of love. The detail in the environment and the animations all shout out quality and attention to detail. The models when shot react convincingly with some nice 'rag doll' style physics going on. One of the best things about the engine is the almost total destructibility of the scenery; need a door in that wall? Blow a hole! This really comes into it’s own when you gain access to the heavier weapons later on in the game.

The sound in the game is generally good, nothing too memorable but competent nonetheless. The music was fairly weak, but since I for one generally turn off the music in games and play my own not a huge factor.

The game interface is very intuitive, and all of the various options are well displayed. A nice touch which is very useful is that when you want to take a shot at an enemy on mouse-over you get an indicator of what the percentage likelihood of hitting the enemy is, this is helpful to prevent you wasting ammunition on shots that aren’t likely to hit. There are a couple of mildly annoying problems in the game but they're not game breakers - Slightly inconsistent requirements on single and double clicking to get your characters to move, and occasionally dodgy enemy AI being the main two.

So to sum up, Silent Storm is probably the best team-based tactical shooter out there at the moment. The graphics are excellent and with at least 30 hours of gameplay in the main campaign alone the value for money is good. Nondescript sound and music are slight complaints, but on the whole don’t detract excessively from the game.

Presentation	8
The interface is functional and relatively well presented, in game icons are good and the graphics are on the whole excellent.
Gameplay	7
The gameplay is on the whole good, let down a bit by the over-long AI turns and the resulting over-long minimum time for a session.
Value	8
Plenty of gameplay to be had from Silent Storm as with the 2 main campaigns and the various scenarios there’s at least 30 hours of play.
Benchmark	8
The best recent game in its genre. Let down slightly by the overlong turns.
Score	8
A good game and one which I would recommend purchasing if you like the genre. If you don’t, or are after a quick fix don’t buy this.