Excerpt from the Diary of Silent Storm

[toblix]

July 6th, 22:00

It seems the player is enjoying me, and the challenges that I present. It is good to be loved.

July 7th, 16:50

Today I felt like suddenly making the game impossible without any warning. That's because crazy Russians made me and I am a monster of Communist Piece of Shit.

July 7th, 17:00

Noo, I'm being uninstalled! Why, Mother Russia? WHY?!

July 7th, 17:05

So... cold...

[lailoken]

So it's too hard then?

And you are generally resentfull towards communism?

Did it eat your lunch?

[Mailman]

I think the fact that enemies can sit in an empty hallway directly under a light, without your soldiers noticing them even if you run into them, indeed makes this game too hard.

[toblix]

Well, that's just the concept of stealth/hiding, which I can accept as a balancing game mechanic. The fact that the game leads the player to a map with indestructable killing machines that you apparently have to get some weapons from some other place to kill, without telling me about it, is unacceptable.

[MrChlorophyll]

I demand to have reviews in the style witnessed here!

[Mailman]

Well, that's just the concept of stealth/hiding, which I can accept as a balancing game mechanic. The fact that the game leads the player to a map with indestructable killing machines that you apparently have to get some weapons from some other place to kill, without telling me about it, is unacceptable.

Stealth and hiding is all good, but not in an empty hallway. Directly under a light. God, no.

Sure, there were other annoying bits in the game too, but that scenario was the one that made me uninstall.

[toblix]

Well, I agree that it's pretty lame, and that it's just a way of balancing out the bad AI that can't hide properly and has to become invisible not to be seen, but if you measure badness in height, and put that next to the one where the game is suddenly impossible because you didn't visit Gamefags to read about the secret super lasar gunz hidden in some hard-to-see backwater pile of mud first, it would become invisible if the view adjusted to fit all the badness, and the view itself wasn't humongously big.

[Steve]

What? Silent Storm was awesome. I never ran into this crazy impossible stuff.

Panzerkleins kick ass. You guys are crazy.

[toblix]

The problem is that the panzerkleins kicked my ass. Without any warning. If the game'd said "In order to blahblahblah go here, BUT BEWARE OF THE RUMORED IRON BEASTS! TO ENSURE VICTORY MAYBE YOU SHOULD HEAD BY THE OLD LASAR CANON FAGTORY AND GET LASAR CANNONS!" it'd be okay, but it was just the next level in the normal progression of the game, and suddenly I don't stand a chance. I agree that the game rocks in a lot of ways, but in the way of suddenly getting impossible, it doesn't at all rock.

[Steve]

What I'm saying is, it never got impossible for me. The game doesn't progress completely linearly. By the time I came upon a PK I could take them down with a little effort. Then I got my own and it was all good.

So I mean sorry you hit a snag, I don't think that's the standard experience.

[toblix]

Yes it is! Okay, maybe you're right, and maybe I'm wrong. Nothing matters anyway, now that this thread has been moved to the reviews board, which nobody ever visits and where good threads like this one goes to die.

[twmac]

"Currently: Interstate '76"

Man I loved that game, if only to see afros, do you know if it is available in England. Me and a mate used to play that online, for some reason the depth in the customisation has never really been seen again...

[Steve]

I'm not sure about the UK connection re: I76. But I am playing it for a Thumb assignment, so I'll look into that for the final piece.

[toblix]

Soo anyway, I gave this game another shot, to see if the sudden wall of impossibleness was just a mistake, and guess what:

(spoiler)

On (one of) the final level(s), you're supposed to kill a guy that's inside a base, and the moment you do, somebody says "OMFG we must fux0r teh base with explosion!" and after three turns you have to leave the level or it's game over, and there's no God damn information about this. It's like the designers want the player to have to die in a lot of different ways to find a way to get around the game mechanics, which is a terrible design philosophy.

[Taylor]

Sorry to revive dying an old thread, but I LOVE Silent Storm.

The TB game mechanic was something I hadn't really played in a game before, and coupled up with the destructible terrain gave me some of my favorite gaming moments when my traps and ambushes carried out just as I had planned, or other times when things went horribly horribly wrong.

The game definatly had flaws, but most of those flaws came from things outside the gameplay mechanics, like music, dialogue, story, and soforth. The stealth ability was always argued over in the Nival forums I posted in before the game was released in Russia or the US, but it has apparently been reworked for the games sequel (not Sentinals, but H&S), which is already out in Russia.

I didn't think the game got impossible. Although it definatly got very difficult, I thought it was extremely fun trying different ways to go about the objectives. I remember that mission where the base explodes in 3 turns, and thought it was a lot of fun blowing an escape route to make it within the allotted time, or trying different ways to attack the base.

What I didn't like about the game was the repition of the maps. Regardless of the territory, many of the maps had the same layouts and buildings, which got very old. What brought me to Silent Storm first was the demo, which had two incredible maps- one was a dark, wrecked city in Germany, and the other was an assault on a train bridge, with the locomotive stalled on the tracks. It was a lot of fun.