Silent Storm TB Goodness

EvoG · Post by **EvoG** » Tue Aug 19, 2003 11:33 pm

Alright, I've been playing the hell out of this demo, and I conclude that this is definitely something a lot of you will want to check out :

Game Info :

http://www.nival.com/eng/s2_info.html

Demo :

http://www.3dgamers.com/dl/games/silent ... s.exe.html

Now first thing to note...ITS FULL TURN BASE PLAY. You are in realtime as you explore out of combat, but once in combat, its completely turn based. No strange pause options. No simultaneous crap. Simply all turn based ( though, you take turns moving your whole team all at once, so you can move one guy a bit, move another, and go back to the first guy an move him again....so call it team turn vs. single character turn ).

Second thing is that it's all in Russian. We're all fairly savvy that clicking on the cyrillic names will gleen you the information you need to play, so it raises the learning curve a tad, but its not impossible to decipher. Also the game is played with iconography vs. words, so you only need to click each to get a better idea of what they do, but the pictures say alot.

There are 2 neat levels ( especially the nighttime, bombed city level with rain ), and one tut ( which is playable as you can pick out what they're saying such as when they denote a key with () and a capitalized version of the letter in question. )

Great weapon modeling ( not the graphics, the gameplay; High powered weapons over penetrate, sometimes several layers ) and the world is fully destroyable.

Oh, and its not an RpG, but there is character development...so its more akin to JA, but nonetheless, a very fucking cool game.

Cheers

axelgreese · Post by **axelgreese** » Tue Aug 19, 2003 11:37 pm

I'm still waiting for the english version of the demo.

In Russia, demo plays YOU!

EvoG · Post by **EvoG** » Tue Aug 19, 2003 11:58 pm

Hehe, well, from what I was gathering at their forum, Jowood is droppping the ball left and right regarding US localization, and that the demo might now be delayed, if at all. Apparently it was a big arm twist just to get Gothic 2 here, so Jowood isn't sounding too reliable. EIther way, this demo is still playable, though I'd love the english version myself so I can read the explanations for everything.

Ernesto · Post by **Ernesto** » Wed Aug 20, 2003 4:14 am

My mother knows Russian, perhaps I'll get her to translate.

Turn Based you say? Well that deserves a download, none of the crap Baldur's Gate stuff.

EvoG · Post by **EvoG** » Wed Aug 20, 2003 5:05 am

Thats the big suprise...one would assume from seeing it that it was realtime...so yeah, the turn base-edness of it is quite refreshing.

EvoG · Post by **EvoG** » Fri Aug 22, 2003 4:06 am

English Demo...yay...this will add quite a bit to my initial opinion on the Russian demo, as I really enjoyed that sans the inability to read anything, so I surely missed some nuances.

http://www.worthplaying.com/article.php?sid=12420

Doyle · Post by **Doyle** » Fri Aug 22, 2003 6:31 am

I only completed the tutorial, but I'm impressed so far. The interface is a little clunky, but easy to use and understand. The pathing has some weird issues, but it's nothing too major. I like the combat, I'd like to see something like this in FO3. Good stuff.

EvoG · Post by **EvoG** » Fri Aug 22, 2003 8:36 am

What do you mean specifically about the interface? I found it perfectly fine since its localized. I'd like to know what you see as being faulty ( sincere request ). Same with pathfinding...what did you see as 'weird'?

One pleasant surprise for me over the russian demo is that now I know what the video settings are, and apparently they were all set to medium throughout the length of my playtime with that demo, so in this one, I cranked everything all the way up to Very High, and I'll be damned if it doesn't look a LOT cooler...especially the nighttime level with the burning car...sweet.

Cheers

axelgreese · Post by **axelgreese** » Fri Aug 22, 2003 6:32 pm

The camera control is shit EvoG

But the interface is alot smoother than JA2's IMO, very good stuff.

Doyle · Post by **Doyle** » Fri Aug 22, 2003 7:25 pm

Camera control is the big one regarding interface. Having to go to a sub menu to change something as simple as crouching struck me as a little clumsy, but it works well enough and it doesn't really affect the game too much. (Yes, I realize that I can do this via hotkeys.) Pathing is harder to define. It just seems like sometimes when I clicked somewhere, the chosen route was not quite as short as it could have been. In combat, I found I usually had to try two or three times to get my character to move the way I wanted. That's really as specific as I can get about that, though.