Silent Storm: Sentinels Review

Once you have enough money, you can hire assistants to help you with the increasingly difficult missions. You will need no assistants in the first several missions as they are fairly simple (eliminate the snitch, deliver documents, find a soldier or doctor and make sure they reach the base safely), and you will sometimes even be assisted by a colleague, who should make things easier. One big difference in comparison to the original game is that it is now all about money - you have to pay for the weapons and team members, and the bosses have to pay you once you complete the mission. It's as simple as that. Now, how simple exactly... I guess that will depend on the level of difficulty you choose and on how fast you come to grips with the game. You will be driven to finish the game not only by the interesting and lengthy missions, but also by the fact that you can develop and improve your team by using the experience points they receive from completing the missions. You can improve their resilience, lock-picking, field of vision, etc. The team can also be improved by changing their clothes. All these RPG elements have been perfectly incorporated in the game.

Your mission is to steal some pancakes!

Look, Luigi, for the last time! I never touched your sister!

The combat is truly fabulous. The last game of this type I really loved was Jagged Alliance 2, but that one was a bit too hard, which made it more frustrating than enjoyable. Silent Storm: Sentinels doesn't have this downside. The missions are far from easy, instead they are really well balanced, and you simply will not get stuck in a mission so that you give up the whole game after trying and failing to complete a single mission a hundred times. You will have to devise good tactics as you face one serious AI motherfucker of an enemy, which will always go for the most efficient solutions of the problem (the problem being the fact that you and your teammates still breathe air). If you try to camp, you will soon be visited by Mr. Grenade. The enemy will skillfully surround you, hide behind covers and pop out just enough to shoot at you, etc. Overall, they will adapt their tactics to your play style and give you a very hard time. A huge problem in fights is the severe frame-rate drop when you face a larger number of enemies. Ok, the fights are turn-based, but this means that enemy moves last forever. And this happened on an Athlon XP 3000+ with 512MB RAM and a Radeon 9700 Pro... a bit disappointing. Fortunately, I prefer the stealthy approach, which helped a bit, as I never faced too many opponents at once. The turns start taking longer as soon as you have more than five or six enemies on screen, but if you play it smart, this will rarely ever happen.

"You'll never tango again."

Graphics-wise, this game is fantastic - it features beautiful, detailed textures, good colors and perfectly animated characters. The character animation uses rag doll physics, and they react differently depending on where and how you shoot them. Whatever you do, in most cases, they will fall in logical accordance to their way of death. I said in most cases, as I saw a couple of cases where character acted very weird, like doing a back-flip while dying or uncontrollably jerking into a lamp-post. But the system still works in most all cases.

The only thing I did not actually like were the cut-scenes; but to hell with the cut-scenes, this is not Final Fantasy. The surroundings are fully interactive - grenades will leave craters, bullets will leave bullet-holes and objects like barrels, doors, windows and crates will be blown to smithereens by nearby exploding canisters... really magnificent. The sounds are also top quality - all weapons sound perfectly authentic. What little music you do hear in the game is not as good as the effects, but also not far from it. The voice-overs are mediocre, and the dialogues are short and trite, but they serve the purpose (in spite of some glaring examples of Engrish).

Silent Storm and its expansion pack Silent Storm: Sentinels are definitely a game I could recommend to anyone, with the expansion brining a lot of novelties and improvements to the otherwise already excellent game. Bear in mind though that you will need the original game to play it.

Some of the novelties like the possibility to break weapons and fix them later add a few new (welcomed) twists to the game play. The missions are versatile and take quite a lot of time. Silent Storm: Sentinels is an excellent game that will occupy your brain for quite some time. Several hours of playing this game seemed like a couple of minutes, which is more than I can say for most of the games that I get to play. All my compliments go to Nival Interactive for this marvelous job, and I hope they continue to make games that are this fun and immersive.