Silent Storm

[Skott]

The new JA3 game supposedly uses the SS game engine so I was wondering how good the SS game engine is. Anyone play the original game and/or its expansion back when it came out? Just curious if it was any good or not.

Thanks,
Skott

 

[DaveSimmons]

I was playing it early last year but didn't finish it -- my graphics card died, I built a new system, and got caught up in playing Oblivion.

My take:

The good
- 3D graphics look good, zoomable like Neverwinter Nights 1-2
- turn-based
- missions have a similar feel to JA2 sector battles
- squaddies do level up and you can pick the new skills to learn

The bad
- squaddies are bland and boring compared to JA2
- shooting through floors works too well, the game encourages you to abuse it
- your base automatically gets so much eqipment after the first few missions that looting was boring. Another rifle to match the 10 I have, yay.

A good deal at $10-15, though JA2 and Urban Chaos are both better except visually.

FYI, I think the original package had Starforce copy protection, I'm not sure about the Gold version. It ran fine for me but some people say Starforce is the debbil.

 

[PhatoseAlpha]

The engine itself is quite nice. The games that have used it have all had their fair share of gameplay issues. Silent Storm wasn't especially deep and had some very quirky behavior with off-duty members. Silent Storm and It's expansion, Sentienels, both included sci-fi aspects that really weren't fun at all. Hammer and Sickle was unforgiving and not very deep. The cyberpunk one (Nightwatch, I think?) was described as awfully generic.


Still, the engine itself is very impressive. They aren't joking when they say fully destructible - cheat an engineer is Sentinels up to crazy high skill levels, and a single dynamite stick can bring and entire fortress crumbling to the foundations. The physics are done well too - blow up the supports for a piece of floor, and the floor is going to come crumbling down.

It's got huge amounts of potential for a JA game or even a fallout type RPG. But the devil is in the details, and up till now, developers have been screwing up the details whenever they used the engine.

 

[Skott]

Glad to hear the game engine works well. From seeing the official JA3 trailer it'll be a good match up I think. I could see the nostalgic JA look of the game. It'll probably turn off those that are used to the enhanced graphics of CoD, MoH, Crysis, HL, DOOM3, and etc., though. Thats okay though. The JA series had its own niche and fanbase. anyway thanks for the feedback.