Fun Factor: 10 of 10
Replay Value: 8 of 10
Sound Rating: 6 of 10
Difficulty Level: 9 of 10
Graphics Rating: 9 of 10
Attention to Detail: 10 of 10

As I try to describe this game, the first thing I think of is "The Sims". But now add tons of deadly weapons, strategy, and resourcefulness, and a World War 2 backdrop, and you have the basis of the missions of Silent Storm. When I first saw this game by a little known producer, and sat down with the reviewer copy they so graciously sent us, I was worried that I might not like it. But as Retro Studios showed us with Metroid Prime, and Silicon Knights did with Eternal Darkness, and store brand mayonnaise (sold at competitive prices) showed us, you do not have to be a big corporation to make something good. Silent Storm is not a game to pass up if you like strategy, war, or role playing games.

Silent Storm sets you in the role of either an Axis or an Allied fighter. You can chose from Italy, Germany, Japan, USA, Britain, or Russia as your home country, and mod your body and face to look like you want. You then choose a team of 5 others, and they are your squad throughout the missions, unless they should die. Each squad member has special skills and weapons depending on his or her class. The classes are Scout, Sniper, Soldier, Engineer, Medic, and Grenadier. You should pick your team wisely, because like Pokemon (sorry, but it is true), you want to have a diverse team to cover all of the obstacles you might face. There is campaign you follow that is different for Axis and Allies, and consists of street fighting and the like.

The gameplay consists of an overhead view of your characters, and it usually involves you moving about streets and buildings to neutralize enemies and find clues to lead to your next mission. THere are two sorts of turns you take, as it is turn based strategy. One kind is your strategic turn, or when you don't see any enemies, and you have unlimited mobility. Should you spot an enemy (and you normally do have one in view) you go to a more tactical turn. In this you have limited AP, or action points. Every character has different amounts of these. They can be used to use a weapon (snipe, fire a submachine gun, toss a grenade, etc.), change your stance (run, walk, crouch, prone), move, aim, or heal with medical supplies.

You or your enemies can interrupt each other's turns if they have extra AP left over, and you can attack them during their turn if they don't see you. YOu can also lay traps like mines, grenades tied to windows, sniping from windows, and camping people outside of a doorway. Every character has VP or Vitality points as health, but can suffer from more than just losing VP. They can have bleeding, AP loss, VP loss, blindness, deafness, and other ailments depending on what happens to them. Your medic has all sorts of medicine, powder to stop bleeding, bandages for VP, forceps for healing critical wounds.This leads to how the game is like an RPG. Your characters gain levels, and their stats (strength, medicine, intelligence, etc) go up, and you get skills, like being able to move with less AP and things. You get upgrades after kills usually. Characters need certain amounts of skill for some items, like big explosive packs take a lo of engineer skill.

Your weapons all have different fire modes, like snapped off shots for less AP and less accuracy, or careful shots for all of your AP, but very accurate. Machine guns have differnet burst fire options too. You can aim at certain body parts (like an arm, a head, etc), to make someone drop a gun, or to shoot to kill. You can also carry bodies of unconcious enemies out of the level to interrogate them for clues, and if you are good at the game, you can prevent your characters from dying almost every time by carrying your unconcious friends over your shoulder out of the level to heal them back at base. Base has an armory form getting weapons, a sickbay for the wounded, a place to reveiw personnel files to fire or hire people to your team, and a hangar for vehicles. This is your place of command.

That is basically the gameplay in a nutshell. I gave Silent Storm a fun factor rating of 10 because I was enthralled with the game. I was going ot play to get the review over with, and found myself loving it. I am going to play it again in a minute.

I gave the game a sound rating of 6 mainly because the sound did not stick out to me, the explosions, shots, and background music were there, and were done right, they just didn't captivate my attention.

I gave Silent Storm a detail rating of 10 becuase as I have stated with medicine for example, everything is very precisely and accurately done, no room for slip ups, and there are very realistic looking / acting weapons.

I gave this game a graphics rating of 9 because with my 2.8 GHz Pentium 4 Processor, GeForce Fx 5200 card, with 512 mb of DDR SDRAM, I had to tone down the graphics for this game to make it not lag, strangely. I am still not sure why that is.

I failed the objectives on one of the levels I played, and replaying it was not bad, it is not like monotonous to do the same thing over in this game, so I gave this game an 8 in replay.

Difficulty is a 9 becuase the game takes brains, strategy, and foresight if you want to live very long.

Therefore I have come to the conclusion that this game deserves a 9 all around, becuase I thoroughly enjoyed playing it. This game reminds me of another Turn Based Strategy game I once played, called "Fallen Haven" by Imagic. It was a game i got for $10 years ago, and I don't know of anyone else who has ever owned it. It was a great game, and no one ever found out. Well, this game is another wonderful game, and I would hate to see it have the same fate as Fallen Haven. A lot of work went into this game, and it is challenging, yet entertaining game that piques the intrest of this gamer. Take my word for it, and try "Silent Storm"; you will not regret it.