Silent Storm Screenshots!

[WarLocke]

I had the opportunity to pick this up Monday. After installing, I finally got it to run after totally disabling Daemon Tools (SecuRom peeves me off; their "copy protection" will result in me downloading a no-cd crack, probably). This is one great game.

If you liked the X-COM games (well, at least the first two), or Jagged Alliance 1/2, get this game. Now. No, I'm not kidding. It's what happens when X-COM meets JA and has a lovechild. Set in WWII. With a freakin' state-of-the-art engine (Ragdoll physics on everything? Check. Everything destroyable? Check. Real-time dynamic lightning on everything? Check. Specular- and bump-mapping on everything? Freaking check!). Also, the images below are all with the lowest detail settings. Running S2 with the detail cranked up chokes my system with extreme prejudice.

The plot and voice-acting may throw some people off - the actual gameplay and mechanics are dead serious, but the atmosphere is more of a "larger-than-life elite squad takes on the whole enemy army" type; almost spaghetti-Westernish. The VOs are overacted and somewhat hammy, but that seems to be the whole point. The physics engine even plays this up in some regards - fire a heavy MG full-auto at point-blank and watch the poor target cartwheel a dozen feet away from you (and through doors and windows if they're in the way!). Sometimes it seems to be a little too "loose" - example: a stray bullet hits an open door/window pane; if the bullet doesn't have enough force to destroy/damage the door, sometimes it will close. :blink: Overall though, it works very well (snipe a trooper at the top of a hill and watch as his body tumbles down it...) B)

Now for some images!



This is me "making" my PC. I set out to make him look like me, but I wasn't quite successful. <_< Still, I think he turned out alright, although I didn't particularly like the voice options (for the Allies you can choose from a gruff Texas/Georgia drawl, a very strange British/Irish brogue, or a hilariously overemphasized Russian accent).



This is an image from one of the random encounters I've played. This particular map was rather small (you can see about 60% of it in the shot), although I've seen a few random encounters with maps half as large as this one. Storyline maps seem to be about twice this size (with lots of nooks and crannies and multi-level buildings to hide in).

This particular encounter was over fast. After sneaking my guys as close as I reasonably could without being seen, Zinaida (the sniper at the roadblock) shot the Axis officer in the head, Rowdy (my dear old ornery, drunken Irish grenadier) lobbed a frag grenade that took out two troopers, and between my Lee-Enfeild and Ramos' Sten II, the last was filled with lead. It should be noted that only having 4 enemies has only happened to me on random encounters - in storyline missions I've always been seriously outnumbered.



Did I mention being outnumbered? This is a few turns into a storyline mission that turned into a huge fracas. I'm helping about a dozen Allied soldiers defend this base from at least two dozen Axis soldiers. The shot is from about 5 turns into the mission; initially that clump of Axis troopers was 10-12 strong, but some have been killed or slipped away around the train or buildings. They also brought some heavy weaponry - I left the mission with 2 Panzerfausts. :ph34r:

If there's any interest I can take more screenshots, but I just had to put these initial ones up. :D

[Hammerskjold]

>If there's any interest I can take more screenshots, but I just had to put these initial ones up.

Currently I'm more interested in how it runs on your machine. Any random crashes, memory leak problems etc.
I'm a fan of turn based games, so I'm sold on that part. I'm currently re-playing JA2 Unfinished Business, and if it was any other game, I would've uninstalled it due to random crashes in 5 minutes to an hour into the game.

So any turn based squad game that runs with the stability of say, Diablo, will have my money.

[jahcs]

Those icons floating over the people remind me of "Big Head Mode" in other games (like Goldeneye). I know on a real monitor it probably looks better but that first screenshot made me do a double-take.

[WarLocke]

Currently I'm more interested in how it runs on your machine. Any random crashes, memory leak problems etc.

Since I've bought the game I've had two (maybe 3) crashes to desktop. None of them hardlocked the computer or required a reboot. I haven't been able to reproduce them accurately, either, so I'm working on the assumption that they were flukes.

S2 does start to lag if I run it constantly for 4-5+ hours. It might just be my 256mb RAM rather than an outright memory leak, but I can't be sure. Also, I sometimes (rarely, only in those 4-5+ hour sessions) seem to run out of texture memory or something, and some things (mostly trooper torsos) start rendering as flat black.

That's the extent of my problems with the game (other than missions with many buildings and 30+ NPC units lagging constantly, but I'm sure that's just my hardware chugging to keep up).

I know on a real monitor it probably looks better but that first screenshot made me do a double-take.

Double-take in a good way or a bad way?


I decided to start a side campaign as an Axis Scout, and go it solo. In my very first random encounter I got cornered (started this campaign on Normal rather than Easy, and enemies are definitely "smarter" in addition to being tougher/faster) and laid a mine just inside of a window I thought a trooper would use to get to me (laying a mine on a hardwood floor? O well). Despite the fact that she was a fresh character with an Engineering skill of 19 (Engineers start with scores of 28-30 usually) that mine took a major chunk of the building with it. I'll post the pic later. B)


EDIT: Here we go! I didn't think to get a pic before the mine was set off, but for the record the grunt set it off by either opening or climbing through a window (I'm not sure if opening a door/window onto a mine will set it off or not). Here's a great still of the ragdoll engine:



And here's the building after everything settled down:



Now, consider that that was done with 1 mine laid by a character with a low Engineering skill. Now imagine what a high-level Engineer would have done in that situation. :lol:

Also, here's a grunt who's about to die:



That Scout made level 6 after a single random encounter and 1 story mission. My 4-man squad needed 5 story missions and at least a dozen random encounters to do the same. :ph34r: the Scout of Doom...

[Haider]

It is a great game, but unfortunately it is a hardware sucker. Even on high-end-systems you have to set down the details, especially flames are slowing down the game to unplayable. Maybe in a year or two I can play it how it was intended.

[jahcs]

QUOTE&nbsp;
I know on a real monitor it probably looks better but that first screenshot made me do a double-take.


Double-take in a good way or a bad way?

A good way. The screenshot is a bit dark and those german head icons above the soldiers blended into the bodies and I had to squint to make sure they didn't actually represent the heads of the soldiers. :D

[WarLocke]

I had to squint to make sure they didn't actually represent the heads of the soldiers.

You can turn them off in the options menu, but I leave them on because I think it's useful to have an indicator of where the enemies are (and sometimes a character will "spot" an enemy that I would miss).