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