Eyeball
Arcane
- Joined
- Sep 3, 2010
- Messages
- 2,541
Following a chat with one of our members earlier tonight, I've decided to do a writeup on one of my favourite guilty pleasure games: Shadow Watch, an isometric turn-based squad game by Red Storm entertainment about leading a team of 6 UN-appointed specialists named Shadow Watch through a series of missions set in Rio De Janeiro, Baikonur and Hong Kong in order to prevent a heinous terrorist plot designed to destroy the first International Space Station before it is launched.
As a turn-based tactical game, gameplay is decidedly boardgamey. The game World is divided into Squares and each character gets 3 action points per turn. Each action such as shooting, opening doors, moving or using gadgets takes one AP, fairly standard for that sort of game. Where the game varies is in its treatment of the effects of adrenaline: each time any character in the game is shot at, shocked or otherwise agitated, it gains an additional AP for their next turn. This can make a character extremely dangerous if he survived multiple shots in the last round, all of a sudden giving him 7 AP to return fire, but if the collected AP exceed his Morale statistic (6-8 for most characters) he will instead either panic or go berserk, causing him to either run away, cower uselessly or run straight at the enemy to engage in close combat, which usually ends with him getting shot dead. Careful management of combat stress is thus pretty important in heavy firefights and can mean the difference between a hallway full of dead Chinese revolutionaries and a complete team wipe.
Interrogating your local friendly neighbourhood Russian mercenary captain in between missions.
Missions themselves have varying objectives, from extracting a hostage to planting explosives to securing an object or outright gunning Down every enemy on the premises, which can be accomplished through the use of a combination of stealth and brute force. Several missions are also stealth only, meaning you need to redo the mission if you are spotted at all. These are a nice variety from managing fields of fire and require careful monitoring of enemy patrol routes by use of your hacker's scanning device as well as silent takedowns from your CCQ Experts or silenced gunfire. Once the alert is sounded on a normal mission, all enemy forces converge on your position or set up entrenched choke points near doorways, making proper breaching tactics a necessity.
The core of most combat situations revolves around the Cover Fire mechanic. Similarly to XCom, a character can opt to preserve AP to take shots at enemies moving into his field of view, which quickly becomes necessary in order to avoid getting swarmed. Not all characters are equally good at this, so careful positioning is again essential for mission success.
One of the weaker points of Shadow Watch is its fairly bizarre and random damage system. Each character in the game gets only 1 weapon with a set Power statistic, 50 for pistols, 70 for assault rifles and 95 for sniper cannons. Power is the percentile chance to inflict a Wound on a character. One wound kills any AI enemy in the game whereas team members can sustain 3-5 wounds depending on the character before dying. The strangeness of the system becomes apparent when you shoot an enemy half a dozen times, knocking him Down and peppering him with shotgun Shells while lying flat on his ass but failing to kill him due to making unlucky Wound rolls. Mission failures are often caused by bad Wound rolls causing a grenade-tossing foe to take no damage from a barrage of bullets, pop right up on his next turn and blow your team to kingdom come with all the extra AP your unsuccessful gunfire has given him. The randomness of the system is very irritating at times and makes it a lot less strategic in some situations where a few bad rolls of the dice can cause you to lose the mission outright.
With its 3 AP turns, multiple characters and cover system, Shadow Watch plays a bit like the modern Shadowrun game, but the variety of character skills, stealth elements and much larger levels makes it a lot deeper tactically. It also has deeper RPG mechanics - killing an enemy, completing an objective or participation in a succesful mission will award characters XP and levels, allowing them to advance through their rudimentary tech trees and allowing them to use new skills in the field. It isn't advanced but it adds a hell of a lot to the game and each character can be built in at least two different ways. Do you train your grenadier to throw more damaging grenades, to breach doors more effectively or plant more dangerous demolition charges? XP is limited and you can't aquire all skills in one playthough, making character Building require a bit of thought.
Graphically, it is an attractive game, with a clean cartoon style and distinct colour schemes for each of the three cities missions take part in: red and yellow for Hong Kong, gold and beige for Rio de Janeiro and green and grey for Baikonur, making each seperate chapter stylistically different and all being quite pleasing to the eye. Music is also notable in that an atmospheric and foreboding theme will play while the team hasn't been spotted yet and then changing to more upbeat and action-filled songs after the first shot has been fired, adding to the sense of suspense during stealth sections and urgency during lethal firefights.
Controls are almost console-like in that you don't need a mouse to play the tactical missions at all. Characters are controlled most easily by the keyboard, which may sound a bit offputting at first but actually Works quite well in practice.
Extracting an orange-shirted dignitary from a warehouse, Triad corpses visible in the front.
Your team members are:
Ian Archer: Black British nobleman and team leader. Mediocre killing power and accuracy with his SMG but has important team-bolstering abilities. Can be trained to mow Down enemies en masse with his machine gun or be a more effective team leader, rallying panicked team mates and boosting their morale.
Maya Knight: Texan redhead sniper. Most accurate and lethal shooter in the game, but can only fire once per turn versus the other character's 3 shots. Also doubles as the team's medic. Can be trained to be a more effective medic, bringing back dead teammates if she can get to them in 2 turns or be turned into a more lethal frontline fighter.
Rafael De Ariano: Brazilian demolitions Expert. Can be trained to use a variety of different grenades with experience. Frag grenades make his AOE ridiculous, proximity grenades trigger when enemies walk by them or gas grenades being entirely silent, the latter of which makes him the best character to take along on steath missions, weirdly enough. Also essential for missions requiring demoliton charges to be placed.
Bartholomew "Bear" Barinsky: Canadian former hockey player and blonde brick shithouse. Sports heavy body armour and carries a shotgun, making him ideal for hard entries. Probably the least interesting character in the game as his skillset mainly focuses on brute force, breaking Down doors and enemies alike. With training, he can learn to rugby tackle and KO enemies several Squares away and upgrade both his and his teammates' armour, making them harder to kill.
Lily Yu: Hong Kongese acrobat and kung-fu specialist. Carries a wimpy silenced pistol that can't kill a thing, but is lethal with kung-fu kicks. Can be upgraded to do running kicks to take Down enemies further away, to instantly tell you the location of the mission objective upon entering the mission and to be a more effective stealth operative. Very effective on stealth missions when paired with Gennady.
Gennady Roschinko: Israeli hacker and general tech-guy. Unarmed, unarmoured and squishy as dogshit but is able to scan through walls with his handheld radar, pinpointing enemy locations. This allows you to set up effective ambush zones with your other characters or avoid enemy contact on stealth missions. Is also the only character who can open locked doors without sounding the alarm and can plant listening bugs on special surveillance missions.
Each character fills an essential role on the team and are all important to mission success, although you will rarely have the option of taking a full team of six on a mission, usually having to pick the team best suited for the mission parameters.
The team, about to burst in on some unsuspecting Russian mercenaries.
As such, Shadow Watch was great for me as a kid because it really is a simple game that emphasises good basic strategic skills: being aware of the position of your foes, making hard entries without getting shot and lots and lots of field of fire management and door covering. It has a good variety of maps and 9 different enemy factions which you will face over randomly generated campaigns, meaning no two games are ever the same. Unfortunately, the fact that it has no RMG is a major mark against the game and it does become tedious after a few playthroughs due to the limited number of maps. It is, however, an excellent example of how great art style, simple but solid tactical combat and an excellent atmospheric soundtrack can come together and make a game far more than the sum of its parts, a lesson modern game developers would do well to take to heart.
It can be aquired through Amazon. I have also seen it on an abandonware site or two, but that version had no soundtrack included, which is really important if you want to get the most out of the Shadow Watch experience.
Music to gun fools Down by in Rio De Janeiro: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FY66s1VTn8A
Shadow Watch 
