What makes the commercial failure of Silent Storm so disheartening isn't so much the fact that it's a great game--although it certainly is that--but rather that it likely represents the dying gasp of a style of gameplay that many PC gaming grognards remember fondly. Anyone who played PC games in the early '90s likely has fond memories of X-COM, one of the many classic titles that MicroProse put out. In it, you commanded small squads of soldiers in turn-based tactical combat battles that mixed destructible buildings and true line-of-sight modeling with a creepy alien-invasion storyline to create a game that caused many an all-night gaming session--"Just one more mission!" was a popular refrain for its many addicts. Unfortunately, the tactical combat featured in X-COM never quite took off, and in the end, the real-time strategy of games like Syndicate became the gold standard for tactical combat games.​