Game News Silent Storm: Sentinels demo is out

[Vault Dweller]

Tags: Nival Interactive; Silent Storm: Sentinels

Thor's Hammer is up to no good again. If you care, grab the demo of <a href=http://www.nival.com/eng/sa_info.html>Silent Storm: Sentinels</a>, that stunning and unsurpassed turn-based, tactical, and highly destructive game, <a href=http://www.silentstorm-online.com/content.php?lang=en&rid=600>here</a> or <a href=http://www.gamershell.com/download_6253.shtml>here</a>. The demo is <b>297 MB</b>, so the dial-up people are invited to look at the <a href=http://www.nival.com/eng/sa_wall.html>pretty pictures</a> instead.
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Don't forget to post your impressions.

 

[Nightjed]

cool, now ill be able to figure out wth they wanted me to do in the russian version

 

[Sol Invictus]

GO GO GO

 

[Voss]

Impressions after the first mission.

Its S^2, but now S^3. I thought I'd share.

Anyway-
movement costs more AP. No idea why. Picking things up costs AP. Taking things out of your backpack costs AP. All told, you're doing less in a round.

Enemies have little icons on the little red symbol. Not sure what all of them mean yet. Question mark, thing that looks like a chain. Presumably it has something to do with their current actions.

Weapons have durability now and can jam and break. Sigh.

You hire people, and choose missions. The overland map is different. Looks nicer. Covers a lot more area (north africa and more of Asia). You can sell weapons... which means scavenging battlefield loot is important... you also have to buy weapons...

But! There is a post battle looting screen. Things you've left lying about are there to take after the battle without scrounging ever corner. Think you still have to get into locked containers though.

Theres also a post-battle statistics screen. most hits, misses, damage taken, things like that. Its mostly who did best/worst rather than stats for every character. Though characters do get a tab for that on their character sheet

Characters can get knocked down by bullets and grenades. The knock down and getting back up animations seem quick and sloppy though.

You can also buy/get uniforms (initially a variety of different ones for the classes from the major nationalities). This makes me suspect the possibility of a infiltrate mission where you go in disguise. (but don't know for sure)

Overall, more SS. The AP change for movement is a pain... even running is 4 AP per space.

 

[Vault Dweller]

You can also buy/get uniforms (initially a variety of different ones for the classes from the major nationalities). This makes me suspect the possibility of a infiltrate mission where you go in disguise. (but don't know for sure)

From the official site: Take on new mission objectives, such as infiltration, demolition and assassination.
Thanks for the impression, Voss.

 

[Voss]

Hmm. Ok, I've been toying around with a second mission. I'm getting splattered all over the landscape. It could be the custom difficulty: you can adjust enemies level, VP, AP and damage (and character damage)- I shoved them all closer to 100%. But its also because I only have two characters (couldn't afford more than one) , and there are a lot of enemies close together.

And I can't go back and try to do the other available mission first. Must go through the first one again. For the record its the 'snitch' mission. Nailing an informer in the middle of a forest road. There are ruins too, but those are alrady occupied.

My first attempt was fun. The soldier I hired got a grenade lobbed at him, then the agent ran up to a rock, popped up and blew his head clean off. I was torn between sad, amused and impressed.

Oh, one more thing. They seem to spot hidden people a lot further away. Not sure how it will work at higher levels (and higher spot scores) but at the moment, hiding in the bushes is hard, I wouldn't even attempt to hide in the middle of the street.

 

[Sol Invictus]

Hmmmm my impressions...

Besides the stuff Voss mentioned, there's also these new 'Accidental Shots' which incidentally happen when you shoot someone. It's kind of like in movies, when a guy goes down, his finger is still pressed on the trigger so he lets off a whole volley of them. It happens when your muscles tense from getting shot at, I guess.

AI also seems to be a lot better this time around, without the civilians walking around in circles and 'investigating' every single thing you shoot at. They rarely move now. Likewise, enemies know where to hide for cover. AI turns take a lot less time now, probably due to optimized algorithms. The game also allows you to speed up the animations of the characters to up to 200% to make rounds faster.

At the end of each mission, your characters stats are displayed, depicting the skills which went up, or down (which happens if you got injured, for example). It allows you to better pace the development of your characters by examining their strong, and weak points.

I like the AP change for movement. It means the AI can't move around so fucking much and it makes more sense, too. It'd take a shorter period of time to aim and fire a gun than it would be to run, don't you think?

 

[triCritical]

[quote="Voss"Anyway-
movement costs more AP. No idea why. Picking things up costs AP. Taking things out of your backpack costs AP. All told, you're doing less in a round.[/quote]

Everything sounds really great, EXCEPT THIS!!!!! The AP, and the number of things you could do in a round was one of the things that I really liked better then JA2. Sheesh, so far this is a real bummer. I can't imagine this making anything better. Heck, I almost don't want to get the expansion pack now.

 

[triCritical]

I like the AP change for movement. It means the AI can't move around so fucking much and it makes more sense, too. It'd take a shorter period of time to aim and fire a gun than it would be to run, don't you think?

If its speeds up AI, that is good. However, one thing I did not like games like JA2, was just how long it took to set things up. I found that SS really made this go a lot faster.

 

[Voss]

Ex: The accidental shots happened from time to time in the original. They weren't labelled though.

Actually thats another change in general- critical hits and effects pop up on hits so you know if you blind/deafen/cause bleeding or lower their APs.

I'm having a hard time with the AP adjustment. I've had a lot of problems getting to cover, particularly when the enemies dig into a position.

 

[Nightjed]

My impressions so far :
-the higher ap cost makes ap reduction criticals "terminal" : you cant escape and you cant shoot (at least not with the earlier high ap weapons)
-wounds have way less effect on abilities than before so unless you got a critical during a close range attack you are probably dead
-better AI makes the enemy turn "wait" a lot shorter and the game seems to leave turn mode more often
-the game runs smoother and the pathfinding calculations are a bit less anoying
-they seem to use lots of cutscenes and they are very anoying since the enemies get a free move and they often get the first turn after it (and if you kill someone related to the cutscene before its triggered weird things happen i remember that some ppl revived on the russian version)
-got at least 6 CTD so far
-the lack of money on the begining makes the first missions really really hard and without the random fights to level up a bit there is no way arround them
-the game seems to encorauge stealth
-all grenades are frag now (i wonder if this is a demo thing) and they miss a lot more often
-they didnt really fix the skill trees at all so they are still very unbalanced
-i would like a hint to explain what the enemy icons mean exactly and they forgot to change "out of screen" enemy icon so to check out the real icon you have to scroll the screen

even with the flaws i still like it a lot more than S2 but i think you need a bit easier access to at least 2 recruits before the first mission what i find really weird is the frag grenades only thing, did they just code those for the demo or what ?

edit: btw, i still have the "the enemy seems to hit a lot more often than me at insane range with crappy weapons" feeling i had with S2, ex: im sniping from a spot where i get 6% initially and the enemy hits me with smg fire .... wth ...

 

[Sol Invictus]

Higher AP cost not only makes ap reduction criticals terribly damaging, but also makes skills like 'ignore wounds' useful, medics much more important (as well as trauma kits) whereas previously in S2 they were completely useless because you could deal with it fairly easily and run around slaughtering things despite being low on health.

Random fights are not enabled in the demo. The final versino will have random fights. I saw that in a pop-up message sometime in the game. I think it was the difficulty screen - it had random fights disabled.

Stealth has definitely got a more prominent role in S3. Scouts were all but useless before, because enemies died very easily if you had 2-3 people on each enemy and it didn't matter if you were out in the open because getting shot at was nothing more than a mere annoyance.

Gunshot wounds actually affect your state of health!

Grenades are not all 'explode on impact'. That's just a demo thing because there aren't even any bouncy type of grenades in the demo that I've seen - just 1 type of frag grenade.

I can't comment much on the skills but I can say that a lot of the skills relating to wounds are much more important now. Skills like 'ignore wounds' are extremely important because they allow you to target with your full basic accuracy even when you are wounded. This matters a lot now because of the higher AP cost - you don't want to be wounded to a point where you can neither hit anything nor have the AP to hit anything.

I agree with last point - there should be an explanation for the icons (im sure there will be) and a special color to depict 'out of screen 'enemies.

 

[Greenskin13]

Has suppressive fire been added into the game?

 

[Voss]

Hmm. no crashes yet.

I have gotten a lot of the enemy nailing me at improbable ranges though... however I didn't have much problem with that in the original game.

And the ap reducing crits, yeah, yipe. The one flunky I could afford to hire for the mine mission got hit with one in the tunnel to the last fight. He didn't actually have enough ap to short burst or throw grenades. I crouched him against the wall for several turns hoping it would pass if he survived. Surprisingly he did and it did. Sadly he got nailed chasing the objective guy, after he started fleeing from the room. The one guy left in the room took him down with a single shot (he had been wounded before, obviously), but I was feeling a sense of urgency.

Have you tried the snitch mission yet? Those buggers are very skilled and very nasty. I just tried playing it cautious, but the spy got away.

On the free turns after the cut scenes- they've gotten the free turns against me, but in each case they've ended up moving into cover rather than shooting at me (thankfully)

Ex- scouts useless before? They were killing machines. With a high enough stealth skill they were absolutely unstoppable. The only time I every got seen with them towards the end the game was when the scout was standing directly in front of the enemy 1-2 squares away. Getting behind them with throwing knives essentially meant unnoticeable auto-kill.

 

[HanoverF]

there's also these new 'Accidental Shots' which incidentally happen when you shoot someone. It's kind of like in movies, when a guy goes down, his finger is still pressed on the trigger so he lets off a whole volley of them. It happens when your muscles tense from getting shot at, I guess.

Thats not new, that happend all the time in the original