Fallout Tactics or Jagged Alliance fans will love this.

User Rating: 8.5 | Silent Storm PC
The turn-based strategy game is a niche genre in the vast gaming world, though it's one of the mainstream of most popular Japanese and Chinese games. In my opinion, if you love this type of genre, you would have no problems with Fallout and Jagged Alliance. But these are quite specific games that have a small but strong, hardcore fan base. Then comes Silent Storm. A pretty offbeat but surprisingly charming game of the same gameplay style.

The charming part would be the Havoc physics involved in the (everyone's favourite part) death sequence, explosions and anything that flies off or falls apart. Sickly as I may sound, but nothing beats the holy satisfaction of witnessing a lifeless flying body caused by a well-calculated shot from your Carbine 98K Scoped rifle, 300 action points across in a 2-turn long sniper mode. Of course, one of the other great features would be the ability system much like Fallout Tactics' perks, though the level up process is tediously long. The really fun stuff, where the genre is at its best, would be the wall penetration feature and TOTALLY destructible environment. Finally we have a good reason to use grenades! Not to mention that the full 3D graphics also put these features to their maximum potential.

What's more, glancing at the cheat sheet (heh!), there're around 400 plus items to loot and collect, making exploration an enjoyable activity in the game. Thus amazingly, JoWood has created a dark horse gem once again, which I'm lucky to have discovered, such as Cold Zero - The Last Stand and Torchlight. So even with the negligible story and poor dialogues, the fun is mainly the varied combat tactics and watching people fly.

KingLim