S2: Silent Storm Gold Edition

The turn based gameplay is a bit clunky within interiors. Enemies can be overwhelming at times. Overall a pretty sweet classic squad based strategy game. The damage modeling of the environment is detailed and adds a lot of fun options for completing a mission.

You can read about the good things in the positive reviews. I will focus on several blunders in this game's design that make me mostly hate it - the 'meh', the 'bad' and the 'UGLY'. Here it goes: The 'meh' 1. For 90% of the game, ALL burst weapons are useless unless you shoot at nearly point-blank range (which is unlikely because you will be killed, AND if not you will still miss a lot resulting in your toon being killed on the next turn); So you just use long-range rifles. And your rifles are FAR more effective than the enemy's, and most enemies will carry useless burst weapons, so you just equip your toons use rifles; 2. There are a few bugs with game saves (things missing on reload, Panzercleins, in particular) and some bugs with line of sight; The 'bad' 3. Both games have primitive story lines and very bad, unsatisfying endings (especially the first game's final mission where control are extremely convoluted because your clumsy Panzercleins have to make way in an very confined space of a missile silo - it is VERY ill-conceived); 4. I will not dwell on the Panzerclein problem - you can patch them out of the game, but then there is a reason why they are IN the game, so you will be missing out if you do; The 'ugly' (Turn-based combat implementation) 5. EVERYTHING IN GAME IS ANIMATED - an enemy drops his weapon and stuff, and you are LOCKED OUT of the game until the loot stops bouncing off the terrain and comes to rest, AND depending on terrain, this could take 10-15 seconds per EVERY DROPPED ITEM; 6. Each unit has 75 action points on average. On missions you have some 40-50 units on the map (enemy, allied, neutrals, + your guys). That's about 4400 APs total. It will take the animations up to 10 minutes to process a single turn! I literally could go outside, have a smoke, come back and the turn would still be processing! So, these games (each) require about 70 hours to finish... but NOT because of huge content.. due to BAD design. The 'UGLY' 5.

This is really one of the best tactics game ever. Cool physics, gameplay and ballance. 5 stars, definitely :)

Unfortunately I ended up being bored with Silent Storm. The pacing between turns is just too slow and there's no way to speed it up. You spend more times waiting for the AI turns, than actually doing anything meaningful yourself. One example was a couple of missions in. A couple of minutes taking my turn, then waiting an eternity for the AI to take its turns. Sadly, that got very old, very fast, to the point where I simply couldn't be bothered. Add to this the tiresome camera movement, frustrating to be sure, without any possibility of reverting the camera views to one preferred. Oh how I yearned for the straight up isometric view, fixed in place, instead of being all over the place. This is perhaps the first time I've ever got bored so quickly with a squad based tactical/strategy game like this, and I absolutely adored the Jagged Alliance games, XCOM, etc... all of which had much better pacing when it comes to the tactical, turn based combat.

Enjoyable enough. Fun, destructible environments and cool selection of historical gear. I was actually having more fun with this than the new X-Com. Then I got about 2/3 of the way through the Allied campaign and every single saved game suddenly became corrupted and wouldn't load. I restarted... which was tedious in the extreme after shepherding my original squad through the whole way. Got almost to where I was at the last time I had to reset...and all of the saved game files corrupted. Again. I was saving in new files with every single mission, plus the quick saves, PLUS copying the files and putting them in a backup folder...and they still ALL failed, even the backups. Neither Google nor the forums reveal a solution. I refuse to start over again or try and marathon the entire campaign just to see the end. If I hadn't only spent like $2 on it during a sale, I'd probably feel ripped off. As it is, I'm just disappointed a potentially good game is getting deleted and never played again because of something so inexplicably lazy and game-breaking as poor code leading to persistent saved game failures. Maybe it's just me and this hasn't happened to anyone else. I doubt it, but whatever. I'd have given 4 stars, if the game had consistently worked as intended.