While X-COM and Jagged Alliance 2 might be THE golden boys of tactical squad simulators, Silent Storm's ability to mow down walls with machine guns, line up triple kills with a high caliber sniper rifle on a group of foolishly clustered soldiers and watch buildings collapse as their supporting structure is obliterated by a booby trap still doesn't cease to amaze me. More importantly the core gameplay is extremely solid, far from being just a glorified physics simulator. The dreaded Panzerkleins and other sci-fi elements weren't implemented that well but fortunately they only affect the last 5% or so of the original game. In the sequel they appear earlier but are far more balanced.
Just chiming in that the glaring issues (1-2-3, speech audio, starmap icons) have been fixed. Finished two of the three campaigns and as far as I can tell this is the exact same title that blew my mind almost two decades ago. Destructor Ray is still hilariously overpowered, one planet can still burn money faster than the rest of the galaxy generates it, campaign events are still poorly paced, tank AI/pathfinding is still terrible and none of it is enough to put a dent in the 5/5 rating IG2 deserves. "Satisfaction" doesn't begin to describe the feeling of your foe losing half their colonies to revolts as their leader becomes your spies' latest victim, yet the gameplay is so smooth you don't even realize how much you missed espionage after finishing a game as the Kra'Hen (whose notion of subtlety is analogous to a rocket launcher).
Well, I wrote a lengthy review I had to shorten multiple times because of the 2000 character limit and when I finally submitted it it simply disappeared. Short version: I'm a 4X veteran all the way from the first Master of Orion looking for a worthy successor and while I hoped I could find it here, I didn't. I've put 40 hours into the game and I can't figure out how to get even the most basic stuff right. Every single opponent outranks me in colonies, technology, production, fleet size etc. no matter what I try. Looking up instructions or tutorials didn't help and the game gives me no feedback as to what I'm doing wrong. I wish I could like this title but I can't. The expansions added new gameplay mechanics and further complicated existing ones, but I can't even reroll to the base game.
