That, ladies and gentlemen, is the only significant comment I can immediately make after my encounter with Silent Storm: Sentinels, Nival Interactive’s expansion to their absolutely awesome WW2-oriented turn-based strategy title from last year, which took realism to the extreme by implementing some excellent ragdoll and general physics technology to offer the ability to behead, murder, mutilate, and otherwise massacre enemy soldiers in hilarious and unique ways – and tear up the environment while you were at it. In a nutshell, the game had a great engine and some really good addictive action, but lost a lot of its steam towards the end (especially with the disorienting introduction of German space lasers and Mech suits that had more than a few people scratching their heads) and suffered a few other harassing problems. Nevertheless, I was glad to hear that an expansion was in the works for this series to push the experience even further, and promptly jumped all over the opportunity to grab a copy. This dancing rapidly turned into a lesson in pain and misery (I refer you to the exclamation above) as the game’s obscene difficulty level didn’t hesitate to present itself. Honestly, this game will abusively take a dump on your face and run off to molest dear Grandma before the experience is over, and I’m here to explain why, as well as offer insight on the few redeeming elements this expansion pack actually has – which didn’t actually feel all that redeeming.

Here’s the story. A year or two after the original game (and the Second World War), Europe and the other major nations have settled into a somewhat uneasy peace. The U.N. is born, armies are disbanded, and entire groups of soldiers find themselves without work. In favor of their new peace-oriented policies, funding is cut to the various intelligence-gathering and special forces units, which certain hostile parties start trying to take advantage of – particularly, a group calling itself “Thor’s Hammer” (yes, the same evil organization from the original game), which is out to cause havoc once again. But standing in their way is a secret agency that has been founded dedicated to hiring on the special agents who served in the original war and putting them to good use. Calling itself the “Sentinels”, this group has far more limited resources than the original “Silent Storm” unit of the last conflict, but is just as dedicated on maintaining world peace. Naturally, after a chance kidnapping and daring escape with the help of a Sentinels agent named “Boris”, your character ends up joining this unit and soon finds himself quickly rising in the ranks and getting deeper and deeper into the conspiracy of Thor’s Hammer.

First and foremost, Silent Storm: Sentinels (also known as “S3”) is a hard expansion – much harder than the original, but a large amount of this difficulty only applies to the first parts of the campaign. You start the game with a fresh plate in much the same way as the original (aside from the fact that there’s only one campaign now rather than the two Allied / Axis ones the original had), first by character creation and then launching into the actual game, but now there is a new dialogue where players can customize the specific difficulty settings. Using this screen, it is now possible to modify the action and hit-points an enemy will have available on average, how much damage both their and your own weapons will do, a toggle for whether the “Random Encounters” seen while navigating the campaign map will actually be visible, or truly “random”, and a few other settings (including a slider for adjusting the effects of a weapon running low on it’s “durability” rating, another new feature I’ll touch on shortly). This new dialogue is actually pretty handy for allowing players to tailor the game to just their preferred skill level and offers a lot of newfound flexibility for allowing the game to be played in any real manner you’d see fit, but I felt pretty comfortable settling into most of the default settings, and the average fan will probably just glance at this screen once and skip right past it. Following this, it’s the same old character creation screen – just pick from one of the six classes available (Scout, Sniper, Medic, Soldier, Grenadier, or Engineer), re-assign a few basic stats if desired, give him or her a name, and you’re set, and you can even choose from a few pre-configured soldiers if you don’t want to spend thirty seconds on personalization. Everything around this point is status quo, but one annoyance is that there are now only four voice sets available – two per gender – that apply irregardless of chosen character nationality. I guess there were time limitations or development costs that prohibited the adding of more voices, but it was somewhat odd and disappointing to make a German medic that tried to pass himself off as Clint Eastwood.

So, getting on with the game, my hopes were quite high and I was ready to kick some Thor’s Hammer ass with my newly created soldier, but two hours later I was left cussing as the early missions continuously mocked and crushed me. After a great start to the game involving my unconscious character awakening in some basement and being forced to work with a buddy to help escape (using baseball bats, knives, and the occasional pistol with barely any ammo), my character was offered initiation rites into the Sentinels, and began his quest to rid the world of evil. Unfortunately, a few changes to the gameplay instantly ensured my quest began in misery. One of the largest changes is a new cash-based economy system, which means that not only do weapons and items all have a certain value associated with them (not only for selling, but for buying, and the local arms dealer has no problem with ripping off you, the savior of the world), but hiring on squad mates also costs some scratch – and quite a beefy amount, no less. Getting a decent cashflow going at the beginning of the game is very hard, because even with the ability to indefinitely tackle random encounters before doing the big, scary storyline missions, the quality of equipment that the enemies drop is so low that you get paid only a tiny pittance for bringing them in, and since hiring even the lowliest of squad members from the roster can cost several thousand dollars, the early parts of the game basically demand that they be tackled alone.

Okay, for the first couple of missions I was able to manage somewhat decently, but then the game gave me a choice of four other missions to tackle (the way the campaign is structured, you can select and play three of these missions before being forced on to the next “chapter”). Stupidly thinking that they’d be balanced sufficiently so as to give me a chance to get on my feet, I chose the best-paying one and ran off to go crush. This turned out to be the end of my first soldier character, because the mission forced me into an impossible situation against overwhelming enemy forces all by myself, and I ended up totally stuck in a single room where nearly a dozen enemies all ambush you at once from above. I very nearly uninstalled the game out of sheer frustration at that point, wondering how the hell I was supposed to win at that when I was merely a 1-man army, but instead elected to start over with a fresh character – a medic this time, as I was tired of uncontrollably bleeding to death every time I took a critical hit. This, combined with some more educated stat-tweaking and careful avoidance of the mission that had ground me to a standstill the last time finally allowed me to build up enough cash to start assembling a decent team, but it was still rough going for a good brick of time. It’s just the entire concept of a turn-based strategy title where one lucky shot can end it all pitting a single soldier against overwhelming odds was a huge turn-off that seriously dampened my opinion of this game from the get-go. It’s one thing to be challenging, but give me a chance!.

Thankfully, things really do pick up if you manage to evolve past this early phase of the game, and as additional team members are hired, the action gets more interesting. Once I had a decent grenadier, engineer, and sniper under my employ, I was picking off enemies in quite the laid-back manner, although the enemy troops tended to get lucky enough on occasion to keep me on my guard. Things went pretty well until I ran into a nasty mission that turned out to be one of the most poorly designed levels in the whole game, and once again I found myself stuck and unable to advance. The scene in question involves the terrorist forces trying to place bombs under a building housing an important meeting in London, and you get sent into the sewers to try and clean out the enemies and disarm the bomb before they have a chance to set it off. Problem is, once I arrived in the final room, my team was instantly set upon by four or five enemies that had tons of hitpoints and an incredibly good skill set. Normally this wouldn’t be too much of a problem, but these enemies were actively running around the room arming explosives, and with my limited team it proved utterly and completely impossible to deal with the enemies and prevent them from setting off the bombs at the same time without getting shot to pieces (remember, this is a turn-based game, not live-action). This mission is so insanely difficult that I actually had to research some cheat codes online to bypass it, but even with invulnerability I still had to try it several times. I even hear the developers have admitted that the mission is much too hard and are working on a patch to tone things down a bit. Once again, the game’s insane difficulty curve very nearly stopped my campaign progress in its tracks, but also once again, I found myself gradually enjoying the game some more once I had (barely) worked my way past this roadblock.

But the fun doesn’t end there. Here’s another difficulty-related thing I found to feast my annoyed emotional state upon: weapon durability. Yes, another new gameplay concept to S3 is the fact that all weapons now have a limited durability rating that drops the more a weapon is used. If it gets below a certain point, the chance of a weapon either jamming, mis-firing, or just breaking outright increases enormously, leaving your favorite toy useless. The only way to bring a weapon’s durability rating back up to par is to either use a repair item, or bring it back to HQ to have the arms dealer repair it at cost, but the latter option is almost always preferable, because each repair puts a dent into a weapon’s overall durability, and trying to have one of your own inept soldiers do the repairs may result in more eventual damage being done than is worth it. Seriously though, was this change necessary? I feel that the new durability system added very little to the gameplay aside from the frustration I kept getting that no matter what I did, my newfound favorite weapon would eventually either have to be re-purchased at an extreme cost, or just replaced with something else because it would uncontrollably end up becoming useless sooner or later. Thankfully, the singleplayer campaign ends up being over before that kind of problem has a chance to truly manifest itself, though I’m not really sure if I would constitute that as a “good thing”.

So we’re looking at a new economy system that seems like a novel concept on paper, but ends up making the game a lot harder, a potentially useless durability system, and an erratic difficulty curve from mission to mission that can make one level feel like a breeze while another has you scrambling to load your save file over, and over, and over again. With all these problems, the game looks like a terrific disaster waiting to happen, but are there any signs of redemption that will give fans an excuse to put up with the misery in hopes of an ultimately rewarding experience? I guess that would depend on how “hardcore” you are. Extremists who have beaten the game dozens of times using only a scout with a baseball bat will probably welcome the newfound challenges the expansion has to offer and mock us lesser mortals for whining “becuz u suk”, but average would-be agents may find themselves fed up with the early stages of the game long before they have a chance to discover its true charms. There are smaller, nifty changes such as some new floating text that appears above a character when he suffers a critical hit, indicating exactly what kind of condition he is now suffering from (this also applies to enemies).

AI seems to also have been tweaked a little, so enemies will now actually make use of their “hide” skill a little more often and tend to act less like total morons – though unfortunately I’ve still seen several bouts of someone crouching, spinning in a circle, getting up, crouching, and repeating the process again until all of his APs for that turn are gone (and no, this was before I had a chance to smack that person upside the head with my Billy Club). Curiously, decapitation rates also seem to have been jacked up to the extreme, meaning it’s now possible to thwack off someone’s cranium with anything from a heavy machinegun to a baseball bat, or even your bare hands – so long as it’s a headshot, gory carnage is ensured. The storyline to the game actually got somewhat interesting the further I progressed too, although it was hardly anything epic or tear-jerking. I think the only other major thing I can think of that was done well in this expansion is the environments and scripted sequences. Some of the cutscenes actually have some good action in them (although one involving several soldiers firing automatic weapons at each other totally brought my system to a total crawl because the game was still trying to process the trajectories and penetration values of each and every bullet in it’s usual hyper-realistic manner that is fine for regular turn-based gameplay, but not a live-action cutscene) and help present the drama and storyline quite decently, and the new 3d environments are really impressive, with lots of new buildings (and even a couple of new objects) to destroy piece-by-piece and some spiffy looking detail. The dreaded Panzerkleins (armored mech suits from the original – don’t ask) also make a return in S3, but thankfully they’ve been tweaked to be a little less obscene in how overpowered they are, and a well-placed grenade or high-powered small-arms fire can actually be very deadly to the errant PK pilot now. It’s also now possible to upgrade a character’s skills instantly while at HQ, although this can get a little costly and, of course, you can only upgrade to a certain point depending on the character’s current experience level. These odds and ends are all nice (or at least interesting) changes, but I didn’t really feel that they were sufficient to offset the crazy problems presented early on in the game that I’ve already gone into.

I’m going to veer away from gameplay commentary for a second to touch on the expansion’s audio goodness. The music in S3 consists mostly of the same offerings from the original (along with a few nifty remixes – I love the “broken record” tune of the main theme), so I’ve got no major complaints, but the available tune selection seemed to be a little limited and was a bit more subdued this time. Maybe it was just me, but some of the cool drama from the original seemed to be missing, and several of my particularly favorite tunes were a constant no-show throughout the campaign. That aside, the only other new audio-related stuff brought to the table by the expansion is main character dialogue (all of the old voices from the original squad are still there in the same manner), which is presented through fairly well-acted lines, there’s just my earlier complaint about a lack of the same variety seen in the original, plus the fact that the available voice sets are really, really cliché. For the male side, you can either make your killing machine sound like a perfectly typical war-grizzled veteran, or something resembling Clint Eastwood, and the female selection isn’t really much better. It’s not really all that bad, just a little surprising, and I wish more effort had gone into them. You don’t have to pull a copycat routine to make your characters sound good; just quit hiring drunks found in back alleys to do the speaking, and write some decent dialogue for a change.