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Operation Darkness [X360]

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    Operation Darkness [X360]

    This is a thread I didn't want to start...first play thread are based on first impressions, and they build up as long as you play, but I didn't want to give bad advertisment to this game until I was sure that it deserved it (the opposite, which often happens in threads I start, is completely fine; oh, the irony), especially when Sketcz is so adamant that the game was misunderstood by the critic.
    Anyway, Operation Darkness: British werewolves against Nazi vampires during WWII. Sounds cool? It does, but unfortunatly the game was only released, region-locked, in Japan and North America. Owners of Japanese X360s, don't despair, set your consoles to English and the game won't feature any Japanese text, only voices; even with Japanese settings, most of the interface is in English, so no language barrier.
    The quality of the translated script is not constant though: dialogues and story intermissions sound like the work of a professional translator, loading screens have a much more broken grammar.

    The game plays out as a turn-based strategy game, where faster characters act first (and multiple times) before slower ones. Characters' speed is affected by a character's stats and how much equipment he/she is carrying; all characters have five slots for weapons and five slots for items (extra magazines, healing items), more than enough to carry the whole team through a mission, especially when you can pillage enemy corpses for more.
    Movement is carried out on a tiled battleground, dotted with objects that act as cover, which will in turn influence the line of sight (LOS) of your character. The game drills into you that you should jump from cover to cover in the first missions, and I quite dig the idea! However this is not executed excessively well, as there is no indication on how an object will affect your LOS: lamp posts and trees (represented by a very thin cylindrical body) completely block LOS, as do benches. Other objects, like bushes, appear to give a defensive bonus without blocking LOS, but how LOS is defined is nebulous, especially when considering how an object looks. There have been some occasions that corpses (not zombies, but dead soldiers lying prone on the ground) would block LOS to a target three squares away, so I think that everything completely blocks LOS, but the game is never really constant on that, essentially destroying my hopes of using the environment to give my team a tactical advantage.

    All weapons have different properties that go beyond simple stats: the Sten gun has a linear spread, the German Mk90 has a "C" spread, machineguns have wider spreads, explosives have a 4x4 area blast (including a "shrapnel area") and so on, though you'll soon find yourself using German guns due to their higher firepower and larger spread. Guns can be aimed at the ground, not just as targets, to fully use their different firing specs, so no real complain on weapon characterisation. I haven't reached the point where magic, werewolves, or vampires use their powers, but based on how normal weapons are represented, I'm quite optimistic.

    Despite the excellent armory, tactics in Operation Darkness tend to be very shallow: I'm only at the beginning, and judging from what Sketcz continually says (

    "keep the medic alive"

    ), things might change, thus leading to my opening statement; but this is my experience so far.
    After the introductory mission, you're given the Autocure skill: with it, a character below 20% will automatically use a healing item, no matter if it's his/her turn or situation. The first missions are over if any story-relevant character dies, so i guess there's permadeath in Operation Darkness, just like Fire Emblem. OK, I quite like it.
    The thing is that Autocure triggers even when a character is driven to 0HP or below, essentially giving everyone an extra health bar as long as they carry medikits. This saves the game from having to restart a mission after a lucky enemy shot, but it essentially feels like characters are invulnerable.
    For example, in the third mission, one of my characters stepped onto a mine. Mines aren't visible on the battlefield, there was no heads up about the in the briefing, and characters don't seem to have any tools to detect them even when standing right next to one. Anyway, the character was wounded, the mine should have killed him; Autocure triggers, character continues to his destination. The spent medikit was recovered from the corpse and I was able to secure a heavy machinegun with which I mown down some enemies.
    Uuuuh...what was the purpose of the mine? In fact, is there a purpose in carrying reserve magazines when you can stuff your characters with medikits and discard weapons when empty, as the German soldiers have better guns than yours?

    This is why I wanted to wait to post impressions on this game, a lot of its mechanics do not fit together, but there are hints that they will once everything is in place.

    Something that will never change, however, is the camera. Yes, Sketcz, I know that you have all the time in the world to position the camera the way you want, but why should I be bothered with it? A bit tangent, but ever since games went 3D and pads got a second analog stick, developers gave players the ability to move the camera and sometimes forgot to code a decent behaviour...because the player can move it. Sometimes it's better not to give camera control to the player and stick with a fixed point of view.
    Aiming the camera is hard, and a bird's eye view in addition to the minimap, that would remove the need to scour the battlefield to see where priority targets are: during the enemy turn, the camera goes wild, and in certain environments, you would hear footsteps with the camera pointing to an immobile tank, drastic changes between enemies' point of view, and, my favourite, a 180 degrees camera roll to follow someone's bullets. I would say that the camera is serviceable (yeah, I pointed out all the bad things and what drove me mad during the first hours), but could have really used more refinement.

    I can't deny that I had my share of fun in these opening hours, though. Jumping from corpse to corpse and using pillaged Panzerfausts to blow up a Nazi vampire and his zombie army was fun, though I've been playing at most two missions per session, as I wasn't really drawn into the game. However, when zombies and other supernatural beings start to pop up, things get more interesting, so I just need to wait for the game to unfold. Operation Darkness also lacks the ability to save mid-mission, even one-time suspend saves, and I wonder how much this will hurt in later missions.

    Technically, the game is lackluster. Character models are decent, but animations fell "hurried", and weapons don't seem to sit well with most characters. Environments are very bland and shrouded in an everlasting fog, which makes them even more depressing and uninteresting. The interface is very clean, but could have used a bit more polish, everything seems confined in its own menu with too many interactions to switch between them.
    The music...ugh, the music. I think it's the most generic music I've ever heard in any videogame; probably the "composer" in the credits is the guy that chose the tunes from a generic library the developers had lying around. It's mostly fast-paced techno/dance/electro/whatever-I-do-no-like-the-genre played at very low volume by default and you actually have to pay a lot of attention to hear it, but every track seems to loop after every 5 seconds, so good thing that the music is almost inaudible.


    Right now I would say that Operation Darkness is average and doesn't stand out among turn-based games for extremely god or extremely bad things, it all balances out in a rather uninspiring way. For now. I'll play more to see how things to go on.

    #2


    I am tremendously pleased that my writing about this game encouraged someone else to play it.

    I wish I wasn't so busy, so I could replay from the start alongside you.

    In terms of interesting things happening, that's only in the story missions. Wait until you unlock magic spells, and Van Helsing woman. Her special attach can kill undead enemies in a single hit. Have you got the ability to turn into a werewolf yet? Their physical attacks are insane. It's possible to kill a tank with just one punch (a good tactic if you know it will blow up first time).

    Have you reached the mission in France, in a courtyard, where a whole bunch of zombies pop up?

    Be sure to make use of Cover Attack and Joint Attack.

    Cover attack is where anyone who is in range will attack an enemy.
    Join attack is where anyone in range will join this attack.
    It's possible to lay a massive web, whereupon every enemy is cut to shreds!

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      #3
      Cracking game if you like 'shining force' style turn based rpgs, or like military ww2 weaponary. Must go back to it at some point in the future.

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        #4
        I've got this. I must try it again.

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          #5
          Originally posted by briareos_kerensky View Post
          Something that will never change, however, is the camera. Aiming the camera is hard, and a bird's eye view in addition to the minimap, that would remove the need to scour the battlefield to see where priority targets are.
          Perhaps I misunderstood this, but...

          There is a minimap. I recall you push Y to activate it. In fact, I *think* there might even be two scales to the mini-map. I used the minimap ALL the time. I also think it shows the position of mines. But I could be imagining that. It's been a while since I played it.



          Also, scavenging is usually a good tactic. I never bought a grenade once, because I just stole them all.

          Soon though you'll want 5x ammo packs, so the guff the soldiers carry is useless.

          Also, MAKE SURE EVERYONE HAS AUTOCURE. This **** goes to 11 fast. You don't want to die from a tank shell to the face.

          Plus, my take on it:


          I'm pretty sure I took those screens using Cavalcade's American 360 and all.

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            #6
            Good reason to avoid all this 'metacritic' guff and actually play the game for yourself....

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              #7
              Originally posted by Sketcz View Post
              There is a minimap. I recall you push Y to activate it. In fact, I *think* there might even be two scales to the mini-map. I used the minimap ALL the time. I also think it shows the position of mines. But I could be imagining that. It's been a while since I played it.
              I use the minimap to get my bearing during movement, but I still don't think it's enough to get a good situation awareness, especially when you want to know the kind of enemy I'm facing...you know, not getting in the line of fire of 6 machinegunners or leave the officers for last, as they tend to carry just a gun and a magazine. A more zoomed out point of view would have gone a long way in making camera management less cumbersome...it's not like I always want to see all playable characters in their eyebrow-lacking glory

              Everyone already has autocure and I've taken some tank shells to the face (poor Cordelia), but I don't think this is something beneficial to the game, I've been able to clear a mission by just using bayonets and a sniper, pillaging corpses for medikits to keep my invincibility going. Now I've got werewolves and if I don't even need to keep anti-tank rockets on characters...well, I hope the story will go bonkers, otherwise there won't be much strategy to talk about.
              Last edited by briareos_kerensky; 07-09-2013, 08:41.

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                #8
                If you're a fan of Mary Shelly, you should love a later mission.

                IMPORTANT TIP:
                Keep your soldiers LIGHT. Seriously, that machine gun may look nice, but the weight will slow down when your next turn is. Go in bare minimum, and scavenge. The only people who need heavy ordinance are your dedicated bazooka people, to mop up tanks. I use the two werewolves, since although carrying bazookas means they must wait a long time for their turn, becoming a werewolf gives them a major increase in movement range, making up for this.

                Once Cordelia has fire magic, don't give her any guns. Just a couple of medkits. Then use her as your main firestarter. With no weapons at all, she usually starts the mission. Move her to a pivot area then spam her fire attacks to take out tanks and tough enemies.

                Also, there's a secret character you can unlock, a robocop style robot, but it requires some work and is easy to miss. You should look that up in a FAQ, since his side story is a bit weird and sad. Poor guy...

                Comment


                  #9
                  Originally posted by Sketcz View Post
                  Keep your soldiers LIGHT.
                  Already doing that, Jude (IIRC) was overburdened and lagging behind everyone else and giving him just a rifle solved the problem.

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                    #10
                    Oh man, you're nowhere near any of the interesting story stuff yet.

                    Has Carmilla shown up yet? RAWR!



                    There's a really good mission where she summons a bunch of vampire stormtroopers. Be careful in that fight, there are roving mines which will take you out fast. Keep the doc light and mobile, and use heavy ordinance whenever you get the chance.
                    Last edited by Sketcz; 07-09-2013, 11:01.

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                      #11
                      I REALLY fancy this, right up my street- but no EU release saddens me. I swear I remember playing a demo of it, I assume I got it from the US live

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                        #12
                        No European release sadly which mean I doubt I'll ever play it shame as I do like Tactical RPGs and the 360 has a real lack of them. Thank the gods for XCOM getting a EU release on 360.

                        According to the very incorrect gamefaqs.com this got a EU games on demand release by Atlus in 2010. Sigh I release wish gamefaqs would double check it's information from time to time.

                        For Operation Darkness on the Xbox 360, the GameFAQs information page shows all known release data and credits.


                        Based on the look of some of the female characters I'm surprised there isn't a combat option to shag, what is it with Japanese designer and half naked women.

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                          #13
                          I started playing this a while back but was put off because I couldn't find an invert Y axis option. Does anyone know if there is such a thing in the game?

                          Comment


                            #14
                            Originally posted by plopboy View Post
                            I started playing this a while back but was put off because I couldn't find an invert Y axis option. Does anyone know if there is such a thing in the game?
                            No, there isn't. Driving me crazy as well.

                            Comment


                              #15
                              So did you guys finish this?

                              Anyone who knows me, knows I hate trophies/achievements, but over the weekend I replayed the last mission to get the Medal of Honour achievement.

                              This could actually be my favourite 360 game still. If I wasn't bogged down with the book I'd replay it, with the aim of having only a minimal load-out time, scavenging weapons off dead bodies. I did that for the last mission the 2nd time, and it was actually quite thrilling. I was getting multiple turns against the enemy because they were weighed down with portable rockets, while I had nothing. I'd then grab a grenade or rocket, use it, and my weight would be back down again.

                              Did I mention I met the guy behind this, Ken Ogura, while in Japan? Not a proper interview, I was interviewing his colleague but asked to be introduced, and then praised the game for five full minutes, going into all my favourite bits. Poor guy was almost in tears afterwards.

                              Such a good game. Maybe not good. But my kind of game. Filled with all the idiosyncrasies which I adore in my games.

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