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 (
), 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.
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 (
), 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.
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