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You’re crouched in a bush beside your favorite red-headed Scottish sniper watching thru the foliage. Finally you spot him, the last SS officer in the Nazi camp. You nudge the sniper and she gives a slight nod raising her rifle and zeroing in on him. With a crack she fires putting a shot straight thru him and he falls to the ground turning the snow red. Well, that’s that…wait…
Three blue circles appear on the ground and you groan to yourself as you see two squads of zombies and a squad of bloodclan vampires appear.
Crap, so much for this being an easy mission.
That’s the idea behind Operation Darkness, Atlus’s new turn-based strategy game for the 360. The idea shows great promise, however Atlus dropped the ball greatly on it. (Ok, Japanese studio Success developed the game and Atlus just imported it to the US)
The first major issue, and perhaps one of the most frustrating, is that the camera control is HORRID. It is difficult to control the angle and zoom. Losing site of your own allies is easily done, but keeping track of your enemies and making sure that you have a line of site on them is near impossible.
This brings up the next issue, unlike many other such turn-based strategy games you cannot start to move a character and then see their attack range or cancel the move when you realize that you don’t want to move there. Once you select an action, that’s it it’s done. Now I can kind of understand that, however when you combine that with the fact you tend to lose track of whom and what are where, it sucks.
Another glaring issue I have with this game is the graphics. You are putting this game on the Xbox 360 so let’s make use of some of its graphical capabilities. The graphics look like a mid-aged Xbox game, not a newer 360 game. During the “cut-scenes” between story battles you get a fixed 2d picture background with fixed images for the characters, rather like cardboard cutouts or comic book pictures.
Ok so enough ranting about the bad, even though I’m sure I can come up with more, and see what the game does have good … um … It has 2 characters on your team that are werewolves ... umm … the battle system itself is actually pretty good … umm … did I mention the werewolves (Yes that’s one of the main reasons I bought it :P ), Oh and you have a character that is pretty much Jack the Ripper!. Yea, ok, I’ll be honest if your really want to try the game just try to borrow it from a friend or rent it.
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