I will post my "review" here if I may.
It's a flawed game.
Let's start with the difficulty. If you are first playing this game you should know that THE HARD DIFFICULTY IS ESSENTIALLY IMPOSSIBLE. It looks like it wasn't playtested. In Silent Storm Sentinels (SSS) and Silent Storm (SS) there are 3 preset difficulty settings, the "Normal", "Hard" and "Impossible". In Hammer & Sickle (H&S) there are 3 preset difficulty settings, "Easy", "Normal", and "Hard". In terms of the bonuses enemies get (damage, VPs, APs) in H&S the easy difficulty is somewhere between the normal and hard in SSS, the normal difficulty is pretty much identical to the impossible difficulty, and the hard difficulty is a step above the impossible difficulty from SSS. Whereas on the impossible difficulty in SSS enemies get 100% damage, 100% VP, 100% AP and +1 level, on hard difficulty in H&S the enemies get 100% damage, 150% VPs, 150% APs and +2 level. Normal in H&S is already harder than impossible in SSS, but hard is a step above that. I have tried it, and basically to beat it you would need to get the right critical hits (motionless, stun) on all the enemies when you need them, so on some maps the luck required would be extreme. With great difficulty I managed to get to the mission after the convoy, and to beat that one would already require extreme luck. And even if you beat that one the luck required to beat later missions would be so extreme it's essentially impossible.
You can only really have a maximum of 4 characters (including your commander), you can get Sanders, Larry and Fidel. I know you can get Moshe, I did get him once but I don't remember how I did it and it may be the case that you can only get him when you are already on a way to a bad ending and you have agitated the army or the crime boss, which comes with problems of its own such as a chance to get ambushed. There may also be a hammer soldier which you can get if you choose the hammer side in the skirmish between hammer and sentinels, but saving him may be too difficult (at least on normal difficulty). On top of that Sanders, arguably your most important soldier, leaves before the 2 final missions which are some of the hardest (and the final mission might be the hardest), leaving you to beat them with just 3 characters and without a good medic.
Neither Conrad nor Sigmund can repair weapons in shop like you can in SSS despite it being implied that Conrad can, which makes it harder to stick with a single weapon for a long time without replacements (repairing weapons with weapon repair items reduces their maximum durability).
Compared to SSS, H&S introduces item weight. I guess they wanted to make the game more realistic, but given the rather mediocre strength of your characters some items, or combinations of items, are so heavy that you can't really use them without suffering significant AP reduction. For example heavy body armor is so heavy that Larry or Fidel would be able to use it only later in the game and only carrying some lighter gun such as an SMG, and using a machinegun with any kind of body armor is basically impossible without significant AP reduction, unless you take a starting character with high strength. It's appealing to give a machinegun to sanders but she lacks strength. Even if you have a character strong enough to carry a machinegun he won't be able to carry too much ammunition and you may need to make other soldiers carry ammunition for him, which is realistic but it reduces their carry limit. And a rocket launcher is even heavier than a machinegun, and rockets are even heavier than machinegun rounds.
Because of the weight restriction you may want to pick a starting character with high strength, maybe even to make a custom character with very high strength, a grenadier or soldier. It can be good to have a character able to wear heavy body armor and able to take at least some hits, and high strength lends itself to throwing grenades, which can deal a lot of damage.
However, in H&S the chance to get a critical hit was increased, so even if your soldier survives an SMG burst he will often be crippled, with Sanders being the only medic (and worse at it than a true medic due to lack of medic abilities) suffering a critical such as motionless or stun can be a death sentence.
Another change is the health and weapon damage. Unlike in the 2 previous games your VP limit basically doesn't increase as you level up, you can train like +1 VP per a few levels while in SS and SSS the limit increased by quite a few VPs per level. In H&S the character VPs depend entirely on strength, so you can have a level 19 grenadier with 14 strength and 190 VP while in SSS the same character could have over 300 VP. The strength cap rises slowly and each 1 point of strength gives 10 VPs.
On top of that the weapon damage output was increased, especially of the machineguns, so the characters are even easier to kill. The body armor blocks more damage in H&S than in SSS, but it doesn't reduce damage from hits to all body parts and now it has weight. In all Silent Storm games as your characters increase in level they gain abilities, but the enemies don't, and that is the main reason they get stronger compared to enemies. But at the same time the increase in accuracy due to shooting skill increase outpaces the increase in evasion, so later on both your soldiers and the enemies will be more accurate, you can snipe a head across the map but so can they. This means that later on in H&S, especially in the last mission, an enemy rifleman can snipe your character from across the map, hitting him in the head and killing him from full health. In SS and SSS it wasn't such a problem as in H&S because of higher VPs and lower weapon damage. And in H&S machineguns have much higher rate of fire. And you can't get panzerkleins. In SSS you could also use the exploit with VP boosting items where after the effect duration expired the character retained VPs over the maximum, but it doesn't quite work in H&S.
You can't train all the skills the same way as in SSS. A character trains shooting only if he hits the enemy and I haven't figured out a way to train hiding, but you can still train burst by shooting randomly, melee by hitting the ground or evasion by bleeding. Also, the skill penalty for taking damage is much more severe (even if the damage was healed, unless it was healed by the doctor). The addition of meth injection had the potential to be very fun and useful, it provides a way to increase APs. Unfortunately, it gives a very severe penalty to skills rendering it almost useless, unless in specific situations like a high throwing skill full health grenadier using it to run around and throw grenades, as throwing grenades requires lower skill than shooting.
The story has ok moments, but overall could be better and sometimes it can be unclear what are the consequences of an action. The journal entries are also not very descriptive.
One would think that with lower number of characters the missions would have less enemies in them, and in some missions there aren't that many, but in others there is still a lot, especially in the final (not bad ending) mission.
Overall, you are probably going to have more fun with Silent Storm Sentinels, or the original Silent Storm.
Post edited May 29, 2024 by rgi1
