Often a good game can be overlooked and severely underrated, and this title published by Atlus is one of them. This tactical strategy RPG may not be as polished as players desired but still it is a good game for fans of the genre.
Vampires, Lycans, Zombies and other supernatural creatures all taking part into World War II, welcome to Operation Darkness!
Story
Edward Kyle joined the army to avenge the death of his family and fiancee after an air raid, injured in the battlefields of north africa he is saved by a blood transfusion from James Gallan, ignoring that event would change his fate forever.
A bit after that he is transferred to a special unit code named Wolf Pack, there you met Gallant once again and the rest of the unit including Lycans, a pyroquinetic and a reanimator.
As the lycan blood flows stronger in your body you start to change and learn about your new powers, powers that will come handy, as the Nazi armada have their own supernatural troops including Vampires and hordes of Zombies.. oh mama!
The game it's a Turn Based Strategy RPG
Gameplay
The game its a turn based strategy RPG, in which you can equip your troops with a nice variety of weapons. You can either buy weapons, ammunition and healing items or loot from dead bodies in the battlefields, you have a fair amount of weapons to pick from including knifes, grenades, guns, rifles and bazookas from both the british and german army (basically you loot these).
Having 5 slots for weaponry and 5 more for healing and ammo comes pretty handy, yet you must be wise to decide what you will carry into the battlefields.
5 Slots for weapons and 5 for ammunition and healing item
You can select characters from the Wolf Pack or generic soldiers you recruit, the generic soldiers have default and far from impressive stats, but is good to have a couple to fill spots in the different missions. Unlike the members of the Wolf Pack, recruited soldiers cannot be recovered if they are not revived before a mission is completed by using your reanimator, so keep an eye if you devote the time to level up a couple of them.
The members of the Wolf Pack have different stats, so give the members the weapons most suited for them, some may be able to carry a bazooka but will make them slower, something you want to avoid. Strategize your moves and team members is a must to beat the many missions in the game.
Germans have surprises awaiting, supernatural boo.. er, omg vampires!
Downsides
Some levels can be challenging and trully unforgiving, this could easily lead to frustration. specially as missions can take a long time to be completed, maps are big and the team can be split all over the place so can be truly frustrating when you die after an hour trying to complete a stage.
Personally this made me think with more care my strategy but i see where people come from when they feel frustrated by having shared slots for healing items and ammunition as it takes time to complete a mission and by having a single member of the Wolf Pack dying is a huge waste of time.
Sometimes healing items are gone really fast specially if more than one enemy decide to gang you, and not every corpse you find will have a healing item to loot.
The camera can be terrible, of course the first and most common complain of the game, yes it bad and it is annoying, still not something to make you quit playing the game compared to the challenging factor, the question here is, why they never released a patch to fix some of these problems?
The demo of the game, jesus where do i start, wonder why they picked a stage that need around 15 turns to start having a glimpse of battle?! this demo was something that made many avoid the game, imagine a player getting the demo and snoring to death before they can even fight, of course that player will tell friends the game is bad and boring, seriously the person in charge of the demo deserves a boot to the head.
Your lycan powers will help you defeat your enemies, use them wisely.
Overall
Definitely the game feels unpolished and unfinished, at least is what i believe. Movie reels with footage from World War II between missions do offer a nice touch and add character to the story, excellent soundtrack.
Good ideas and elements are here and probably with more time under development or updates and patches this title could have survived the test of time and maybe, just maybe become a fairly good rival for games of the genre like Valkyria Chronicles.
Definitely a game mainly for die hard fans of the genre that don’t mind a challenge. The title is available on Games on Demand in the Xbox Live Marketplace, but i do advice to search for a good deal over Ebay or Amazon, the game can be found for cheap there, even brand new.
We give this game a 6.5 out of 10
~Mario
