Operation Darkness Demo

[Gabriel]

I just tried the demo for Operation Darkness. I want to share my thoughts and see how others viewed it.

 

Operation Darkness is a square grid turn based tactical RPG with a World War II mixed with supernatural theme. That's a decent way to start. The majority of TRPGs are Tolkien-through-the-lens-of-anime themed, so it's good to see something with a little different coat of paint.

 

The demo starts off on the wrong foot straight out of the troop transport. Instead of immediately putting you in a scenario, it begins with a message that you have learned new skills and you need to equip them. I guess it's good the game showed me it's menu system right off the bat, but it wasn't the first thing I was interested in. And doing the menial labor of skill equipping put me in a sour mood before I had even begun.

 

After fumbling around for a bit, I reached the battle. I'm supposed to do something or other. As far as I'm concerned, I'm just killing random nazis. The next flaw becomes apparrent. The game looks like a PS2 game. I wasn't expecting a graphical extravaganza, but this was a big let down. Stuff like this was acceptable early on for the 360, but we've passed the grace period. Now it's just disgraceful and lazy.

 

The next thing which becomes apparrent is the map is HUGE. Since this is a WW2 game, ranged weapons are the norm, and the game gives you lots of space to run around in. This is a flaw because the screen can't even display your guys' movement range all on the same screen, much less the location of your targets. Everything is wildly spread out, and it took me a long time just to traverse enough of the battlefield so I could shoot at something.

 

After that the next thing I noticed was the camera. I haven't seen camera controls this bad since the earliest days of the 3D era. There's no zoom option. Objects constantly block the view to the character you're trying to observe. Trying to get a good camera angle is a lost cause as the thing pitches around almost out of control and always seems to default to a view which allows you to see the most limited area possible.

 

Quite a few months ago, I complained about the camera in the Dungeons & Dragons Tactics PSP game. I found myself desiring something as good as the D&D camera for Operation Darkness. Think of the most broken camera you've ever seen in gaming, and Operation Darkness's is worse. I got a headache just from struggling with the thing.

 

A couple of characters have a tranformation ability. This allowed one to turn into a Werewolf. I thought this was pretty neat, but really only made the character a bit tougher. The thing I thought odd was the now werewolf formed character still had to run around and shoot people. I had been expecting the character to become a melee machine and ended up having to simply use his revolver. It was more than a bit anti-climactic.

 

In terms of mechanics, the game was novel for featuring a whole cast a characters with extremely long range (for a TRPG) weaponry. In addition, all the characters weapons affected areas instead of single targets, so it would be possible to spray down clusters of targets. The bad news keeps coming though, because the size of the map and the dispersion of the enemies meant that long range failed to speed the game and the weapons still could only catch a single target in their area of effect. Beyond that, it was a vanilla TRPG with the typical extra detail of choosing a facing after movement.

 

On the good side, there are tutorials, but they aren't programmed and they are skippable. Strangely, there were tutorials for the moron-simple things like moving and targeting an enemy, but not for navigating the early menus, starting a mission, and equipping skills. This is strange because those latter tasks are much less apparrent than moving and shooting.

 

The main problem with the game (beyond those above) is finding your enemies and shooting them. Or rather, its being able to get some idea of the position of your enemies in relation to you and what obstacles are in the way. The game helps a bit by allowing you to cycle targets with the shoulder buttons. This is because the enemies are, on average, so far away and the lack of camera controls makes it impossible to find them or see them. This makes the game feel very abstract, and reduces the feeling of involvement.

 

When all was said and done, the demo didn't leave me with a positive impression at all. If I were to buy this one, it would only be for fanaticism and completeness. I hate to say this, but I think Atlus should have left this thing under the rock where they found it.

 

Gah. Sure have been a lot of bad games lately. Soul Calibur IV better kick butt and take names.