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Question: What do you think about Hammer & Sickle?
90+ - Great - 1 (12.5%)
80-89 - Good - 2 (25%)
70-79 - Ok - 3 (37.5%)
60-69 - Mediocre - 1 (12.5%)
Less than 60 - Bad - 1 (12.5%)
Total Voters: 8

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Author Topic: Hammer & Sickle  (Read 10781 times)
rvdleun
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« on: February 12, 2008, 03:25:04 am »

Using the established rating guidelines, can you give your opinion on Hammer & Sickle?

Bought the game yesterday, played it for about 2-3 hours and I have to say that I'm intrigued with the concept so far. Story/dialogue-wise, I am somewhat getting into it, even though some of the text feels oddly translated at times. There seems to be a healthy dose of choice/consequence, the Cold War makes for a nice different setting than ye usual fantasy/sci-fi fare, and I'm really enjoying the turn-based combat.

I haven't played enough yet to get a proper 'feel' of the game, but there's definately something interesting hidden in it. The combat is bloody brutal at times, and I've heard that one misstep can doom the campaign 2 hours later into the game. Not sure how I feel about that, but all-in-all... so far, the game has an interesting premise. I hope it manages to keep my interest.


Unfortunately, I can't play it on my notebook running Windows Vista, because of the bloody Starforce driver being incompatible. Is there a patch for this? This is mostly out of curiosity, as I'm gonna try an' install XP on that notebook as soon as I can.
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Morbus
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« Reply #1 on: February 12, 2008, 04:30:10 am »

Starforce? 60-

Also, it's at least freakingly ironic that the game doesn't run on vista because the copy protection, not the game, is incompatible... incredibly stupid too...
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Fritharik
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« Reply #2 on: February 12, 2008, 05:21:25 am »

Hell, I have a copy of Spellforce 2 taunting me from my desk because Aspyr extended it's equal opportunity employment to it's quality assurance department, resulting in a gaggle of retards who failed to notice they shipped the game without the CD-Key in the box. Which means I'm now caught in a bureaucratic tangle between three companies, each refusing to take responsibility and referring me to the others. I assume I'll have just as much fun trying to authenticate that I made the mistake of purchasing this game, instead of ever more attractive option of pirating it.

Of course, it wouldn't be the game industry we know and love if it wasn't populated by people who failed out of all other walks of life, be it business-school drop-outs or idiots who can't perform reasonable quality assurance.
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Priapist
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« Reply #3 on: February 12, 2008, 07:38:51 am »

I went with "OK", mainly because being built on the Silent Storm engine means that combat is really enjoyable, and choosing to talk your way out of it makes the game significantly less enjoyable. Still, if you ignore the less than stellar "RPG" additions, it's basically a nice non-linear Silent Storm expansion. Incidentally, if anyone knows a way to get it running under Vista, I'm all ears.
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Vandal delle 3V
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« Reply #4 on: February 17, 2008, 08:01:48 am »

haven't played H&S yet, but i've been a huge fan of silent storm, for the simple fact that it had a great feature that all games are missing: totally destroyable environment (besides obvious undestroyable items such as antinulcear bunker walls lol).
turn based combat always turned me on Grin
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Paranoid Jack
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« Reply #5 on: February 20, 2008, 01:24:08 am »

Double D'oh!   Huh?

1) I still have my unopened copy of H&S sitting there taunting me. I bought it purely as a way of showing support in part to help Nival fund the next S2/S3 game and to show them turn-based games are still selling so don't stop making them. I love S2 and have played a good part of S3 on two occasions though I have yet to finish the add-on/sequel.

2) I just built this system and the main OS is Vista 64. I know...  I know. I wanted to try Vista one more (read as: last) time before totalling giving up hope on ever getting my money's worth out of that purchase. And I started thinking about installing H&S to finally give it a try. On a side note... AoC looks fantastic in DirectX 10.     Evil

So maybe after I iron out a few more wrinkles...  get this system configured exactly as I like it. And finally over clock this Q6600. Then I'll install H&S and try to figure out how to get it to run on Vista. I'll post back here if I find a way. But since I was planning on making this a dual boot system I may just go the easy route and install it on XP.
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rvdleun
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« Reply #6 on: February 20, 2008, 08:22:11 am »

In the end, I had to resort to a no-CD crack to get past the Starforce. There doesn't seem to be any other way.
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Balor
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« Reply #7 on: March 02, 2008, 12:54:28 pm »

It's one of rare games where different decisions during game can provide you with REALLY different playthough experience. I mean, like COMPLETELY different.
Also, one of rare game where your inactions can bite you in the ass as your actions and you have to think and act like a real spy, not a psycho killer to accomplish your objectives.
Statchecks are present in dialogues, too - better not make your int as a dump stat if you want more elegant solutions to challenges presented... and it is challenging enough already! You will have your share of combat, don't worry. Unless you crank difficulty sliders all the way towards 'easy', it ranges from 'challenging' to 'outright suicidal'. Fortunately, latter is usually avoidable combat... and more often then not an indication that you screwed up heavily somewhere.
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Sapienti Sat.
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