Maybe, somewhere way back in the original source material it all made sense. Maybe back in the very first Night Watch novel there was a vibrant, gripping world just begging to be turned into a game. But somewhere along the way in translating the books into movies and the movies into games and the Russian into English and the strategic depth of the Silent Storm game engine into the stripped-down letdown version of it here, a whole lot of something was lost in translation, not just falling into the cracks but plummeting deep into a seemingly bottomless chasm before being buried under a layer of fishhooks and sheep intestines just in case anyone was foolish enough to reach in to see if there was anything worth salvaging. Spare yourself the barbs and infections—it’s not worth the effort.

Doom of Gloom

Night Watch is based upon a series of Russian films (in turn based upon a series of books) detailing an uneasy, centuries-old truce between the forces of good and evil. The movies are the obvious source material here as clips from the films randomly intrude upon gameplay with all grace and nuance of a coughing fit. While borderline incoherent, the movies at least had a flashy sense of style to rescue them—the game stubbornly clings to that incoherence but abandons any sense of style.

To be fair, that source material is responsible for much of the game’s hamstringing. The forces of evil are limited to evil mages, werewolves, and vampires while the forces of good (the side you’re forced to play) are limited to good mages and, uh, silvery werewolves. Worse, most of the action takes place in a parallel dimension known as the Gloom which sounds all cool and exciting right up until the very first second you send your characters in and discover the Gloom is a carbon copy of the real world as seen through a muddy blue-grey filter. Smeared with Vaseline. It’s not just ugly, it’s downright hard on the eyes and roughly 90% of the game takes place in this ocular hellscape.

Running on Empty

The vast majority of the game occurs on large maps packed with bad guys you’ll be asked to kill in what was intended to be tense, turn-based tactical combat; unfortunately, the once-mighty Silent Storm engine, a game engine that truly created a wealth of tactical options, has been so whittled down that your actual strategic choices range from few to not a lot. This liability goes far beyond losing the ability to choose stances for your team. That’s the least of it. The worst change is the inability to move your party as anything other than a team during the periods between battles—this not only means you cannot set up ambushes or just deploy your characters intelligently but the pathfinding (still miserable three years post Silent Storm’s release) results in parties being vulnerably spread out virtually every time a battle is triggered. You can get around that by making the game even more plodding and have your group take mincing steps around the maps. Yeah, that’s a good time.

Boredom—the Vampire Killer

Most battles boil down to focusing your party on one guy, quickly dispatching him, then moving on to the next one. It doesn’t help that there are just three character classes: enchanter (a buffer/debuffer type who can create some power-ups); mage (the only useful one of the lot, mages cast—yep—spells); and shapeshifter (the aforementioned silvery werewolf that I found to be much more effective in an unshifted form).

Worse, combat is prolonged by excruciatingly lengthy and dully conceived spell animations—all of them, of course, further washed-out by that charming blue-grey Gloom filter. These conflicts are the meat of the game and they could have been so much livelier and engaging if it didn’t take every character a month and a half to simply eat an apple or cast a simple fireball. Again, the game fiction aids and abets the problem by positing a world where the forces of good shoot bad buys with flashlights and whack them over the head with fluorescent light bulbs. This may work in Russian and in print but in a game it just comes off as lame and silly.

All this is doubly frustrating because occasionally the planets align and the battles are fun. Rewarding even. Characters level up at a satisfying, well-balanced pace, opening up a large menu of spells and abilities to choose from (if only what you chose ultimately mattered more than it does). It’s a testament to just how strong the now-feeble heart beating in the once-robust Silent Storm engine was that you can still find a measure of delight in dispatching a group of enemies in a passably clever way. If only there had been more of that, so much more…and if only the final, horribly unfair battle had undergone the least bit of play balancing.

Whatchoo Say, Olga?

And the Idioglossia Award for most incomprehensible game of 2006 goes to…well, you guessed it. There’s better acting in a preschool production of Equus than in this game. As atrocious as the voice-acting is—and it is unbelievably godawful—the writing is worse. The plot makes no sense and characters frequently drift into ill-conceived attempts at humor which are truly nothing more than banalities that stop just short of discussing shoelacing theory. Attempts at drama come in sub-Ed Wood brilliancies such as, “I tried to shoot you so, you know, I’m sorry too.” It’s entertaining in that same “I can’t believe this” way a televised autopsy is.

But you don’t need an autopsy to figure out what killed this game, a game that sounds so good on paper (a tactical vampire-killing RPG using the Silent Storm engine—yes!) but is so disappointing on the hard drive. What killed it? Just about everything in it.

Article by: Robert Coffey
Video Produced by: Michael Leffler