It's part of the very best games I've played this year, right there with No More Heroes, Hot Shots Golf OOB, Lost Odyssey, Grand Theft Auto IV, Metal Gear Solid 4. If you like SRPGs you simply HAVE to check it out!
Reviews in the vein of 2/3/4 out of 10 are pure insanity.
If you're a strategist, this is for you. And the camera isn't as bad as it appears, you get used to it pretty quickly, even if on occasion the zooms are pretty bad. Eventually you end up really liking its dynamic style. The one thing that is a bit more nagging is that there are an absolutely huge amount of hexes on every map, and scrolling over them to pick the spot that you want takes ages. However as nearly all weapons are guns, maps need to be so huge.
Even at that, also even with the bad visuals (Xbox in HD but who cares?), the game is pure, pure fun. World War II with guns and werewolves simply cannot be a bad combination. Having a SRPG relying so heavily (almost exclusively in fact) on guns and rocket launchers instead of melee weapons and spells is actually quite refreshing. You aren't aiming for a single spot anymore if you don't use a sniping gun; most of the time you have some sort of machine gun and when you aim you target a few hexes, and thus you can kill a bunch of nazis in one shot.
Also, taking out tanks with rocket launchers never gets old. Blasting away dozens of undead nazi soldiers that arise out of the blue is always exciting too!
As far as the story goes, it reminds me a lot of Front Mission, albeit with more cheese, less character development and no locales to visit. Oddly enough, this isn't even a bad combo! Most of the music is also some weird form of techno, and it helps you not to take this game seriously.
Sure, if one of the main characters dies the game is over, but you don't play Fire Emblem with significant characters who've died, do you? On top of that you can load them with a bunch of healing packs so that they don't die when shot.
In my last fight I thought I'd won the map, there was this big tank with like 200 HPs left, I just needed ONE tiny little missile shot and it was done... and then the tank played and it ran over the main character, killing him and ending the game, as you can't use an healing pack in that case.
I already can't wait to get back to it. Operation Darkness kicks ass, try it out for yourself and spread the word!
