Operation Darkness is a strange alternate history WWII turn-based strategy game with zombies and werewolves. It's a pretty weird but by-the-numbers storyline told through text boxes with voice-over between campaign missions.
You control a squad of storyline characters and generic recruit characters using some pretty standard turn-based strategy controls. There are 3 groups of trigger commands that can be used to cause a character to take action when another ally moves, when anyone moves through an area, when an ally attacks, or when an enemy moves within your weapon range or attacks from within your weapon range. You can trigger your character to move or return fire. Some of the trigger actions can be chained together so that an ally's ambush trigger can trigger another ally's attack trigger and so on. Building these actions into your strategy is required to succeed in some of the harder missions.
There are melee weapons, small arms, sub-machine guns, machine guns, and anti-armor weapons. Some character can transform into alternate forms (werewolves..) or use SP (spirit points) to activate bonus skills or actions.
The bad news: the camera in not just bad, it's terrible. It makes the game unplayable. The horizontal rotation axis is reversed and there is no option to fix it. Scrolling the camera around in character-move mode also changes the viewing angle of the camera, usually in such a way as to give you as little view of the battlefield as possible. The camera in the character action issuing mode is zoomed in close up to the character. This in itself isn't terrible. Maybe they want to get you in closer to the action. The character models aren't particularly well built or textured though.
There is no zoomed out overhead camera view to use. You can't get a good view of the battlefield. There is a mini-map that consists of colored dots, about 300 pixels wide total. This is what you will be using to play the game. The battle camera stays zoomed in close to the player with the annoying inverted horizontal controls. It's very difficult to get a feel of each characters position on the battlefield relative to the enemies. As you can imagine this makes playing a turn based squad strategy game annoying.
The texturing, color and 3D model details are very rough. Enemies blend into the background and everything looks muddy and low-resolution. There isn't really much to say here. Some of the 2D hand painted portraits during the text box dialog scenes are pretty nice. I think this game may have been better served with a sprite isometric view instead of polygonal 3D with a terrible free-camera system.
Finally the line-of-sight calculations are broken. There is no clear visual indication of what you have line of sight to. Some things that appear to be clearly within your line of sight but they are not. You may have full view of an enemy which you can verify with the free camera but the game engine seemingly arbitrarily determines that LOS is broken and won't allow you to attack. It's a toss-up every time you move a unit into a new position, and this can be extremely deadly. Generally if a single campaign character dies you loose the battle and have to restart. That's a pretty harsh penalty after an hour of combat. Also, landmines. They're undetectable and instant death.
This game is just too broken to play.
