Hammer Sickle PC

With an acclaimed codeveloper like Nival Interactive and an intriguing premise set during the dawn of the Cold War in the 1940s, you wouldn't think that Novik & Co.'s Hammer & Sickle could lose. Nival certainly knows this territory, with the excellent squad-based WWII sim Silent Storm on its list of recent credits. And who could resist such an interesting, unexplored setting? It's easy to see why so many squad-combat fans were eagerly awaiting this game's arrival in stores. Unfortunately, it has proven to be a bit of a miscalculation. Somewhere between conception and execution Hammer & Sickle went offtrack. Way offtrack. All of the great promise inspired by both Nival's involvement and this innovative setting has been wasted in a game that is inept on every level. Story, interface, difficulty, graphics, voice acting, music, and just about everything else, seem to have been slapped together at the last minute and rushed out with no attention to quality control.

Even the promising setting has been ruined. You play a Soviet spy snooping around West Germany just as the Cold War really starts to get going. The year is 1949, so say hello to Checkpoint Charlie, loads of international espionage, and escalating tension between the US and the USSR. But the plot veers away from historical reality after setting the stage, with the introduction of a mysterious third party of suspiciously Nazi-like thugs bent on drawing both nations into a nuclear holocaust. So the tale turns from gritty Cold War thriller into a James Bond-style saga, which is a little clichéd and disappointing.

Even more distressing is the awful way that this superspy story is told. Nothing is set up properly, so you're always left wondering what's going on and where you're supposed to go next. Dialogue is spit out in such a random fashion that it seems like somebody cut every third line for brevity just before shipping the game. It begins with the very first mission, where you're told to contact Vaclav, deliver a proposal, and kill the guy if he doesn't like what he hears…without the benefit of a preamble explaining who you are, where you are, who Vaclav is, what this proposal is all about, and so on. Mission assignments rarely come with proper instructions, so the game is often incoherent. Also, the story branches at points that are almost totally imperceptible to the player. Kill the wrong people at the wrong time (mainly Allied soldiers and civilians).

Minimum:

 OS: Windows XP SP3

 Processor: 2 GHz Intel Dual Core Processor

 Memory: 2 GB RAM

 Graphics: NVIDIA GeForce 8800/ATI Radeon HD 2600 (256MB minimum)

 DirectX «: 9.0c

 Hard Drive: 10 GB HD space

 Sound: DirectX 9.0c compatible

Recommended:

 OS: Windows XP SP3/Vista/Windows 7

 Processor: 2.3 GHz Intel Quad Core Processor

 Memory: 3 GB RAM

 Graphics: NVIDIA GeForce GTX460/ATI Radeon HD 5850 (512MB minimum)

 DirectX «: 9.0c

 Hard Drive: 10 GB HD space

 Sound: DirectX 9.0c compatible