Hammer & Sickle
A single-player post-WWII strategy title… again.
Tags: Hammer & Sickle Categories: PC Reviews, Reviews
Posted by Craig "American Idle" Hansen on Feb 14th, 2006
| Title | Players | ||
|---|---|---|---|
| Hammer & Sickle (title page) | 1 | ||
| Developer | Publisher | Genre | Online |
| Strategy | No | ||
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OK, stop me if you’ve heard this before. Hammer and Sickle is a post-WWII, Cold War title in which… Umm, gimme another second here. I didn’t say WWII, I said post-WWII. Anyway, you play as a Russian spy sent to the West to walk around West Germany. Hah! Surprised you there, didn’t I? Actually, the surprise is more to the credit of CDV, who go back to the WWII well, but with a slightly fresh twist. Unfortunately, the concept, compelling though it is, consists of just about the only thing in Hammer and Sickle that is remotely appealing.
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To keep it focused, Hammer and Sickle tasks you with trying to get past the infamous Checkpoint Charlie and into the west to gather intelligence on the West for good ol’ Joe Stalin. However, even Stalin’s KGB was kinder to folks that this game, which claims to offer a graphics engine that’s friendly to PCs as lowly as 1 GHz, but still runs slow and clunky even on PCs that live up to their preferred specs of 2.2 GHz. And having a RAM footprint of 256 MB is supposed to be sufficient, but without at least 1 GB of RAM, the game’s gonna lag no matter how nice your graphics accelerator card might be.
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If Hammer and Sickle were a 60 fps bleeding-edge shooter, such specs might be understandable. That’s not the case, however; Hammer and Sickle is pure turn-based strategy, a genre that ought to go lighter on the ol’ system specs, but in this case doesn’t. Perhaps the specs should simply be raised, but another possibility is that the game simply wasn’t given enough time in quality control before being unleashed on the public; hey, what do you expect from a $20 budget title?
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Well, one thing to expect is a game that isn’t such a headache to play. From the opening obstacle/training course through the final mission, Hammer and Sickle is a game that simply takes a long, long time to do anything. CPU turns take quite a bit of patience to sit through, since the game takes nearly as long as you might in the early going to decide on strategy and moves, not even counting the time for them to play out on-screen. An early mission in which you must use a distraction to slip into the West is a great example.
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The big distraction that allows you to get past Checkpoint Charlie is that your Russkie comrades decide to roll a tank up to the gate, nearly causing an international incident but allowing you the freedom to cut through the fence and slip into West Germany while everyone’s attention is elsewhere. It’s a nice concept but the sequence, mid-mission, in which the tank rolls up, story sequences play and guards from both sides move out of their normal patrol positions takes so much time to play out, you could easily leave, heat up some microwave pizza, make some hot chocolate and come back before it’d come ‘round to your turn again.
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Oh, and that idea about cutting through the fence to get past Checkpoint Charlie? That’s more of a hint on how to beat that early mission than the game will offer you. The first time you attempt the mission, you’re likely to get shot before the tank even rolls, since even East Germany patrols don’t know you’re there and on their side. You have no idea what the distraction will be until the first time the tank roll-up sequence takes place. And then there’s the experimentation involved with figuring out how the hell you’re supposed to get over a fence when you can’t climb it. Only after stumbling across some wire cutters in my inventory, which I was never told were there, did I figure out how to solve that mission.
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If it were one mission, that’d be a minor annoyance; but Hammer and Sickle consistently never really tells you what you’re supposed to do or how you’re supposed to do it. Sure, there’s more than one way to complete each mission, but open-ended game play is no excuse for poor game design. It would be an improvement, at least, if you were given a genre-standard logbook that lists your current objectives, but even a head-scratching-saving feature such as that is MIA here. And let’s not even get into all the poorly-proofread script, which is full of typos; not to mention the voice acting, which doesn’t always feature an appropriate accent.
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The combat engine, once you experiment around enough to figure it out, isn’t that bad; what is bad is that you’re typically alone and grossly outnumbered. I’m a fan of games that offer a respectable challenge level, but Hammer and Sickle just simply stacks the deck against you to a ridiculous degree; this isn’t survival horror, so having something close to enough ammo and weapons to take out the dozen or so enemies you have to kill to accomplish this mission or that objective would seem to make some sense, but the game simply isn’t well-balanced enough to be relied upon for that kind of common-sense feature.
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In the end, Hammer and Sickle makes it clear that it’s only a $20 game for a reason; no one would ever pay $50 for a game this poorly slapped-together. It’s unfortunate because there’s not many WWII games out there with a fresh premise; Hammer and Sickle has a slightly-fresh premise, all right … it just doesn’t have much of anything else that it takes to formulate an enjoyable gaming experience.
| What Works | Score |
|---|---|
| + The premise of playing as a Cold War Russian spy in the West hasn’t been done to death, at least. | 3.3 |
| What Doesn't | |
|
– The graphics and framerate – The error-laden script – The poor voice acting – The nearly non-existent mission briefings – The silly way the game is overbalance against you |
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| Under the Shrink-wrap | |
| Within a couple hours of playing, you’ll want to take a sledgehammer to Hammer and Sickle. | |
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Tags: Hammer & Sickle
Posted by Craig "American Idle" Hansen on Feb 14th, 2006 and is filed under PC Reviews, Reviews. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can post a comment, or trackback from your own site.
