Hammer & Sickle starts at the height of the Cold War. As a Russian commando, you are sent behind enemy lines to retrieve a contact, but it naturally all goes wrong. You find the contact group has just recently faced a firing squad of unknown soldiers and, armed with no real weaponry, it will take all of your skill to liberate yourself from the enemy's rifle sights, generally by liberating the enemy of their lives before you're pushing up daisies yourself!

Depending on what class you select, this can be extremely easy or exasperatingly difficult. My first attempt at this was with a Soldier class, where I had only a pickaxe and two fragmentation grenades, neither exactly the weapon of choice for taking on a half dozen armed soldiers. So I ended one with a pick to the head and stole his rifle, used the excellent ballistics system to shoot and kill the other three in the line up and fortunately survived the other two's shots due to their incompetence. As the soldier, I later went on to die unexpectedly when the one person who had info on where I could acquire forged documents was having a bad day and shot me in the head, which is always spectacularly fun.

My second attempt was with a Scout class, and being armed with a silenced submachine gun it was a simple task to dispatch them all. The second wave of the group was a more difficult task being a scout, as direct confrontation isn't the most ideal, so I had to use stealth to stay hidden and pick off enough of the enemy to be able to take care of the rest. This is where the AI and the civilians turn out to be the most colossal pain in the behind there has ever been.

I'll set the picture. You're crouched by an open bay window on the second story of the house. Below you are a dozen armed soldiers with a mix of rifles and submachine guns that could not only kill you, but likely remove the floor from under you as well; so attracting their attention is a very, very big mistake. Then as you're about to make a shot, the nice local moron group comes to pay a visit and subsequently ruin your cover, and this happens all the time with civilians. I dealt with this by throwing my grenades out the window and then ducking behind the civilians, who are surprisingly efficient body armour. However, when the game is about stealth, it becomes quite an amazingly big flaw to the game - as in a gameplay ruining one.

Hammer & Sickle uses the same game engine as Silent Storm, featuring a totally destructible environment and very cool weapons ballistics, currently unsurpassed by any other RPG. Unfortunately, this means it has carried over a lot of the problems (the civilians flocking to you is one of them) and a few have been fixed, but mainly the ones that weren't problems with the gameplay, like the shadow system getting confused. It also means that the graphics haven't changed, which isn't a good thing, but also isn't that bad a thing, as they were undoubtedly ahead of their time and still look good, with spectacular explosions and muzzle flashes.

For those who haven't played Silent Storm, you can control a total of six soldiers of multiple types. The combat plays out in Fallout style, with a few additional features, like climbing, and more importantly you control the entire group with dynamic controls. The camera is isometric to start with, but has followed a similar trend as Neverwinter Nights, where the camera is fully controllable and it is required to use this camera, or horrific mistakes can be made, like shooting through an explosive barrel.

Some newly enabled features in the game, which existed but weren't used in Silent Storm, is the use of money, meaning that you now have to buy your weapons. This is a nice feature, as it actually brings meaning to looting all of the bodies at the end of a killing spree. Another new feature is headshots, specifically the decapitation aspect, which is a very fun thing when used against the enemy, although it is the most annoying feature when used against you. If one of your men gets decapitated you can't bring them back, obviously, but as you have to recruit people that you meet, it means you'll be going it alone until then.

Another new feature is the time system, which is impressive but also brings complications and failings to the game. The stealth system now only works at night, which in my opinion is a major flaw in the game, as there isn't an efficient way of passing the time except for resting, which isn't something you want to spend your time doing. The redeeming quality of the time system is that it brings in the random events that actually determine the way the game goes.

For example, one of the missions you have to perform is a prison job. You have to break in and rescue an old friend and the first time I did this in the middle of the day and managed the rescue with him getting out in more or less one piece. This, with my luck, led to World War III, as the event was attributed (correctly) to a group of Russians. The second time I got lucky, as I started at 6am and used stealth until I got into the prison and shot everyone in the bottom room, got upstairs and killed everyone up there, then rescued my old friend with the rest taking little effort, as I sniped the British reinforcements from the roof. When leaving the mission, I got a news report with an interview from a German worker who was fixing the sewers and blamed it on the Jews and their "whores" (actually an American soldier in combat gear, easy mistake to make of course) which meant I got away without anyone knowing and avoided World War III, at least until the next mission, anyway.

The music is great and adds to the action of the game; it's a pleasant surprise to find consistently good music and it's quite heavy, giving an aptly stronger energy to the action that is definitely needed in a squad-based and turn-based RPG. The weapon effects are good and sound accurate, not that I've ever wildly fired a heavy machinegun into a wall before, but the best sounds of all are the booming explosions; they're just downright fun in a fully destructible world and if the little piggy won't come out to play then you'll have to simply blow the house up!

The story is horribly non-existent in a game that really needs it. It's the Cold War and you infiltrate West Germany, but there's no story; you're there for no reason, as your mission fails. As well as this, the game isn't streamlined and you're constantly pulled out of play by failing the mission/dying/causing World War III to kick off and breaking your toes by kicking your computer in sheer frustration certainly doesn't help with the whole experience; rarely have my feet been sorer!

Hammer & Sickle is a great and original concept, but the story was executed by a firing squad at the beginning. The game is slow to play and the timing system can make that even slower, World War III will start more times than you'll be able to count and a fully destructible environment isn't worth much when you are supposed to be stealthy. The story is short and having no clue what to do makes it highly infuriating, so I would only recommend this to people with a lot of time and patience, as there is perhaps some enjoyable gameplay here if you're willing to put in the effort. For the rest of you, it's simply just another game that you should really leave out in the cold.

Reviewed by Nik Gregory for AceGamez (All Rights Reserved).