Grom: Terror in Tibet (PC)

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Your units will fall unconscious fairly often, because the game's combat is difficult. Not only must you struggle against the game's interface, but you are also usually outnumbered and outgunned. And because there are no real tactics or strategy involved, the combat isn't very satisfying. You can't use environmental objects to your advantage, so those gas tanks in the Nazi camps will just sit there undisturbed throughout a heavy firefight. And while Grom has all the appearances of a tactical game, including the ability to lie prone and crouch, you mostly just run around and exchange fire with the enemy until one of you is dead.

One of the game's more frustrating elements is the fact that you cannot leave a map until the enemy is eliminated. An early mission requires you to sneak into a Nazi camp and steal some documents, but while you can sneak around to your heart's content, you can't actually leave the camp until you've killed everyone. This is also frustrating when you enter a map, only to find yourself outnumbered and without a means of escape. What's worse, you can't actually have your party stop and rest as you would in a traditional role-playing game, so your units recover from damage only through the use of healing items, which are costly and somewhat rare.

Other than combat, the game consists of lengthy dialogue sequences that are poorly translated and therefore largely nonsensical. Frequently, you'll be presented with a two-option response tree where it's impossible to tell what the responses mean, let alone make a guess at what effect they'll have. There is also a bargaining game that's entirely optional and equally frustrating. Your characters have bargaining cards that represent reactions to the other participant's cards. You must choose your cards, which represent attitudes like "angry" or "insulted," and then enter the bargaining round, where you play cards in response to your opponent. It's a guessing game, because you don't know what cards he'll play and, even if you did, it's unclear how each card affects the others. Usually, it's best just to take the default price for whatever it is you're bargaining for and move on.

Grom has a number of frustrating elements, and it doesn't offer much of anything to make up for them. In the end, the game's problematic interface makes it too complicated to be mindless fun, and the combat itself is too mindless to have any strategic depth.

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Tibet,

Nazi,

CDV Software Entertainment AG,

enemy,

gameplay

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