Shadow Watch

by Barry Brenesal
April 12, 2000 00:00 AM PST

The developers of the original X-COM are back, with a game that focuses on what they do best: turn-based combat.

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The developers of the original X-COM are back, with a game that focuses on what they do best: turn-based combat. In Shadow Watch, you control an elite commando squad created to protect the construction of the world's first international space station. You have six individual mercenaries at your disposal, each with a series of unique skills. Lily is a martial arts expert who can silently dispose of enemies, while Gennady, though useless in combat, is an expert with electronics equipment.

Gameplay is very similar to X-COM or the Jagged Alliance series. You move each merc separately into a building that holds their current objective, using action points which govern the number of activities they can perform in a given turn. The action points in Shadow Watch increase from stress - everything from hearing a loud noise to being hit by a bullet. Should stress grow too high, however, a merc will break and - depending upon their personality - flee, attack wildly, or dive for cover. Once an agent of yours is dead, they stay dead, and you don't get any replacements.

No two Shadow Watch campaigns play the same. Each new one generates 3 subplots of 5 missions apiece and a final, more challenging mission. There are 3 possible subplots in each of the cities - Rio, Hong Kong, and Baikonur - with contacts that offer you several possible missions, which in turn lead to new ones. There are 8 randomly chosen mission types, with 6 map sites unique to each city; and each city provides three distinct factions. Thus, you may be asked in Baikonur to raze a laboratory guarded by scientists, or to rescue a scientist from a Kazakh military base. The strength of your enemies is controlled by the difficulty level you set, as well as by the experience of your characters.

Missing from Shadow Watch are the rewards that are normally expected from linked scenarios in a campaign, such as captured weapons and ammo. As your team gathers experience points (for achieving objectives, not tripping alarms, etc), they acquire new skills you select, but it's not quite the same thing as feeling that virgin flush of joy which rises with liberating your first Uzi. And Shadow Watch's diverse enemies, once you've gone beyond a nodding acquaintance, tend to pose similar threats time and again.

Thus, each campaign is distinctly new every time you play Shadow Watch, but each campaign is hardly distinctive. Plot elements aside, the game plays very much alike every time around, down to the same six characters, weapons, and skills. Like old-fashioned dungeon crawls, Shadow Watch is best taken in small doses. That way, its randomly generated challenges seem more fresh and less generic.

Shadow Watch's graphics have a retro-comic book feel that may also not be to the taste of all players. Character rendering is not particularly distinctive, the look is a flat faux-3D, and colors are dark, tending to the blue end of the spectrum.

All in all, Shadow Watch is perfect for a quick mission, with none of the elaborate notes you have to employ for tracking inventory, research, and travels in larger, more complex turn-based tactical games.