Just finished my playthough. As I was starting the last location I began to wonder about the “Difficulty was Easy” in the post mission debrief. I thought it was just something about the quantity/alertness of the enemies, and I guess it is indirectly… Somehow I never noticed (or didn’t remember) the difficulty switch hidden in the settings menu. Isn’t that something that should be asked at the start of a campaign?
So the space station is safe and all, but it feels a little hollow now that I know I did it on easy. At least it’s not as bad as the X-Com difficulty bug.
I thought that difficulty only modified when you are allowed to save, but looking at the manual it does change the number and difficulty of enemies. That’s a shame! I at least would have expected it to start on Normal.
Yeah, when you consider that X-COM had a mouse-driven square-selection interface six years earlier, it’s probably inexcusable that Shadow Watch’s controls are so primitive. However, remember that it was made by a team of 5-7 over 12 months. So, you know, they can be cut some slack. BTW, in my Let’s Play opening post, I did say the controls were “serviceable at best.”
The controls are clunky and there is some deep strangeness going on with the LOS algorithm that I can’t understand at all. It’s new enough that you can’t run it in an emulator like doxbox, but old enough that it doesn’t know about widescreen monitors.
But once I gave up on the technical twiddling and just accepted a little stretch-o vision I really enjoyed this pick. There are a lot of interesting tactical choices without being overwhelming.
Some of the characters aren’t in many storylines, depending on which faction they are primarily associated with, whether that faction is friend, enemy or neutral, and whether the player chooses to mess about with them or not.
I don’t have any of my notes anymore, I don’t think, but there’s more than 225k words in the dialogue trees. I forget how many hundreds of run-throughs you would have to do to see them all.
Sorry for the necro, but I just found out the game was on GOG myself. Hadn’t played in probably 10 years.
