Graphics and Sound

Kill new people - in 3D!

Shadow Company promises incredible new 3D environments, with all kinds of neat-looking effects. It certainly acts like it should look that good; the second mission (a fairly large map) was near unplayably slow on my testbed system. The testbed is our "benchmark" of what a game should run decently on: a Celeron 400, with 64 megs of RAM and a vanilla 16meg TNT2. Most current games run fine on it, so it was a bit of a surprise that Shadow Company didn't.

What was all this power going towards? We're still not sure. Shadow Company is a pretty bland-looking game: in-game graphics are textbook run-of-the-mill stuff, and so-called "eye-candy" is sparse. In fact, the only neat graphical effect we noticed was that when you shoot trees, they fall apart. Some neat graphical effects we DIDN'T see were: boat wakes, tread marks, and decent explosions.

In my sights

Boom

Shut up already!

Shadow Company has a typical musical score; an in-game attempt to heighten tension through music. We generally don't expect much from a game's musical score, so this isn't too big a deal. What is a big deal, though, is sound effects.

Whenever you click on a person or give them an order, they'll spurt out some phrase, with different voices and saying depending on their character (think clicking on peons in Warcraft). While a noble effort, the extremely repetitive and uninspired tidbits soon become more an annoyance than anything else. In fact, the worst thing about the sound in this game is that you can't really get rid of it - not listening to the sound will cause you to miss out on important audio signals such as gunfire and yelling.

Going for a cruise

Still cruisin'