Ages ago, I came across Heroes of Might & Magic from (of all places) the local video store. Yeah, they were renting PC games alongside Nintendo and Sega carts. I fell in love with the series and eagerly awaited each installment right up through the seminal Heroes of Might & Magic III (HoMM). Finding games in the same genre which scratched the itch as well as HoMM has remained a challenge for me for the last twenty-five years. I had thought Songs of Silence might serve to satisfy that itch. Instead, it just made me wish for the good old days.
Songs of Silence takes place in a fantasy world literally torn apart, one light, the other dark. Ages ago, a cataclysmic war between Celestial and Primordial gods and their human followers forced the split to keep everything from being utterly destroyed. Unfortunately, a third party called the Void decided to destroy both sides and ruin everybody’s day with their corrupted servants. And now, you get guide three heroes (one from each faction) across a campaign which tells the story of the world’s final reckoning.
Visually speaking, Songs of Silence has an elegance to it for the most part. Character and creature portraits are rendered in an art nouveau style, while character models on the battlefield hew fairly closely to the same designs. It’s a little hard to tell at times because your ability to zoom in past a certain point is rather constrained, so we don’t get a good chance to appreciate the human-scale units quite as easily. There are all manner of nifty looking visual effects for various special abilities and attack spells. The user interface is reasonably clean and easy to read. Flat out, this is a very lovely looking game.
When it comes to the audio portion, Songs of Silence brings a lot to the table. Arguably, the star of the show is the soundtrack by Hitoshi Sakimoto (Valkyria Chronicles, Final Fantasy XII). The fanfares when you win a battle, in particular, have a very Final Fantasy feel to them. Beyond this, you’ve got a good array of sound effects for when your units perform some heroic action. The voice acting is solid. Not star-studded, but quite well done.
The great stumbling block for Songs of Silence lies in the gameplay. Particularly in the campaign mission design and the tactical auto-battles. Let’s take the auto-battles first. Now, having an option to auto-resolve battles is a decent quality-of-life feature for 4X games, particularly if you’re tooling around with a massive force and are coming across pipsqueak enemies in the wild. Having real-time battles in a 4X games is a design choice, and one which has been utilized to great effect in the Total War series. But auto-battles like what you would find in a mobile title, where you have no direct control over the units and relying on the AI to be smart about fighting, absolutely sucks. Playing “fate cards” to kick off special abilities isn’t as helpful as it sounds, particularly when there’s times when the game seems to forget which mouse buttons you’re using. You’re constantly having to pause the action in order to make sure the card’s area of effect is properly sited, which makes the interminable battles just stretch out longer.
Building up your empire in the strategy portion just makes “bad” into “worse.” While the UI might be clean to read, the mechanics of how you gain resources is poorly described. More obnoxiously, you can only have a single improvement on various city sites, which limits their utility as well as causing you to waste a lot of resources you might otherwise need to recruit units or improve existing sites. Adding insult to injury, while the Campaign mode has an option for “story focus” (the easy setting), there’s no way to adjust the AI in the Skirmish mode. For extra salt in the wound, you’re having to perform a bunch of mobile-style unlocks by meeting certain conditions either in Campaign or Skirmish. Yet the way that maps and missions are designed, you basically have to be willing to lose one or more of your heroes in order to expand the map or fulfill hidden objectives which will lead to specific unlocks.
You feel pressured to complete the main objectives in such a way that inhibits any sort of exploration outside of the secured areas. Sure, you might meet roving monsters and what not, but when the scenarios cap your character levels, their utility is questionable. Leaving garrison forces is almost never sufficient to deter an attack by enemy units particularly with hero units in command. Another twist of the knife is trying to reinforce your heroes, which boils down to dragging them back to a castle or outpost, trying to pull from the pool of available garrison forces (you did remember to build up garrison forces, right?) or spending resources to draft replacements. It’s a lot more cumbersome than it should have been. As a final insult, the “ambush” mechanic is, like everything else, poorly described. Basically, you have to have the cursor showing an icon that indicates ambush; simply coming up behind the enemy a la HoMM is insufficient. Meanwhile, enemy units seem to be able to ambush you from any angle. This results in a lot of fights which rapidly deplete your forces and your resources.
The basic narrative setup for Songs of Silence is not particularly novel. We’ve seen it before in Sudeki, Final Fantasy XIII, and others. I can accept a typical conceit if the execution is well done. Even enjoy it. And Songs of Silence doesn’t execute as well as it could have. The writing isn’t bad, but the voice direction basically has every actor taking a turn as a mustache-twirling villain instead of a complex character. Worse, certain narrative choices give the feeling that the developers didn’t really think about their mission design as closely as they could have. Even worse, at one point, I felt deeply cheated because it seemed like the mechanics were essentially “turrned off” to provide what the designer thought was a satisfying ending. Compound the narrative issues with the mechanical ones, and it makes for a painful slog of an experience.
I was hopeful for this one. I really was. And those hopes were badly disappointed. If you want to buy the soundtrack to help support Hitoshi Sakimoto, cool. Because those are the only good songs to be found in Songs of Silence.
Axel reviewed Songs of Silence on PC with a review code.
