For starters, Operation Darkness doesn't really look the part of a 360 game. It reminds me of the early port jobs Activision did for the 360 with games like Gun, where there was really only a change in resolution from the older systems. Still, as long as I can remember, SRPGs have always been behind the curve on graphical presentation with few exceptions like Front Mission and Stella Deus. So while it is the first thing that strikes you, it's still not a big deal for this type of game.

The story is also not the issue. What gamer wouldn't be intrigued by a fantasy spin off of World War II. In this timeline, there is a special ops section of the allied forces that employs a werewolf who just so happens to pass his blood along to one of our protagonists. Hand drawn player portraits with some voice over dialog help move the plot along.

When you get into a fight is when everything breaks down, which is really where these types of games start to shine. Much of the blame can be placed on the camera, but there's more than that. The camera has inverted controls for left and right, which cannot be changed via options. It zooms in when you pan down and zooms out when you pan up, with no way to disassociate the two actions. And to top it all off, it's incredibly twitchy.

The camera issue is compounded by the battlefield space. Stages are large, which should be a positive, but with this camera and a sub-par top down map, it's really hard to get your bearings on the fight. There's a reason that isometric works so well for this genre. Characters can move really far too, which makes the limited view even more frustrating. When it comes down to it, the spatial relationship among the participants on the battlefield is really hard to track, which robs the strategy from this strategy RPG.

Since it's WWII, you're dealing with ranged weaponry from handguns and machine guns to rocket launchers and grenades. This keeps everyone in your group in danger nearly all the time. Since melee range rarely comes into play, distance from enemies does not mean safety like we're used to in the fantasy games. Safety can come in the form of cover, which has a couple of meanings in Operation Darkness.

At first I thought the cover system in this game meant firing from behind barricades and around corners, but that is not so. You can hide behind obstacles to be safe from attack, but there is no way to initiate attack from that same position. Cover actually means providing cover fire. You can choose to move to a position and automatically shoot anything that moves inside your weapon range. You can also choose to attack a target anytime someone else attacks that target. These become the keys to the game since your advantage in battle comes less from positioning and actions as it does from making use of extra attacks out of turn.

Operation Darkness did not make the splash Atlus would have hoped for considering this was their debut on the 360. It's a very disappointing game in nearly every aspect. I sincerely hope that Spectral Force 3 and Zoids Assault fare better. Atlus fans expect and deserve higher quality.