AceGamez posted their review of CDV & Nival's Night Watch tactical RPG based on the movie and book of the same name.  The final score is 6/10, and the mostly positive review highlights things gamers might enjoy or not like before summing up as follows: 

In the end, Night Watch the game reminds me of something Semyon tells Anton in the last section of the Night Watch book when Anton has gotten drunk on Cognac. "It is all wrong, he says - Cognac is for the heart, Vodka is for the soul…" So they share a couple of bottles of Vodka. This game has a very good story to tell but its attempts to tell it through a combat-based game engine felt all wrong. So to paraphrase, I'd say that the Silent Storm engine is for combat but not for storytelling. Enter the game knowing that and let your soul drink deep from the well of glorious turn-based combat and you'll be satisfied. But go looking for a great sweeping storytelling experience and you'll be left unsatisfied and feeling hung over.

Nival's Night Watch has been reviewed at GamersInfo. There's no score as usual for this site and the text is more description than critique, but the author seems to like it in the conclusion:

All in all, though, it's a mostly fun game with a great background. A lot of people miss the traditional turn-based combat of RPGs such as this, so it's refreshing to have one back. With the three main classes, and the ability to change the class of the first person you meet, it also means the game has some replay value as you try to do things differently. If you're wed more to the faster pace of real time games, though, you might find Night Watch a bit tedious.

For such a simple concept (dark against light), Night Watch remains stubbornly convoluted. Thrust into the action straight away, we join Stas, a normal man who discovers he is an Other. Yet Stas has an unbelievable level of pre-knowledge for someone who's never encountered Russian sorcerers before. Ten minutes after being told he has special powers, he's nonchalantly shape-shifting into a bulldog without too many questions. Add another five and he's happily bantering with vampires and werewolves. Just another day in Moscow?

Yet it's this casual approach to story-telling that really hurts the game. As the player, we need someone to anchor us in and fully explain what's going on, as we learn through their eyes. Stas offers no such relief in Night Watch. The plot remains horribly messy and confusing, which is not a good thing for an RPG. I say RPG, but in truth Night Watch plays much more like an interactive novel at times, overloaded with lots of very long cut-scenes. Every event is told using an in-game engine cut-scene, often intruding on combat scenes. Perhaps this wouldn't be such a problem if not for the dated engine.

Right, that's it, no more game-playing for me. From now on I'm just going to read optimistic previews and get my pleasure from anticipation. If I'd done this with Night Watch then the following paragraphs would have been blissfully free of nasty, soul-rotting whinge-words; no 'ill-conceived', no 'woeful', no 'disappointing', no 'hopeless', no 'dire'. The sum-total of Global Negativity wouldn't have been increased by 0.00000000000026%; right now I'd be a fractionally less cynical, less suspicious gamer.

Let me tell you something I learned in a marketing lesson at University. When creating a movie tie-in game, try and make it related to the movie's plot in some way. Okay, that's a lie. I didn't learn that in marketing, I used my common sense. Most games attempt this cohesion by following the movie's plot as closely as possible, perhaps inserting a few extra scenarios to lengthen the experience or, in the cases of the brilliant Chronicles of Riddick: Escape from Butcher Bay and the significantly less than brilliant Enter the Matrix, by exploring the parts of the plot that are not explained in the movie. Night Watch, however, takes the film's plot, as well as the trilogy of books it is based on, goes in a completely different direction, and throws in some archaic gameplay, bland graphics, and dull voice work to hamper an interesting license.

The game and the movie takes place in modern day Russia. You can play one of three character classes. The sorcerer can turn normal items like florescent light bulbs into energy weapons like a sword which can harm dark ones. The sorcerer can also charge ordinary flashlight bulbs into killing weapons, allowing you to shoot beams of light that singe dark ones. This weapon is in both the movie and the game.

You can have up to four members in your party, but the game ends up dictating who you end up with. You can't pick for yourself, which turned out to not matter, since there are only three classes. All characters are allowed to walk freely in the world until they spot danger, at which time the game changes over to turn-based mode. In combat, every little thing burns up action points, but even when you level your characters up, they never really seem to get much more of them. At most, you'll be limited to throwing up to three punches per character before having to press the "End Turn" button to see what your foes will do. Movement uses up a ton of AP, so many players will be forced to stick primarily to ranged attacks until the enemy manages to move within melee distance. One really annoying problem we came across was that your party constantly follows each other around, but they don't move at the same speed. So, if you decide to send the group to a location and your fastest member spots a foe while everyone else is twenty paces behind, the game still switches to turn-based mode, and the player is forced to waste AP's so that their close-range characters can enter the fray. The pathfinding isn't bad, but it's not great, either. It's competent most of the time, then seems to have trouble figuring out a straight line. Not to mention, characters don't exactly end up where you point them. They have a tendency to go to the general vicinity and stop.

With the speed of modern games it is very hard to pull of a fun turn based RPG anymore. Pool of radiance is the last PC RPG I can think of that was fun. The game would have been much better served with a structure like Neverwinter Nights, the calculations of combat are handled turned based but the action never stops. I could see the game being turned based if there were lots and lots of options and choices for the player to deal with, but there are not enough options to warrant turn-based combat. A well-designed user interface could have easily picked up the pace of this game and made it more enjoyable.

CDV has released the first retail patch for Night Watch, upgrading the techno-fantasy 3D tactical combat role-playing game by Nival Interactive to an unspecified version number. This update improves lip syncing and fixes the voice volume, dialog texts, and other text bugs.

With an in-game cutscene engine that doesn't look like it's up to the technological task, and gradually underwhelming combat, Night Watch's strongest point becomes a clearer explanation of the story universe than what was provided in the film -- but that's not exactly what we're looking for here. Plus the game is interspersed with clips from the film that are so abruptly delivered that they border on the non sequitur. And there is some branching gameplay, but you can really choose to take one side or the other. If you liked the film and what to know more about the lore, then the game will provide plenty of interesting information. But the longer you play, the more the gameplay itself becomes an uninteresting hurdle to enlightenment.

Given the age of the engine, Night Watch isn't going to win any technical awards, but just because it doesn't sport the greatest visuals doesn't mean the underlying game fails. On the contrary, what's here is engaging and contains a compelling, in-depth story to complement the gameplay.

It doesn't help that the movement in the game is somewhat awkward and very imprecise. It seems simple, because you just have to click the spot on the map where you want your character to go, and the artificial intelligence is fairly apt at finding paths around obstacles and through doors and such. However, the movement lacks precision, usually getting your characters only within the general vicinity of where you clicked. If there are obstacles or other characters nearby it becomes a jumbled mess, which makes it difficult to select a target when attacking or using items. You can rotate and zoom in the camera, but that rarely offers a better perspective on the action.

Billed as a "tactical role playing game," Night Watch is actually a turn-based strategy game with a jumbo side-order of adventure, due to its heavy-handed linear story. Instead of the typical choose your race/gender/hair initiation rite, you automatically play as Stas, a young Other who has just discovered his true nature and chooses the path of the Light.

There's a thin line between awful and pointless, and Night Watch manages to wobble like a poorly spun top right in the middle, sporadically teetering too far into awful before righting itself, then drifting over to pointless territory. Again and again and again.

Night Watch is a tactical RPG, using the Silent Storm engine, and based on material from Russian writer Lukyanenko and is situated in the not so distant future. Replacing the earlier Russian demo, this version features 3 missions, 3 playable classes, all spells for first five levels, sixteen enemies of the three main classes including the boss at the end.

CDV Software Entertainment USA has shipped Night Watch, a tactical RPG based on the hit Russian movie of the same name, to US retail today. Players in Night Watch will explore a world filled with magic and mystery as the attempt to maintain the balance between good and evil. More information about Night Watch is available at http://www.night-watch-game.com/.

From a visual perspective, the game hasn't changed too much since we last saw it. The Silent Storm engine is a few years old now and it shows, so Night Watch won't win any awards for graphics, though at least it should run well on older systems. It's apparent that the main draw to the game is its tie-in to the Night Watch movie, which was a big hit in Russia and other nations. By expanding on the story, Night Watch aims to deliver a deeper look into the setting of the movie. The game is scheduled to ship next week.

In the Night Watch universe, there are people among us who appear ordinary, but who are different; they call themselves "Others." These Others can channel magical power as devastating attacks and defenses. Those who support the forces of light are known as the Night Watch, while those that fight on the side of darkness are the Day Watch. These two sides have been locked in an epic battle with the common hope of one ultimately claiming a decisive victory and a right to rule the world.

Developed by Nival Interactive, the studio that created the critically acclaimed Blitzkrieg and Silent Storm series, Night Watch will ask players to take on the role of a recently initiated Other as he strives to comprehend the mystical powers he has recently discovered, and to make sense of the role he plays in this epic struggle that could very well determine the future of mankind.

GGMania: Which characters from Night Watch movie appear in the game?

Dmitri "Zak" Zakharov: As a Night Watch operative you will meet the head of Night Watch Moscow department Gesser. Another famous Light Others, such as Olga and Tiger will sometimes fight together with you against the forces of Darkness. You will also meet Zavulon, "the main mean guy" who is the head of Day Watch as well as his witch-lover Alice.