There's no indication I can remember in the opening of the game as to the Engineer's nationality, but he/she does start out by being assigned to a long stint at an impossibly remote location somewhere in the frozen north, which does feel a lot like being posted to Siberia.

>So the "speaking English" is almost
>certainly being done as "your character understands this, so we'll use
>a language the player understands."

Now that I have 30+ hours in the full game, I can report that I was wrong about that part. The soldiers' voices are heavily filtered, like the HECU marines in Half-Life or PubSec agents in HL2 (they even make a sound similar to the "flatline" noise PubSec guys make when you kill them), and at first I thought they were speaking barely comprehensible English, but they're not. I don't think they're speaking any real language; more likely it's the devs' idea of the vocal equivalent of the made-up alphabet all the in-game signage is written in.

The story is slowly getting deeper and stranger. I'm digging it, although one of the most recent revelations I ran across was disturbing and made me very sad. Not in an "I'm going to ragequit" sense, though. It makes sense within the context of the game, it's just... upsetting.

--G.
-><-
Benjamin D. Hutchins, Co-Founder, Editor-in-Chief, & Forum Mod
Eyrie Productions, Unlimited http://www.eyrie-productions.com/
zgryphon at that email service Google has
Ceterum censeo Carthaginem esse delendam.