Review: Stormrise

If the plot of your average sci-fi game is anything to go by we will inevitably spark a disaster that’ll wipe most of humanity off the face of the globe. The future for mankind looks bleak indeed. If Stormrise is anything to go by then real-time strategy games will become increasingly awkward and frustrating. The future for gamers looks bleak indeed.

It seems to be a hard and fast rule that any futuristic game must apply the post-apocalyptic tag and Stormrise is no exception. The game opens with a lengthy cut scene which explains that a mysterious series of storms plagued the planet and drove most of humanity underground into cryogenic hibernation leaving those unable to afford a tube to die a nasty death. After this catastrophe, which they dub The Event, it emerges that some of the people left behind survived. The Sai have predictably enough evolved into mutant types with psychic powers. Now that the underground guys, known as the Echelon, have awoken from their slumber an all out war has started. This opening cinematic has its moments but there are enough rough edges to hint at the disaster to come.

Limited View

You take on the role of Aiden Geary, a Commander in the Echelon army. By way of an awkward introductory tutorial which spills into a first battle against the Sai you are taught the basic controls. By the end of the sequence you have mastered troop movement and it is clear that both sides in the war are very interested in your destiny.

One of the first things you’ll notice about the game is the fixed camera views. You can’t roam freely across the battlefield and instead the camera is tethered behind whatever unit you have selected. You can select units and direct them to areas on the map, ask them to capture nodes or tell them to target specific enemies. Once captured nodes allow you to build a limited array of upgrades and move your front line forward through the map.

Whip Select

The game has two major selling points and one of them is the console focussed design. The controls are completely unique and the Whip Select system lets you use the right stick to select units. It draws a line and highlights the icon of the unit you are selecting. At first it seemed efficient and clever but as the game progresses and the armies get bigger it becomes irritatingly easy to select the wrong icon and go zooming back to the starting node accidentally.

The other big feature is the 3D depth and you can indeed go underground, through buildings and climb on to rooftops. The problem is that the camera view can often leave you with a face full of wall and because you are tethered to the unit it can be near impossible to select the spot above or below that you want to send it to. Combine that with the laughable path finding skills of the troops and their reluctance to stop and engage when fired upon and you have a good idea badly executed. Or maybe it’s just not a good idea.

The biggest flaw with Stormrise is the difficulty in controlling all of your troops. Co-ordinated attacks are something you can only dream about. The annoying thing about this is that the Total War series completely solved this problem for the RTS genre. Stormrise throws out the established ideas about camera, interface and troop selection with alarming abandon.

The game just about comes up to scratch in the visual department. The unit designs feature typical sci-fi styling but they do look quite good. The environments are dull and drab but this is a post-apocalyptic future remember. The backdrops and visual effects border on impressive at times. The production values don’t extend to the voiceover work which is cringingly cheesy.

There is no escaping the real reason that this game will fail and it is all about the design. Bad design which is poorly executed and thoroughly bug ridden. The maps almost seem deliberately designed to exacerbate the bugs. Sometimes troops get stuck in animation loops, on reloading there are occasional awkward views through the map and it is not always clear where the enemy fire is coming from. There are occasions when mission objectives are inexplicably not triggered and progress is hampered and it is frustrating in the extreme when these are revealed on a second play through.

The multiplayer offers some respite from the fatally flawed single player progression but there is no escaping the AI flaws. It is also online only with no split screen option but you can play with up to eight people. You can fight ranked matches against each other and the game does work better as a straight battle for domination of nodes and therefore an entire map. However low uptake is liable to scupper any potential the game has as a multiplayer RTS.

Published by Sega and developed by The Creative Assembly there was every reason to get excited about this self proclaimed revolutionary game which would bring us the first truly 3D RTS ever. Delving a little deeper into the credentials we find that this was developed by the Australian branch of The Creative Assembly and not the team responsible for the excellent Total War series. It definitely shows. There are some good ideas in here and with a bit more bug fixing and tweaking before release this could have been a decent offering. In the end Stormrise has so many problems that it is impossible to recommend.