Stormrise

With all the re-invention that the real-time strategy has undergone in recent times, there’s greater emphasis on developers to either stay traditional or do it right, should they choose to innovate. In such a time, there’s place for a title with good ideas, but bad design. Unfortunately, that’s all that Stormrise is about.

The game starts off with a promising storyline, showing how humanity, in an attempt to fix the world, fails catastrophically and destroys most of the planet in a violent firestorm. That in itself, seemed like the grounds for a gripping storyline, which could perhaps incubate a great gaming tale. I was hopeful.

The first few minutes of the game showed off the game’s terribly bland, and inadequately detailed visuals, that run at a terribly choppy framerate. I was still hopeful; I mean, not all good games are well optimized right? “Maybe behind the badly presented package, there’s some engaging gameplay”, I thought to myself. I was so wrong.

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The biggest flaw in the game is the thing the developers ‘The Creative Assembly’ had boasted about the most - the Whip select. The unique thing about Stormrise is that the game plays in a third person perspective, with the camera hovering right behind the selected unit. Since it is such, you obviously cannot select units the traditional way, i.e. by the click and drag method. Instead, you have the whip selection function that lets you hold down the mouse’s right click to bring up a ray out of the selected unit, which allows you to select units around it depending on which direction is targeted. While this makes switching between units quicker than before, it’s extremely restrictive, and relative to the unit currently selected, making it frustratingly difficult to accurately select units far away (especially when many units are clumped in one direction).

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Apart from being a bitch to control, the units in Stormrise are a complete pain to find. The fact that the game plays out from such a close over-the-head third person perspective, makes it really claustrophobic and restrictive compared to the standard isometric RTS view. The fact that you have nothing but a half-assed neon overview of the battlefield, doesn’t help strategically either. Most of the time you’ll end up sending your units in a general direction, just to get slaughtered by the enemy.

Which brings me to the other flaw - units in Stormrise don’t attack while moving. If you issue a move command that intersects a platoon of enemy units, your units will simply walk through them to their death. They won’t fire a single bullet even when they’re close enough to smell the enemy. The worst bit is that you’ll see units die all over the map even when no one’s firing at them, placing the game amongst the most sloppily executed messes I’ve seen in a long time.

Group selections are also inadequate in Stormrise - you can only add a maximum of 3 units to a group in Stormrise. So when you have an army of 30 units you wish to move around, you’ll have to issue move commands to 10 different squads, which is the most laborious and boring task I’d have to do in any RTS. What makes it worse is that units skirmishes don’t last for more than 5 - 10 seconds, so by the time you issue move commands to your army, the battle you wish them to get to will be over.

There’s nothing in Stormrise that warrants a purchase. The game’s boring, badly optimized, badly designed, terribly executed and absolutely the worst RTS I’ve played in a long time. Stormrise, you shall go down in Tech2 history as one of the worst games ever made, right besides Hanuman: Boy Warrior.