Stormrise Game Review: Tough Times, Tough Timing, Tough Luck
With a name like Stormrise, you think it’s got to be a really interesting game, right? When I first heard about this one poised to invade markets literally just a few days ago, I was picturing a nice Baldur’s Gate style medievalist fantasy. Of course, if I’d read up on it in advance I likely would’ve been sorely disappointed right from the word go, but instead my disappointment had to wait until I finally got my hands on a copy of Stormrise.
Now available for Xbox 360, Playstation 3, and PC, Stormrise presents an ominously possible future, as humanity faces a global catastrophe brought on by what seems to be a combination of its own willing ignorance and global warming. In response, humanity develops a kind of satellite network to counter the resulting superstorms. It works, for a while, until things get vastly worse through humanity’s meddling. The result? A hellish apocalypse unleashed on earth, and two warring factions left to fight over the ruins: the Echelon, a technologically advanced human society that sealed itself in shelters for protection, and the Sai, a race of mutants who’ve learned to live on the now-blasted surface of earth and instead depend mostly on monsters for assault where the Echelon would instead have tanks.
You play an Echelon commander who’s been out of the fight for some time, and wage war against the Sai for your own survival. You’ll be in charge of several different kinds of battle unit, including several classes of infantry, aerial units, and giant mech suits.
It’s hard to pan Stormrise directly. It’s an innovative enough idea, and the real-time strategy subgenre has been badly underappreciated, especially in these days of constant nonstop first person shooters every time I turn around. There’s even some stuff to like in how easy it is to move from one unit to the next with the right analog stick. The plot is deep and interesting with a lot of room for growth.
But there are problems here. Of course, there’s almost inevitable comparison to fellow recent release Halo Wars, and you can rest assured that, giant mechs aside, Stormrise will not even vaguely be able to compete with Halo Wars. I liked how rapidly I could switch between units in Stormrise, but I found that getting them to move anywhere was a confusing prospect. The much-vaunted 3D aspect of the game has to take an unpleasant backseat to the sheer fact that, often, you can’t see where you’re supposed to be going next around the buildings and hills and valleys and assorted whatnot that’s cluttering up your field of vision.
There seemed to be a lot of problems with unit balance—at one point, I dispatched a mech and two units of infantry to seize an energy node, while leaving the balance of my force behind to shepherd the portal from which further troops could emerge. My expeditionary force was chewed to bits by what I later discovered was a nigh-infinite flood of Sai troops, and when that happened, the game apparently decided that I just suck too hard as a commander and forced me to restart the level from the last save point.
Suffering from unpleasant control schemes and a really lousy sense of timing, Stormrise will almost inevitably wind up as second banana to the Microsoft juggernaut as presented by Halo Wars. And this is sad, as the innovative ideas and interesting storyline will inevitably be lost to bad controls and better alternatives.