Prepare To Battle…Against the Game Itself
From the opening cutscene through the first few minutes of play, Stormrise is interesting and seems like it has a lot of potential. Sometime in the future, humans realize that something drastic must be done to halt global warming and save the Earth from all of the environmental damage it’s sustained by human occupation. Scientists develop a method, a force field, that was meant to help support the failing atmosphere. At first, all was well, and the world was a better place. Unfortunately, that success was short lived and unexplainable firestorms began erupting all around the world, destroying cities and anything in their path. “The Event,” as it’s referred to, was quickly putting an end to human existence. Unable to stop these storms, deep underground chambers with cryogenic pods are built and many people are ushered into these chambers with the idea that humans might someday wake up again from their cryogenic sleep to find that the storms have stopped. Of course, not everyone on Earth was allowed into the chambers and those that weren’t allowed were barred outside, forced to survive and evolve in the dire surface conditions. As years pass, these ‘outsiders’ evolved into what is basically a different race, retaining some human qualities but also many other non-human traits. They become known as the Sai.
Fast forward even more into the future, and members of the Echelon faction are seen scouring through cryogenic chambers looking for survivors. One such survivor is Aiden Geary, a former Commander in the Echelon army and someone who hated leaving fellow humans out in the wrath of The Event all those years ago. As you might suspect, the player’s character is Aiden Geary. Current Echelon officers are pleased to have you back in action and eager to help you get re-adjusted to your mech battlesuit to help stomp out the Sai, who have become increasingly violent. As the this opening cutscene ends, you’re led through a brief and helpful tutorial mission in which you get to learn some of the control mechanics and meet some of the characters in the story.
At this point, I was intrigued and looking forward to diving into my next mission and to start controlling some units, gather resources, storming my enemy’s base, and all of that great RTS stuff. Unfortunately, the crippling issues began.
Sounds Great On Paper, But…
The most important point and feature in Stormrise is in how players control the camera and unit selection. I’ll get into other details about game mechanics soon, but the Whip Select mechanic is far more important for two reasons: 1) it’s an absolutely essential part of the game from the first minutes of play, and 2) it just doesn’t work very well at all.
The idea with Whip Select is that each unit – be it the main character of the game, Aiden, in his mech suit, or a group of nameless grunts – has an icon on screen that shows up to indicate where in the game world they are located. The idea is similar to the icons on players in sports games that show where the player is when he is off screen. Now, it’s also important to know that your view in the game world is limited to an area surrounding your currently selected unit. So to move around the map and coordinate strategies and so forth, you have to hop around to your different units to see the map as they see it. While I think this mechanic is a bit restricting, I can understand it and accept it. Anyway, to switch units and therefore points of view, you simply use the right thumbstick and point it in the direction of the unit you want to switch to. When you press the right thumbstick, a thin line appears pointing in the direction you currently are pointing the thumbstick. As you move the stick, the line moves, and as you hover over a unit’s icon, it glows; to switch to this unit, simply release the stick and your view and control is instantly transported over.
So far, so good, but things fall apart literally within just a couple of hours during the second or third mission (for me, it was towards the end of the second). You’ll soon have so many different unit icons on screen, with many of them bunched up next to each other, that trying to effectively switch between the units becomes a major chore – something that you have to fight and work to do right, not something that you can seamlessly and accurately due like in just about any PC RTS game or even many RTS games on the 360 and PS3. It doesn’t help that your AI behave in erratic, strange, and buggy ways too, but more on that shortly.
To help alleviate the headache of trying to manage your units and effectively switch between them, you can assign up to three units together to form a group. You can only assign units to a group if they are next to each other, another bearable limitation but still an unfortunate one. With three units together acting as a group, you’ve not only decreased the management headache but you’ve also bolstered those units’ chances of staying alive. However, something you will quickly learn in Stormrise is that units are meant to be expendable, with the exception of primary characters; when these die, the mission is over and you will have to revert back to the start or to a checkpoint.
Rough AI
So while Whip Select sounds like a nice idea, it only works for a very limited time before you simply have too much going on in the game to be able to use it effectively. Not being able to efficiently navigate the battlefield and control your units and hop back to important areas is a critical issue for an RTS, but the dark cloud over Stormrise isn’t about to pass just yet. Other troubling issues come in the form of the AI and general bugginess.
The AI in Stormrise isn’t completely broken, but I also wouldn’t just say it only needs a bit of polish, either. I think part of the issue with the AI is in how the CPU decides to attack in a lot of cases, where they literally just send unorganized drove after drove of enemy, and they seem to rarely demonstrate a coordinated, staged attack. Granted you’re likely to see more organization with a human component online (if you can find someone to play with), but for campaign players, you certainly expect more of the CPU. Other AI headaches come in the form of unit awareness and action. It’s not at all uncommon to zoom into the battle to watch members of a unit get mowed down while other members fail to react. Or, you might witness a unit who doesn’t know how to effectively use his skill against the enemy and instead puts himself in the most vulnerable situation possible. It’s especially important to keep tabs on vital characters for this matter because once they die, it’s Checkpoint time. That said, I’ve experienced a handful of other weird bugs too during play including things like units getting stuck on invisible objects and the opposite of that too, clipping.
Gameplay In General
These critical issues overshadow the underlying game that is taking place during the twelve or so missions that make up the campaign. Still, there are some important points to make about the experience that gamers should be aware of. First of all, this isn’t a traditional RTS game in that you don’t have a literal base of operations whereby you churn out units. Instead, the mission map has several Nodes spread throughout that you must reach and hold, kind of like in the Dawn of War RTS games. Once you have established your position at a Node, it can be upgraded with turrets and other defenses. The Nodes are vital in that they supply you with unit reinforcements that will teleport in after a typical ‘building’ sequence in which the unit of choice is prepped for use. Nodes also have a unit icon, which is nice for being able to move over to them quickly if they come under attack, but well, I’ve already established why that is often easier said than done.
These Nodes require energy to use, rather than raw currency, and collecting additional energy is done by finding areas in the map that seep energy from the surface of the Earth, for example. Players must maintain control of these areas as well to advance.
I’d also like to point out the movement of units across the battle. So once you’ve Whipped over to the unit you want to move, you use the left stick to select where they need to move. Important points are noted in the game with markers; these markers show the distance to said point and it’s easy to send a group to a marker because the markers are more than just a single point – they are a circle and it’s easier to select a large circle instead of a single point. Anyway, moving units works well enough except that I often wished I could Whip to a unit and then zoom the camera way back to get a more overhead view of the map. Without an overhead view, you have to either move to a marker or move the unit and then move them again a second time; it’s tedious and I think it makes selecting destinations more complicated than it needs to be.
I do like how units can work with varying levels of terrain and that all battles don’t just take place on a basic, flat battlefield. There are plenty of overpasses to go on or under, bridges, skyscrapers, and hills and other map features that help keep things interesting, although some AI shortcomings keep this potential from being full realized.
In terms of visual and audio quality, Stormrise doesn’t do anything outstanding, although framerate hiccups during medium to large scale battles is really disappointing.
Closing Thoughts
To be frank, the issues with Stormrise are more than enough to make it very hard to recommend this game for anything but a rental out of curiosity. I do hope Creative Assembly can release some major patches to help out, and at the time of this writing I have already had a 20MB patch to v1.01, that is good to see. However, it’ll be interesting to see what other fixes may come as I’m sure Creative is also busy with patches for Empire Total War on the PC, a far better game than Stormrise, but one that has disappointed a lot of the loyal fan base with significant bugs.
In the end, it’s honestly pretty tough to recommend Stormrise. There are a few critical issues with the core game that render it well nigh unplayable at times and just short of that you’ll find the experience a frustrating chore most of the time. That lone statement is enough to all but condemn any game, but I’m hopeful we’ll see more patches released by Creative Assembly that might address some of these truly critical issues. Until then, you might give it a rent, but I can’t recommend this for purchase.