When a huge strategy giant, such as The Creative Assembly, announce a
new real time strategy game, a lot of fans are going to be interested.
This is especially true when they move away from a setting they are
well known for - in The Creative Assembly's case, the Total War series.
What's even more interesting is that the development studio is also
drifting from their PC roots for their next game, Stormrise. Heavily
focused on getting real time strategy games to work on consoles,
Creative Assembly has focused on creating an innovative control system
to get around the control pad limitations. However, the review will be
based on how well the game translates to a PC, and how these controls
work on the keyboard and mouse, which are still the mainstay of RTS
controls.
Stormrise is set in a post apocalyptic future. Scientists were
commissioned to develop a solution to address the environmental
decline, which led to the creation of a forcefield. At first everything
seemed fine, but eventually nature had its way and vicious destructive
storms ripped apart the planet and its cities. Survivors were either
locked into underground security structures or left on the surface to
survive. The surface dwellers ended up mutating and evolving into a new
race, which the game calls "The Sai." Once the danger had past and the
underground cryogenic sleepers had awakened, it was time for them to
reclaim the planet. Echelon was formed, and the battle for the planet
with the Sai had begun.
Taking control of Aiden Geary, a commander for the Echelon team, it's
your job to fight off the Sai. Stormrise isn't your typical RTS game as
the player doesn't build a base; instead you capture points and can use
these points to build reinforcements to help your fight. These points
can be reinforced with defence, which you'll most likely need. If you
lose these points, you lose your ability to build anything if you don't
have any other capture points in the level.
Units are built using the energy you gain from capturing these points
in the mission level. The capture points can also have upgrades which
will pump out more energy, so you don't have to wait as long to build
the unit you want. As the mission progresses, you get to the point
where you have so much energy coming out that you never really have to
wait that long to build a unit, which keeps the game interesting, at
least when it comes down to the action on the battlefield.
Now you're probably asking, "how do you manage to select the units you
want if you can't see them or move the camera?" With the control system
that Creative Assembly came up with, you can still select units, but
it's a frustrating and a slow way of going about it. The focus of
trying to make the game for controllers has totally destroyed how it
should play on the PC. The "Whip Select" system allows unit selection
by requring you to "whip" your view towards a unit to take control of
it. When you are in control of a unit, the camera is focused behind it,
kind of like a third person view. The game does allow you to spin the
camera around the unit and also allows you to do the most pointless
zoom out. It's rubbish since it doesn't zoom out enough to be
worthwhile. The only way you're going to get a battlefield overview is
by using an air unit, so you can see from above from the sky. I can see
what they were trying to do with the idea, but it's just not practical
enough to be in a game.
Once you've got the hang of the camera system, you have to get the hang
of the whole unit control. Stormrise allows you to click using the left
mouse button to move the unit you have selected. It's also possible to
look at another unit from the one you are viewing. Just click and drag
from the unit to force them to move without you having to actually jump
to them, though this stills requires you to get them into your line of
sight.
To let the pressure off a bit, you can group units of three together.
This relieves a bit of the whipping that you have to do all the time.
There's so much whipping in Stormrise, that there's even an achievement
for whipping in a mission 250 times. I did this on mission 3, which is
early on in the game's 12 missions, which should give you an idea of
how many times you've got to do it. At least you can still link units
to hotkeys, even though the game doesn't actually tell you this in the
tutorial part of the first level. I just assumed it would from trying
it in all the other RTS games out there, and to my surprise, it worked.
This ended up becoming vital in selecting units, rather than doing it
the whipping way. You know there's something wrong when gamers try to
avoid using the intended mechanic.
It doesn't help that when you've got a huge army of units that you need
to control, you need to whip to all of these to move them individually,
even if you've grouped them into three. Three isn't enough when you've
got say 12 lots of these three-unit squads on the move. It's
impractical and nearly impossible to handle a huge army in Stormrise;
even with hotkeys, you still have to move these groups all
individually, and from their camera point of view as well. When it all
this comes together with the whipping, it just makes you get annoyingly
aggravated to the point where you are hurling insults at the game. I
did so numerous times.
If you can't see units to whip to, a little icon comes up on the side
of the screen in the direction of that unit. Even so, you don't know
where about that unit is on the map, so you need to memorise it or use
the radar map screen by pressing tab. Also having a large army throws
so many icons on screen that you end up whipping to the wrong unit.
It's so poorly designed and results in nothing but trouble for the
player.
The nuisances don't just end there during Stormrise. AI pathfinding is
another problem that crops up sometimes. In confined spaces the units
have trouble moving past each other. On one mission, I had around 15
buggy units on this thin stretch of road. Having grouped a couple of
them together to go on a scouting run, I watched them struggle to get
past the buggies in front. They would either not move or just spasm
into the ones in front, and the ones in front would either move the
wrong way or get stuck in a reverse-forward-reverse loop. To solve this
I had to move the front ones out of the way, which helped put
everything back to normal. It seems to happen more to vehicle units
rather than the infantry, but it still irritating.
I've also noticed people dying when they don't seem to be getting hit
by bullets. There must be some collision errors, as one of my control
points was killed by the opposing team's infantry shooting underneath
it - through thick concrete. As far as I know, you shouldn't be able to
shoot through walls in this title. All these errors really bring
Stormrise down to become a bad game.
Some praise can be awarded in terms of setting, but that's all about I
can give it. The graphics are respectable enough but there's some sort
of frame rate drop or animation stuttering going on with units, as they
seem to skip animation or shake a bit while moving. I know it wasn't
the PC, because the game was running on a quad core Q9550 overclocked
to 3.4 GHz with a 4870×2 ATI card and 4GB ram. The audio and voiceovers
are fine, though.
I had a major problem with the game at one point. After my initial
play, I returned on the next day and it just would not start. It would
come up with an error crash or restart my PC. After messing with
settings and everything, I found out that if you have the Catalyst AI
option turned on in the ATI control centre, the game will crash all the
time. Turning it off solved the problem.
Multiplayer is included, which has a feature World in Conflict had: the
ability to join and leave a game at will. The control and camera
controls are the same, but instead of a mediocre single player campaign
fight, you've going up against human opponents, which is certainly a
bit more fun than against the CPU. Up to 8 players can play in a game,
but really there's nothing that good about Stormrise and it's still
affected by the awful whipping system.
A simple design idea for controllers created a massive chain reaction
in how the game is played, and frankly, it's for the worst. Creative
Assembly should have transformed the game controls for the PC version.
Because of all these problems, Stormrise has ended up becoming one of
the worst RTS games I've experienced in recent memory. This is a RTS
game you don't need to play, even if you are a fan of the genre.
