Stormrise
To make matters worse, there’s a strange lag between issuing a command and your troops carrying it out; ordering a retreat takes what feels like an eternity, and by the time your soldier/mecha/whatever wakes up and begins to about-face, it’s usually too late.
Then there are the graphics to consider: grey and drearier than a winter in a sixties multi-storey car park, Stormrise looks suspiciously like a last-gen Gears of War. Indeed, it seems as though Creative Assembly created Stormrise with one eye on Marcus Fenix’s macho exploits; the dropships, neckless jocks and brain dead banter all figure heavily. Unfortunately for Creative Assembly, it doesn’t stack up to Gears’ sublime presentation: despite the attempt to add some immediacy to the beard-stroking strategy with a ground level (as opposed to remote) viewpoint, Stormrise’s battles lack visceral impact, with damp squib explosions and tiny, plain antagonists – the Locust these are not.
There are numerous glitches to contend with, too; whole animation routines also appear to go missing at times, platoons collapse and die without a shot being fired, while others occasionally vanish off the map altogether. Poor pathfinding leads to your troops getting stuck on bits of scenery or even each other, and ordering a sniper to fire from a rooftop will occasionally cause the hapless idiot to go running towards the enemy rather than just lie there and shoot.
Missions are similarly disappointing generally amounting to little more than ‘capture the node’ escapades, with said nodes featuring heavily in Stormrise. Once wrestled from enemy control, nodes can provide a shield, change into a refinery, transform into a cannon or call up more troops. While the nodes speed the game up, with less time spent building bases and harvesting resources, they diminish the strategic aspect of the game as well, making it surprisingly repetitive. The desperately flawed control system also taints Stormrise’s eight player multiplayer mode.
Creative Assembly deserve a fair amount of praise for at least attempting something new (the whip select system could have worked well with a smaller Full Spectrum Warrior-type army) and for some of the neat ideas lurking beneath its derivative post-apocalyptic trappings – most notably the ability to command units on different levels, as opposed to a flat playing area. But unfortunately, Stormrise quickly degenerates into a war of attrition.
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I’ve read nothing but crap about Stormrise and it sits still unopened on my desk as a result. I have the PC version, however, so I’d hope that whip select is gone and I can box select like a normal RTS game. How it will work out… Well, we’ll see, I suppose.
Just to mention: “And on the subject of casualties, Stormrise’s central mecha-operating protagonists are your equivalent of the king in Chess – regardless of the size and firepower of your army, it’s game over if either of them are killed.” This is also the way Supreme Commander works, so it’s nothing new.
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