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Gameplay
As we said before, it’s best to start off cruel with Stormrise and avoid getting your hopes up if at all possible. With that in mind; the gameplay mechanics are possibly the worst we’ve ever seen.Really. We’ve seen some bad games, but on a gameplay and control front Stormrise puts even the likes of Code of Honor 2 to shame. It’s about as much fun as trying to eat broken glass, or the logical consequence of that which would follow a few hours later.
It was so bad in fact that even Harry, our resident RTS
There are things that any RTS game relies on; like being able to skip over large portions of the map quickly, move units to exact locations and send huge batches of troops to attack a single target. These things are not possible in Stormrise.
The map is the worst kind of useless pseudo-futuristic garbage, rendered in an obnoxious yellow and orange series of holograms that utterly fail to show you where your units can travel. The viewpoint is that of a third person shooter, which means you can’t order troops to go around corners easily unless you’re sending them to a preset waypoint. And you can only group units together in teams of three.
Three. That’s it. There’s no way to quickly select all units of a certain type, or even all units, and the fact that the screen is held in a third person position means you can’t even move the camera around independently of your troops. If you want to see what’s around a corner then you have to send a trooper there to have a look.
Creative Assembly’s main feature in the game, the one that they’ve been boasting about as a huge innovation in making RTS games work on consoles, is called Whip Select. And yes, that too is awful. Creative Assembly can call it whatever it wants, but the fact of the matter is that it’s using the thumbstick to point in the direction of the unit you want to control. Flick towards a trooper on the other side of the map and your camera will quickly hop over to them.
It’s a remarkably inefficient method for selecting units when you consider how many soldiers you can have on your team and how large some of the maps are. When you warp in more soldiers through your portal, which can only be built in certain places, then they all cluster around one spot, practically clipping through each other, which makes switching to them via Whip Select an arduous and fiddly process.
The control problems are compacted further by how ornery the camera is too. You have a crosshair in the centre of the screen and the viewpoint is behind the character you’re controlling, so you’d expect it to be standard third person controls. It isn’t. The crosshair is moved independently from the camera until it reaches the edges of the screen, at which point the viewpoint begins to shift as well. It’s a fiddly, pointless and annoyingly imprecise system that makes it practically impossible to turn quickly and tackle a sneaky opponent.
These points outlined above though are really just the beginning of it all. There’s so much more to ridicule and point at in infuriated wonderment in Stormrise that it really boggles the mind. Why is the build menu such an unreadable blue on blue? Why, given the line-of-sight limitations on unit orders, do the levels focus on destroyed cities? More importantly, what the hell is going on with the absolutely atrocious dialogue and graphics?
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