Eye of the Storm

Really, the writing is beyond awful in Stormrise. The plot premise itself is clichéd and done to death, but not too bad, but the dialogue is…well, it’s just bad. If this is honestly the creative limit of whoever came up with this drivel then they have a very short future in the industry with any luck.

Let’s not mince words. The characters are all the worst sort of unlikeable, unbelievable pillocks that we’ve ever seen in a game, and their scripts are all in urgent need of a rewrite. They prattle on endlessly about exactly the type of boring codswallop that you’d hear from a group of annoying teenagers who watch too many American sitcoms.

Honestly, without resorting to a stream of obscenties and vulgar accusations we’re finding it hard to fully express the level of contempt and fury we have for the scriptwriters. Ugh. Just... ugh.

Knowing all this, the one hope you might have for Stormrise might be that it has awesome graphics. Again, you’d be wrong. Despite the fact that Creative Assembly says that Stormrise is optimised for DirectX 10.1 and is a Vista-exclusive game on PC, it looks terrible on the Xbox 360. We weren't sent the PC version to play with, so we can't say if that's any better.


To get an idea of the graphics of Stormrise, imagine someone has made you a cheesecake as a present for your birthday and, having worked tirelessly over it, a bead of sweat falls from their brow onto the centre of the cake as they give it to you. Aghast, they raise the cheesecake to their mouth and lick the sweat off, scooping a thin curl of the cheesy topping with their tongue. That analogy is useful for two reasons; firstly it illustrates exactly how unappealing Stormrise looks, secondly it’s as overworked and irrelevant as most of the dialogue in the game. Damn you, Mr. Scriptwriter.

The presentation and art style is the most depressing and uninspired type of the usual post-apocalyptic brown; the broken, stop/start animations are like something from a child’s flip book, and the characters themselves as they appear in the pre-rendered windows look like something a twelve year old might make in Poser. It’s really quite atrocious.


Honestly though, all the problems mentioned in this review so far are just the icing on the cake. The real problem with Stormrise is that you aren’t so much buying a game but rather an enormous sense of disappointment and disbelief. The game is bad, but you aren’t going to play it and spend your time lamenting that fact. You’re going to spend the time banging your head against the table and asking yourself how this game could ever possibly from the same developer that made Empire: Total War. The answer is that it isn't quite - Stormrise comes from the Australian wing of the Creative Assembly, who have been plugging away at console RTS (and Medieval II: Total War) for years.

Scoring Stormrise by the bit-tech scale is pretty difficult, as we really don’t think there’s any reason you should ever want to play it. Really, you should just avoid it like the plague.

The game isn’t broken though and, while we absolutely abhor the very idea that someone might like the game, you can rest assured that it is at least very stable. There are even a few levels where it’s quite clever too, where units can be given indirect orders and can accrue tactical advantages from holding the high ground. Which we eventually learned was important for some units.

In the end though, these few good points can’t really redeem Stormrise in any appreciable way. The game is still boring, poorly balanced, trite and visually underwhelming. When the best thing you can say about a game is that it doesn’t crash the system then it’s time to just call it a day and move onto something else.

Score Guide