Stormrise

Storm in a teacup

In a bleak, dystopian future where all hope is lost...we're bored already. Yet another in a long line of dreary post-apocalyptic set titles, The Creative Assembly's latest RTS venture takes place in the wake of a botched experiment to control the Earth's weather systems (will those eggheads never learn?), where two surviving factions wage war against one another for no apparent reason. In the singleplayer story, you take control of the human Echelon forces in a bid to destroy the opposing Sai: a league of monstrous mutated humanoids born out of the hostile environment that are all nasty tentacles and glowing bits. It's immediately apparent that the Sai are the bad guys and they've got a bone to pick with the Echelon. Maybe it's because they were locked out of the sealed underground shelter when the world was going to hell in a hand basket. Just a thought.

That Stormrise's character design and setting is fairly uninspired is the least of the game's problems however. This is yet another crack at bringing the RTS to home consoles (although the game is also available on PC) with an innovation the developer has dubbed 'Whip Select', a way of rapidly selecting units using the right analogue stick. As the first fully 3D RTS title (Creative Assembly say so), Whip Select at first seems like a necessity, enabling you to flick between units in the blink of an eye using a projected line whenever you nudge the stick. In reality it can prove incredibly frustrating when all you want to do is issue quick commands and gather an army to march into battle. Whip Select sounds simple on paper - simply move the stick towards the icon of the unit you want to jump to - but in practice, especially when you've multiple icons clumped together in one place, Whip Select is horribly clunky and imprecise.

What The Creative Assembly has attempted with Stormrise is admirable. Shifting the RTS genre into 3D seems like a logical evolution, but we remain steadfastly unconvinced that it can work on the strength of this particular offering. Real Time Strategy games normally hinge on your ability to see the entire - or at least a hefty chunk of - the surrounding battlefield and the action unfolding thereupon. In Stormrise, the only way to view the entire environment at once is by pushing the SELECT button to bring up the tactical field map, a blurry, translucent orange mess that's impossible to use thanks to the hideous controls. We couldn't find a way to get a bird's eye view of the map, instead spinning the 3D map at speed as we hopelessly twiddled the analogue sticks, tearing out our hair in a vain attempt to see what the hell was going on and make sense of it all.

It could be that Stormrise simply requires uber-saintly patience to enjoy, because we were hoping to get stuck into the action and bring the Sai forces to their knees with little of the protracted effort that involves. After beating the tutorial with ease however, we still felt ill prepared for what came next, having to command multiple units to seize a bridge over a dry riverbed. Seemingly easy enough, we began by grouping together our soldiers into a triumvirate of stronger units; subsequently marching in for a three-pronged attack on the enemy entrenched on the opposite side. Sounds like a pretty good idea right? Wrong. Taking our eye off one of our groups for more than 30 seconds saw them unavoidably fall under the duress of enemy fire, resulting in an instant fail. There goes another clump of hair. This was the very first level on the easiest difficulty; the later stages and harder settings prove to be utterly insurmountable wars of grinding attrition. Be forewarned, Stormrise takes tactical, strategic thinking of Patton-like proportions and a (very, very) slow, methodical approach to boot.

There are a lot of great ideas vying for your attention in Stormrise, and a fully exhaustive list of the usual multiplayer features allowing for quick (although we use the word very loosely) skirmishes, online or LAN multiplayer battles and the aforementioned single-player campaign, which lasts for a gruelling 12 missions. The majority of players will get the most out of the online modes playing against other human players who are equally as bewildered by the fiddly controls and glacial pace. Each of the game's maps are suitably vast, with towering vertiginous buildings to scale, gaining you a tactical advantage over your opponents. Trouble is, with Stormrise's 3D environments and muddled mess of a tactical map, you have to rely solely on your own line of sight. This makes it incredibly difficult to amass an effective army to launch an all out assault upon your enemies, meaning that you'll often have to resort to slowly traipsing your units into battle. Being able to group only three units together into one slightly more effective platoon makes the possibility of overwhelming the opposing force through sheer numbers nigh on impossible, so there're no instances where you can gleefully watch as your carefully assembled squad wipe out the other side. Normally, you'll watch through your fingers as your own men are cut down and ruthlessly crushed instead.

A meagre nine unit types for each faction doesn't help matters either, and you'll have experimented with and exhausted every tactical option at your disposal very quickly indeed. Stormrise then, is really only a game for the extremely patient and dedicated RTS player. Its relentlessly drab, washed out visuals will put most players off before they've even picked up the controller and the unimaginative art design only serves to exacerbate the problem. Granted, the game is a far more appealing prospect when played in multiplayer, but as a singleplayer experience this is sub-par at best and perhaps even more damagingly, Stormrise is totally inaccessible to casual players. With Halo Wars getting a head start over Stormrise, it's difficult to see why anyone looking to invest in a console RTS would choose this over Ensemble's vastly superior effort. Halo Wars might not boast as many interesting ideas and innovations as Stormrise does, but then neither is the execution as inexorably ropey. As a first attempt at pulling the traditional isometric 2D RTS genre kicking and screaming into three-dimensions however, Stormrise isn't unrepentantly bad, just severely lacking. As the studio responsible for the ace Total War series, it's difficult to understand how they've managed to get this so very wrong. It's a real shame that what seems like a decent idea ultimately emerges as a visually unappealing, impenetrably tough and devastatingly unrefined sci-fi strategy title.

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By Richard Walker