Stormrise is an example of a game that has a great concept with new ideas that doesn’t come together and falls on its own sword. Stormrise is a new RTS developed by Sega and Creative Assembly. In the game man created a system that controlled nature but due to ‘The Event’ the system went haywire and started to create fire storms throughout the world. As a result one branch of humanity, the Echelon, went into cryogenic hiding while another, the Guerillas, stayed in the environment and evolved to fit into this new world. The opening cinematic really does a good job of selling the game but after that the story falls apart and becomes completely incoherent. Not only does the story fall apart but so does the gameplay in Stormrise.

Stormrise’s first great idea is the Whip select system. Your units are represented as icons on the outermost portion of the screen. It’s as simple as pointing with the right analog stick towards a given icon to select a group of units, or at least it would be if the game worked properly. The Whip select system is truly what makes Stormrise unique but is also the game’s Achilles heel. You see, as the game gets more hectic you get anywhere between five or thirty little icons on the outermost portion of the screen. Good luck picking the unit you want. The Whip select system does let you fly across the battlefield like other high profile RTS games but the ability to be selective is nearly nonexistent. To make matters worse, once you select a unit you have to take the time to point them to their new location. This wouldn’t be bad except for Stormrise’s other Achilles heel, it’s tiered levels.

 

The development team of Stormrise thought that making tiered levels would make the game have multiple levels and more interesting to play in. The theory is sound but because of the Whip select system you can rarely select the unit you want and when you want to travel up you have to be careful that you’re in range of the area you want to travel too and then you must actually move the cursor until it points upward with a yellow arrow. After this is done you can send your units to the selected position. The entire system feels so cumbersome that I couldn’t help but get frustrated with even the most basic of tasks.

These two control issues wouldn’t be so bad if the game was slow. However in Stormrise you are required to make quick movements and decisions but with the Whip select system you can rarely find the right unit and even if you do you’ll spend precious moments trying to move your units to the appropriate locations. What’s strange is that if the developers would have given you the ability to group non specialized, ie not mechs, together you could move one massive force at a time rather than having to deselect and reselect another group over and over to move even thirty soldiers across the map.

 

The final nail in Stormrise’s proverbial coffin is it’s awful unit AI and overall glitchiness. On more than one occasion my units got stuck in basic, not even tiered, pathfinding situations and I had to move them step by step where I wanted. On top of this I would find that Snipers would run halfway across the map to engage an enemy rather than using their bloody sniper rifle! I mean what’s the point of specialized units if they’re all going to run up to the enemy and try and shoot them at point blank range? None of this makes any sense at all.

Stormrise had enormous potential however the game was too simplified. I know that it’s difficult to make a game about micromanaging work on a console but it’s definitely not going to work if you make a game’s control scheme ultra simplified. Stormrise uses only a few buttons and when push comes to shove and the game’s action kicks in the controls are woefully inadequate to control the in game action. That being said if Sega can take what didn’t work in Stormrise and tweak it for a better experience I’ll be first in line to give it another chance. Sega took a big risk with this game and though everything didn’t work out great it still should be respected for trying something new. Hopefully the ideas behind Stormrise aren’t dead, we’ll hope for better from them in the future.

Overall: 4.2/10