There are few worse experiences in life than getting your hopes up for something only to have it fail to meet your expectations. Just look at those sad, broken minded individuals who claim the Star Wars prequel films have any value at all, tugging at your shirt and staring into your face for any hint of sacrilegious disagreement. I feel a bit like this with Stormrise, a multiplatform release that I had very high hopes for and no screenshot or gameplay video could deflate me. But when I got the game in my hands it became abundantly clear that there were issues. Not small nit pick issues that you might not even notice, but big hairy smelly issues with no regard for your personal space.

The setting and protagonists of Stormrise are its best features. The game is set on earth millennia into the future. The main character Aiden Geary heads into cryogenic hibernation with the rest of humanity while a nuclear storm burns the earth and those survivors unlucky enough not to make it into shelter. When he wakens it seems things have changed more than expected. The underground humans of the Echelon have emerged to a burnt out world inhabited by a mutated people called the Sai, some of whom have developed powerful psychic abilities. Geary is quickly recruited into the Echelon but it becomes apparent that he has some connection with the Sai as well and the situation isn’t as cut and dried as it seems. The world of Stormrise and the characters immediately conjures up images of Gears of War, the unit designs and environments have the same combination of futuristic and alien tech. Likewise while the Echelon infantry are supported by several vehicle types the Sai are supported by a range of monsters. But Stormrise's units are actually more diverse and interesting than the Gears units.

The game opens with a short tutorial which takes you through the control basics and then throws you into battle. Oddly other control elements are only elaborated on in the second and third mission, even though some of these, such as moving units by proxy to locations that aren’t visible to them, are crucial elements of play. The controls, primarily the whip camera, is the real selling point for Stormrise and when it works effectively it’s pretty impressive. Unfortunately it doesn’t always work, getting it to work the way you want can take a lot of practise and it’s in the third mission when you get your first taste of managing multiple unit types that things become awkward.

Although the game is multiplatform it's really made to be played on a console (FYI this review is based on the Xbox 360 version). The controls are focused on the setup of a console controller. You will always have a unit selected and your left analog stick controls a cursor thats more like a look feature so if somethings outside that units sight its outside your sight as well. This is one of the first triping points that will annoy some, you just can't leave your units and scroll around the place, exploring the terrain. The left stick controlled cursor is used to move the unit and set them attacking a target. The right stick is used for selecting your other units. You can do this by holding the right stick down and rotating a marker line 360 degrees around the screen until you have highlighted the unit you want to use, then release the stick to whip to that unit. You can also flick the right stick and you will whip to the unit nearest you in the direction you flicked.

The units are represented by a symbol depending on the unit type and this brings us to the first big problem. When you have a lot of different units, because at most times you will, that’s a lot of little emblems crowding the screen and it can be hard to select the right one. Especially as, in the heat of the moment, selecting the wrong unit can be monumentally disastrous. For instance, when your command unit comes under fire it can be less than two minutes before he is killed and for you its game over; as a result accidentally selecting the wrong unit, who then has a different perspective on the other units, can eat up time. You can press a bumper button to enlarge the emblems but this doesn’t always help. You can group units into teams of three but this is based on where they are standing so the units closest to each other get grouped, you don't get to choose.  It’s that type of omission that really hurts the RTS feel and makes the control scheme seem more suited to a large scale squad based game than a small scale strategy game. Stormrise really wants to be both and makes an attempt to cover all the bases, but it doesn’t quite have all the dice available.

Saving and failing missions together are a single big issue. At certain times the game pauses to save, usually when you have completed a certain objective, then when you fail you are given the option to continue from a ‘checkpoint’. Unbelievably this is a lie, there is no checkpoint, there never was, that loading screen was just the in game dialogue firing up where you listen to your comrades talk. Maybe this is different on the PC or PS3 version but I checked every level I played and never was there an actual checkpoint. You can save the game during missions but there’s only one save spot. If you choose a bad point to save the game you’re stuck with it and will probably grudgingly restart the mission all over again. You will fail missions a lot because as mentioned your hero unit is the crux of your game, when he or she dies, you are done. This means that you are constantly keeping one of your most powerful units well back from the actual combat to prevent them from getting killed and even then it’s easy for a sneaky unit to get to them. Most of the time there isn’t any way to repair or heal your units either so don’t expect to throw your commander into the fray and then pull him back for a patch up. After his moment of action he gets parked some where safe for the rest of the level.



The AI in the game also needs a big tweak. In confined spaces your units have very serious problems getting around each other. Much like the vehicles in Halo Wars, the pathfinding is often terrible and obstacles can basically just stop some units dead. Certain levels are painful to experience, just past the half way mark there's a level set completely in a very enclosed multi level base, visibility is bad and there's lots of corners and you seem to lose units every time you look away. Worst of all the spawn point for all your units is in a hanger that can only be exited by a single ramp that larger units can only access one at a time and you'll often have to juggle them around till you find the one blocking the path for everyone else. Another level on a torn up city street had your spawn point perched on a cliff edge with a low over hang above it. This was when the game first gave you vehicle units to play with but the geography meant you had to painfully spawn them one at a time and then drive them away from your node before you spawned anymore so they didn't all become trapped.

There are stages of certain levels where the enemy just send wave after wave at you like clockwork and once you have a strong defensive line established it’s almost funny how easy you cut them to ribbons. Then it’s just a matter of building up some units to throw back at them. The AI in the campaign is chronically bad but oddly the enemy are a little more savvy in the skirmish matches and actually seem to take the time to try flanking you and using actual tactics. Overall I enjoyed the single skirmish matches a helluva lot more than the constant frustration of the single player campaign. Whenever you had a new unit available for the first time in the single player campaign it was almost a given that you would need this unit for an unpassable section you were about to encounter. At times it was almost like an 'on rails RTS' in the campaigns refusal to let you tackle objectives the way you wanted. This is further compounded in the games final level where there's basically one way of doing the entire level and not working it out will result in repeated and rather frsutrating failure.



Added to this, and maybe it’s just me, but certain important graphical and audible elements were sometimes missing from the game. Units would be getting shot at and your only indication would be a falling health meter. Entire squads could collapse to the ground with not even a ‘pew pew’. This made it extremely hard to even work out where shots had come from; although the game often touted the verticality of the gameplay it didn't do such a good job of showing you if your aggressors were shooting from above or below you. Then of course as soon as your unit is dead you can't see any of the area anymore and you have to sacrifice more troops just to see where the enemy is. There's just a distinct lack of informed awareness for the player, you never have a great idea of where everything is until it kills you and then only if you're lucky. Don't even mention the map either, there's a 3D map thats just a big pile of colorful shapes, like the end result of baby who eats Lego bricks, that make zero sense. Its like the awful in game map from Splinter Cell only five times worse.

Strange as it is to write, I liked Stormrise up to a point, I really did. I liked the units, I liked the art style I liked the whip camera (up to a point) and I was certainly keen on the ideas behind the gameplay. For the few brief shining moments when it worked smoothly it was good, you could almost feel the potential. I suppose I was entranced by the theory behind Stormrise more than the actual game. I could see what they were trying to do and it interested me. But the actual gameplay was nightmarishly frustrating and the difficulty curve lurched like a drunken sailor on shore leave. The final level of the single player has to go down as one of the most frustrating of all time. I’ll probably revisit the game again some day this year during a quiet lull in the release calendar. But this review isn’t for me it’s for you, the person reading it, hopefully with pants on (but hey I’m not your mother), so there are things I can’t in good conscience not let you know about. If you are curious about the game and its interesting mechanics then it might be worth a pick up, but if an original angle on the RTS genre doesn't pique your curiosity then move right along because there isn't anything else here for you.