I have to say that when I was asked to review Stormrise I was very excited. When I was told it was an RTS I was even more excited because I’m an RTS nut job. But the cherry on top of the cream on top of the pecan nut sundae was when I found out it was developed by Creative Assembly. I’m a massive fan of their work, having played every single total war game, from Shogun to Empire, and I was very excited to give Stormrise a go….but then a lone thought suddenly crept out of from the shadows of the back of my mind: “I wonder why I have never heard of this game before?” In fact a visit to their website reveals that the game isn’t even listed there…uh oh.

The reason, boys and girls, in a nutshell, is because this game is TERRIBLE. An abomination of a game excreted from the bowls of Creative assembly’s “B Team,” packaged, scented with some fancy cover art and then silently unleashed on an unsuspecting gaming public.

But pleasantries aside, let me explain my reasons by taking a look at the game in a more conventional manner. First the positives – the story and premise of Stormrise are actually quite good. It deals with the clashes between the games’ two factions, the Echelon and the Sai, on a planet that has been devastated by a massive environmental disaster. It has some very well produced cut-scene movies that really set the scene and the voice acting is also of a very high standard. What a shame all this potential is completely destroyed by some horrific design flaws.

At the center of the design debacle is Whip Select. This allows the player to “jump” from one unit to the next by simply moving your mouse in the direction of another units’ icon on the screen and then releasing the right mouse button. The camera now jumps to this unit…easy? HELL no. If you have 3 units on the screen then maybe, but when you have 20-30 units all closely packed together (as you will in most levels) then whip select becomes as effective as whipping a dead horse.

Now I know this game was developed for consoles and maybe this technique will work better on them, but on a PC it is downright horrible and feels completely unnatural. Just about every RTS game on the PC has the same basic control scheme – click on a unit to select it or draw a box around multiple units to group select. Clicking on any other unit in Stormrise will move your currently selected unit to that position! Group select? Not a chance. To be fair you can assign 3 units together into a squad, but you still can’t select multiple squads and each squad must be ordered to attack separately. All this generally results in your units arriving at enemy positions one at a time and getting utterly slaughtered…one at a time. A much better idea would have been for them to develop separate control systems for the console and PC versions of this game as EA has done very successfully with its Command and Conquer series.

Unfortunately things don’t get much better for this game. The path finding is quite possibly the worst ever in an RTS game. Units are constantly getting confused and stuck on the environment and each other. Infantry move sideways and backwards without warning, in fact I haven’t seen this much moon-walking since Michael J. Fox in Back to the Future.

Now while constantly fighting the user interface you are actually expected to co-ordinate troops in battle. Power nodes provide you with the games’ resources and a way to create units. You can also upgrade your power nodes with shields and some very effective turrets - a similar game mechanic to those employed in the Company of Heroes and the Dawn of War series. Capturing an enemy power node, however, requires a coordinated attack of multiple units and, as I have said previously, to get multiple units to attack the same node at the same time feels like trying to fold origami with knitting needles.

As you can imagine, playing this game can get very frustrating, most times it is impossible to finish a level on the first attempt and success really relies on you having your ass handed to you on a silver platter a few times and then trying it again from the beginning.

After 1 hour, 7 minutes and 46 seconds I was finally able to complete the first level. By the 6th level I had run out of 4 letter expletives and my wife forced me to stop playing for my own mental health and to halt possible negative influences on the vocabulary of our son who is just learning to talk.

Finally, a non-existent online community and multiplayer that suffers from all the flaws of the single player campaign, means there is virtually no replayability to Stormrise at all. Needless to say that this games multitude of flaws make it impossible to recommend to anyone. In fact I’d recommend that you stay well, well away from it - for your own sake and for the sake of young children.

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