Xbox 360 Review: Stormrise

Sega is shaping the future direction of Real Time Strategy (RTS) games with their latest release, Stormrise. Instead of the typical “I am God” overhead view of battle, familiar to this genre, the game combines a full 3D environment with a 3rd person point-of-view.

The game focuses on making gamers feel like they’re on the frontline, while gathering resources and commanding troops. Stripped of the overhead view, you must rely solely on the line of sight of your units. Stormrise is one of the first RTS games where the excitement is not found in huge assaults across the battlefield, but in the actions of smaller units. The most riveting moments come in moving your infantry through buildings and scaffolding to infiltrate your enemy.

This game reminds me a lot of an old PC title, Uprising, one of my favorite games. If you played it, then you would definitely have a good idea of what this title is trying to do. If you haven’t, drag your old Gateway out of the basement and find the disk on e-bay.

Stormrise takes place on Earth in a future where the planet’s atmosphere has been stripped away by something known only as “The Event.” This apocalypse spawned a series of destructive storms that destroyed the planet. What little hospitable land was left is now contested turf between two rival factions: the Echelon and the Sai.

You start out on the side of the Echelon and their technological-based empire. Players command tanks, snipers, and even bootleg Star Wars chicken walkers against the Sai. The Sai are humans that have evolved and gained supernatural abilities because of “The Event.” While the Echelon has their shiny tanks, the Sai has giant armor plated crabs. What a future!

As the twisted plot unfolds, you end up fighting for both sides. Stormrise has a rich back story, but the story’s progression throughout the game is haphazardly achieved. Switching between sides feels arbitrary; I felt like I switched sides every level without reason. The result: I felt no loyalty to either faction by the end of the game.

I found the actual game play to be very ambitious in its approach to the genre. As with most ambitious activities, it has a long list of accomplishments as well as failures.

Tanks of the Future look very similar to Halo. I wonder where Master Chief is hiding?

The controls in the game were clumsy and not well explained. You begin the game with a few easy introductory missions. Shortly in, you will realize that there are several available commands the game designers forgot to introduce you to in those missions. Actions like grouping and changing unit orientation must be referenced from the manual. Usually RTS titles allow you to “learn as you play,” especially with features that play such a major role in the game.
On the Xbox controller, the left thumb stick is used for looking and targeting, while the right stick is your “whip select” control. The “whip select” allows you to point in the direction of the unit you want to switch over to. You can group up to three units into a company, but you can only control one company at a time.

On each level, the objective is to capture all of the enemy outposts. You can do this by overwhelming your opponent with shear numbers or building stronger units than your opponent. As you capture bases they become selectable units. After five units appear on the map, it becomes difficult to accurately switch between them. This is a problem because when you have certain characters that must be kept alive, you will need to select them quickly or be forced to keep them out of combat.

Typical issues that plague RTS games are also present. Units suffer from poor AI and will block the movement of others, get stuck against walls, and take the long route to their target. New issues arise, thanks to the 3D perspective, like strange camera angles and clipping. Despite the games repeated attempts to dispel my interest, I found myself ignoring these distractions and really getting into the missions.

The future of RTS

The graphics in Stormrise are on par with your average 360 game. There wasn’t anything innovative about the approach; the finer details were spent on the tracer rounds and troop uniforms instead of on the maps and objects. Using some of the high elevation air units, you get some impressive overviews of the landscape that you are about to conquer.

On the music front, the soundtrack cut harshly whenever switching into and out of fight sequences. In some cases the combat would end before the music would transition. The dialogue was horribly cheap and dated, or hilariously crude. You’ll hear phrases like “Thanks for using Coop.com,” implying that the entire earth was destroyed, except for the Internet. I also got the feeling that misogyny will survive the apocalypse, when I heard, “Let’s dance. But, you didn’t bring your pole?”

Overall, the levels in Stormrise are long enough to keep you playing for hours, while the difficulty will hold your interest as you play. Expect to spend a few wasted hours getting the controls down, but once you do, the strategy element will present a fine-tuned and exciting experience. Despite nagging tech issues, Stormrise kept my attention far longer then I planned. I hope that, conceptually, this game makes a big splash in the RTS realm, so that more RTS games adopt the 3D look and feel.