Tag: Stormrise
Summary: Stormrise
by admin on Mar.13, 2010, under Summary
Experience the heat of the battlefield by leading your troops from the front line, instead of the traditional way of controlling the units from a detached view point. Stormrise also allows units to be commanded in the air, across rooftops, on the earth’s surface and even underground, this unique idea of “verticality” introduces multiple layers of gameplay that must be mastered for strategic advantage. The experience is heightened by a simple yet effective control system tailored specifically for consoles, which allows easy unit selection, rapid navigation and precise deployment.
Genre: Real-Time Strategy
Publisher: SEGA
Developer: Creative Assembly
Online Play:
Local Play:
Stormrise AU Review
by admin on Mar.13, 2010, under Review
Australia, March 25, 2009 –
Game developers keep trying to crack the hard console real-time strategy shell with simplified controls, irresistible licensing, voice commands, better online integration and matchmaking. And yet, the RTS genre still hasn’t proliferated on the lounge room circuit. Maybe it’s because the genre is simply too niche, too subtle and too detached to stack up against their shooter brethren. Or perhaps it’s simply because, until now, nobody has come up with a genuinely equal alternative to the mouse and keyboard combo that keeps the bulk of RTSs on PCs.
Stormrise, developed by The Creative Assembly (Total War series), is the latest contender for the title of ‘breakthrough real-time console strategy’. It initially presents itself nicely, promising a whole new way of approaching the genre, taking cues from third person strategic shooters and blending it with a far-future setting and surprising depth.
The story pits The Echelon – human survivors of a catastrophic climate control experiment gone wrong – against a new species of humanoid, known as Sai – a tentacled, psionics-based race bent on …being evil, apparently. Really, the introduction leads you through the basic storyline enough to give you a feel for the post-apocalyptic setting that The Creative Assembly has crafted – but it’ll leave you somewhat confused by the premise.
Visually, the game is stark and severe; Stormrise pulls a colour scheme from every classic ‘dystopian future’ reference source out there, so there’s an overdose of browns, greys and beige. We’re talking about cities gutted by flame, fractured highways dotted across open, bucolic wasteland, deep underground passages and airborne assaults amidst thick, choking vapour. It gets a little muddy a times, trying to pull opposing forces from the murk at distance; you really have to rely on the on-screen faction symbols to differentiate during heated combat. Stormrise’s maps also benefit greatly from verticality – something we’ll delve into a little farther on. Missions in the single-player campaign guide you over rooftops and under buildings, through sewers and tunnel networks and to the highest points on the map. By utilising your sniper units and capturing valuable vantage points, you get a great literal overview of the map. The solid draw distance and mostly stable framerate are also big plusses.
Character design and animation in Stormrise are both solid for a genre that has often neglected detail in this area until recently. The Echelon units are not particularly memorable – aerial attack craft pulled from Terminator, your host of buggies, helicopters, artillery and Hero-unit mech suits; on the other hand, the Sai units are pretty nifty. Of these, the acid-spewing, multi-headed Hydra, the lumbering bipedal Rage unit and the crab-like Matriarch are impressively menacing and lovingly animated. Although there are only eight unit types all up, the game gives you a wheel of abilities for each, greatly increasing their flexibility. If you’re the kind of player who’d rather not delve into micromanagement, the abilities wheel can be ignored completely; those who want to control the approach your units take during a struggle, you at least have the option.
Arguably Stormrise’s biggest point-of-difference is the Whip Select – so-called for its whip-like, unit-jumping properties – assigned to the right thumbstick. It is, without hyperbole, the single most innovative thing about Stormrise and the closest the genre has come to emulating the speed of mouse control.
Whip Select works just fine when your units are nice and close to your current location. In fact, it’s great, even. But move farther away…
It does not, however, improve efficiency. Understand, for every step forward Stormrise takes, a muddled and almost indecipherable mess of icons and samey units clutter what should be a streamlined process. If you have units close together who aren’t grouped, making precision selections becomes fiddly – particularly if icons are overlapping, which is almost always the case when the units are on the other side of the map and in close proximity to each other. At a glance, it’s very difficult to discern the baffling light blue symbols, which also can cost valuable time.
Any RTS that doesn’t let you muster all available infantry at the demand of the player needs to tread very carefully indeed. Stormrise will allow you to group any three squads together, creating a triangular arrangement of three tiny icons. Grouping is assigned to the right bumper on the 360 by default and holding it down while the cursor is over the group and using the whip select disbands it. You still end up having to manually shift a dozen separate units around, which means that Whip Selecting is almost constant if you’re controlling two simultaneous groups. It’s fiddly to the point of detracting from what should be a basic process. If you want to send four linked groups into battle at the same time, for instance, there needs to be a broader group-select option and there just isn’t. It’s a lot of manual labour where there’s no need.
Pathing is also an issue, as is the overly-dependent AI; units often take baffling routes through terrain, getting stuck on edges or sometimes doubling back for no particular reason. Why? Who knows. Even more bizarrely, if you point a group of units towards a point and the enemy intervenes, oftentimes, your units will push though to the waypoint before even attempting to thwart the enemy. This, of course, costs you a lot of unnecessary casualties – but the real question remains, why don’t these suckers pursue the enemy a little more actively? If line-of-sight is so critical to your perspective, then how come your troops can stand at the base of a bridge and watch as a swarm of enemies surge towards you – and then do nothing but stand there like targets in a shooting gallery? Moments like this really make it hard to like Stormrise; you’ll want to, but your patience will be tried.
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The verticality is an interesting twist on the classically flat terrain of most RTSs. With a few previous exceptions, this is about the best example of an RTS trying to give players a reason to explore depth and height. The game’s unit creation infrastructure is all tied to a node network – essentially a series of linked capture points that chain their way through a level, supplying your base with material to create more units. You can, as you might expect, upgrade their production rate and equip each node with a potent turret and protective shield – but the beauty of this system is that it urges gamers to really utilize the landscape in order to not only secure each node, but protect them and eventually relocate unit production to one a little closer to the enemy.
As a result of the node chains, the action can be immediate; the game’s AI voice-over, your ‘Cortana’ to Stormrise’s ‘Master Chief’, lets you know when a node is being sundered (and, amusingly, when you’re losing), so whipping back and forth between nodes and multitasking keeps the pace frantic. If you don’t master this early, the game’s default difficulty can become punishing – particularly when combined with the instant game-over as a result of neglecting your commander.
In Skirmish mode, you can take on up to eight AI opponents for overall victory on ten maps pulled from the single-player campaign – which, incidentally, are the same maps used in the multiplayer component of Stormrise. The maps themselves are enormous –each with a recommended number of players (generally a minimum of 4, but all can be played with just 2 if you don’t mind the eerily quiet nature of a massive, empty playing field.
While Stormrise’s production values are clearly tight, we wish more polish had been applied to the rest of the experience.
Will Stormrise impress you with stellar multiplayer? Well, that depends on how taken you are with the nodes-based gameplay and the gradually unlocked character creation mode. You can customise your factional Hero unit with all kinds of ability and weapon modifiers to make them more formidable in the field, as well as to relay some handy defensive effects upon your legion.
To conquer in multiplayer, essentially, you can either demolish the opposition’s forces or capture the nodes to win. Of course, the real meat of the strategy comes into play when you start taking elements of verticality into consideration, as well as being able to cut off your opponent’s resource supply chain by swarming to a node between two others. That’s Stormrise’s multiplayer at its best – truly strategic.
Without the ability to simply amass huge numbers of troops and swarm over to the enemy base in one crushing wave, you really have to stop and think things through a little bit. If you can’t get your head around Whip Select – or simply lack the patience for this kind of approach, you’re going to struggle from the get-go. The in-game training doesn’t delve into the complexities of the interface either; study that manual or spend hours trying to figure out the peculiar multi-button combinations and Whip Select toggles instead.
There are a lot of throwaway clues that point towards The Creative Assembly’s PC heritage. A lot of these stem from the use of secondary 3D map overlays that feel clunky to navigate and the baffling icon-based HUD that is a minimalist nightmare. These suckers beg for more text, more colour differentiation and frankly, Whip Select or not, you’ll miss being able to roll over a unit and quickly check the status or similar.
Closing Comments
Clearly, this is a talented studio with a knack for RTS; its track record on the Total War expansions is excellent – but its standing as a console developer is still unproven. Stormrise has some solid production values with a story that apes classic sci-fi epics, but fails to stand out in any respect. It’s sad that this is the case – it’s not easy to launch a new intellectual property like this, and it takes a lot of time and money to develop something like Whip Select. Unfortunately, that’s what we’re looking at: a decent but unpolished strategy game built around a technological concept that only sort of works in any practical sense. An amiable attempt, but a far cry from victory.
IGN AU Ratings for Stormrise (X360)
out of 10
click here for ratings guide
6.5
Presentation
The menus hint at intelligent and streamlined interfaces throughout. It’s a half-truth – the HUD is a pain, but there are a few good ideas there.
7.5
Graphics
Pretty solid for an RTS; the environments are evocative and expansive. Units tend to blend together though, and the Echelon faction is forgettable.
7.0
Sound
A suitably epic score and some nice environmental sound effects. Voice acting falls on the bland side of good, but never cringeworthy. Too many repeated lines in the field will grate.
6.5
Gameplay
Look, it works, but it’s not any better for Whip Select. Often, you’ll plead at the screen for a more practical set of controls. Screens feel no pity, sadly. Close, but not quite there.
7.5
Lasting Appeal
The campaign could take you anywhere from 10 to 15 hours if you take your time, but if you really sit down and master the intricacies (and deal with its shortcomings), then online is a deal-maker.
6.6
Passable
OVERALL
(out of 10 / not an average)
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Stormrise AU Review
by admin on Feb.26, 2010, under Review
Australia, March 25, 2009 –
Game developers keep trying to crack the hard console real-time strategy shell with simplified controls, irresistible licensing, voice commands, better online integration and matchmaking. And yet, the RTS genre still hasn’t proliferated on the lounge room circuit. Maybe it’s because the genre is simply too niche, too subtle and too detached to stack up against their shooter brethren. Or perhaps it’s simply because, until now, nobody has come up with a genuinely equal alternative to the mouse and keyboard combo that keeps the bulk of RTSs on PCs.
Stormrise, developed by The Creative Assembly (Total War series), is the latest contender for the title of ‘breakthrough real-time console strategy’. It initially presents itself nicely, promising a whole new way of approaching the genre, taking cues from third person strategic shooters and blending it with a far-future setting and surprising depth.
The story pits The Echelon – human survivors of a catastrophic climate control experiment gone wrong – against a new species of humanoid, known as Sai – a tentacled, psionics-based race bent on …being evil, apparently. Really, the introduction leads you through the basic storyline enough to give you a feel for the post-apocalyptic setting that The Creative Assembly has crafted – but it’ll leave you somewhat confused by the premise.
Visually, the game is stark and severe; Stormrise pulls a colour scheme from every classic ‘dystopian future’ reference source out there, so there’s an overdose of browns, greys and beige. We’re talking about cities gutted by flame, fractured highways dotted across open, bucolic wasteland, deep underground passages and airborne assaults amidst thick, choking vapour. It gets a little muddy a times, trying to pull opposing forces from the murk at distance; you really have to rely on the on-screen faction symbols to differentiate during heated combat. Stormrise’s maps also benefit greatly from verticality – something we’ll delve into a little farther on. Missions in the single-player campaign guide you over rooftops and under buildings, through sewers and tunnel networks and to the highest points on the map. By utilising your sniper units and capturing valuable vantage points, you get a great literal overview of the map. The solid draw distance and mostly stable framerate are also big plusses.
Character design and animation in Stormrise are both solid for a genre that has often neglected detail in this area until recently. The Echelon units are not particularly memorable – aerial attack craft pulled from Terminator, your host of buggies, helicopters, artillery and Hero-unit mech suits; on the other hand, the Sai units are pretty nifty. Of these, the acid-spewing, multi-headed Hydra, the lumbering bipedal Rage unit and the crab-like Matriarch are impressively menacing and lovingly animated. Although there are only eight unit types all up, the game gives you a wheel of abilities for each, greatly increasing their flexibility. If you’re the kind of player who’d rather not delve into micromanagement, the abilities wheel can be ignored completely; those who want to control the approach your units take during a struggle, you at least have the option.
Arguably Stormrise’s biggest point-of-difference is the Whip Select – so-called for its whip-like, unit-jumping properties – assigned to the right thumbstick. It is, without hyperbole, the single most innovative thing about Stormrise and the closest the genre has come to emulating the speed of mouse control.
Whip Select works just fine when your units are nice and close to your current location. In fact, it’s great, even. But move farther away…
It does not, however, improve efficiency. Understand, for every step forward Stormrise takes, a muddled and almost indecipherable mess of icons and samey units clutter what should be a streamlined process. If you have units close together who aren’t grouped, making precision selections becomes fiddly – particularly if icons are overlapping, which is almost always the case when the units are on the other side of the map and in close proximity to each other. At a glance, it’s very difficult to discern the baffling light blue symbols, which also can cost valuable time.
Any RTS that doesn’t let you muster all available infantry at the demand of the player needs to tread very carefully indeed. Stormrise will allow you to group any three squads together, creating a triangular arrangement of three tiny icons. Grouping is assigned to the right bumper on the 360 by default and holding it down while the cursor is over the group and using the whip select disbands it. You still end up having to manually shift a dozen separate units around, which means that Whip Selecting is almost constant if you’re controlling two simultaneous groups. It’s fiddly to the point of detracting from what should be a basic process. If you want to send four linked groups into battle at the same time, for instance, there needs to be a broader group-select option and there just isn’t. It’s a lot of manual labour where there’s no need.
Pathing is also an issue, as is the overly-dependent AI; units often take baffling routes through terrain, getting stuck on edges or sometimes doubling back for no particular reason. Why? Who knows. Even more bizarrely, if you point a group of units towards a point and the enemy intervenes, oftentimes, your units will push though to the waypoint before even attempting to thwart the enemy. This, of course, costs you a lot of unnecessary casualties – but the real question remains, why don’t these suckers pursue the enemy a little more actively? If line-of-sight is so critical to your perspective, then how come your troops can stand at the base of a bridge and watch as a swarm of enemies surge towards you – and then do nothing but stand there like targets in a shooting gallery? Moments like this really make it hard to like Stormrise; you’ll want to, but your patience will be tried.
- 1
- 2
- Next »
The verticality is an interesting twist on the classically flat terrain of most RTSs. With a few previous exceptions, this is about the best example of an RTS trying to give players a reason to explore depth and height. The game’s unit creation infrastructure is all tied to a node network – essentially a series of linked capture points that chain their way through a level, supplying your base with material to create more units. You can, as you might expect, upgrade their production rate and equip each node with a potent turret and protective shield – but the beauty of this system is that it urges gamers to really utilize the landscape in order to not only secure each node, but protect them and eventually relocate unit production to one a little closer to the enemy.
As a result of the node chains, the action can be immediate; the game’s AI voice-over, your ‘Cortana’ to Stormrise’s ‘Master Chief’, lets you know when a node is being sundered (and, amusingly, when you’re losing), so whipping back and forth between nodes and multitasking keeps the pace frantic. If you don’t master this early, the game’s default difficulty can become punishing – particularly when combined with the instant game-over as a result of neglecting your commander.
In Skirmish mode, you can take on up to eight AI opponents for overall victory on ten maps pulled from the single-player campaign – which, incidentally, are the same maps used in the multiplayer component of Stormrise. The maps themselves are enormous –each with a recommended number of players (generally a minimum of 4, but all can be played with just 2 if you don’t mind the eerily quiet nature of a massive, empty playing field.
While Stormrise’s production values are clearly tight, we wish more polish had been applied to the rest of the experience.
Will Stormrise impress you with stellar multiplayer? Well, that depends on how taken you are with the nodes-based gameplay and the gradually unlocked character creation mode. You can customise your factional Hero unit with all kinds of ability and weapon modifiers to make them more formidable in the field, as well as to relay some handy defensive effects upon your legion.
To conquer in multiplayer, essentially, you can either demolish the opposition’s forces or capture the nodes to win. Of course, the real meat of the strategy comes into play when you start taking elements of verticality into consideration, as well as being able to cut off your opponent’s resource supply chain by swarming to a node between two others. That’s Stormrise’s multiplayer at its best – truly strategic.
Without the ability to simply amass huge numbers of troops and swarm over to the enemy base in one crushing wave, you really have to stop and think things through a little bit. If you can’t get your head around Whip Select – or simply lack the patience for this kind of approach, you’re going to struggle from the get-go. The in-game training doesn’t delve into the complexities of the interface either; study that manual or spend hours trying to figure out the peculiar multi-button combinations and Whip Select toggles instead.
There are a lot of throwaway clues that point towards The Creative Assembly’s PC heritage. A lot of these stem from the use of secondary 3D map overlays that feel clunky to navigate and the baffling icon-based HUD that is a minimalist nightmare. These suckers beg for more text, more colour differentiation and frankly, Whip Select or not, you’ll miss being able to roll over a unit and quickly check the status or similar.
Closing Comments
Clearly, this is a talented studio with a knack for RTS; its track record on the Total War expansions is excellent – but its standing as a console developer is still unproven. Stormrise has some solid production values with a story that apes classic sci-fi epics, but fails to stand out in any respect. It’s sad that this is the case – it’s not easy to launch a new intellectual property like this, and it takes a lot of time and money to develop something like Whip Select. Unfortunately, that’s what we’re looking at: a decent but unpolished strategy game built around a technological concept that only sort of works in any practical sense. An amiable attempt, but a far cry from victory.
IGN AU Ratings for Stormrise (X360)
out of 10
click here for ratings guide
6.5
Presentation
The menus hint at intelligent and streamlined interfaces throughout. It’s a half-truth – the HUD is a pain, but there are a few good ideas there.
7.5
Graphics
Pretty solid for an RTS; the environments are evocative and expansive. Units tend to blend together though, and the Echelon faction is forgettable.
7.0
Sound
A suitably epic score and some nice environmental sound effects. Voice acting falls on the bland side of good, but never cringeworthy. Too many repeated lines in the field will grate.
6.5
Gameplay
Look, it works, but it’s not any better for Whip Select. Often, you’ll plead at the screen for a more practical set of controls. Screens feel no pity, sadly. Close, but not quite there.
7.5
Lasting Appeal
The campaign could take you anywhere from 10 to 15 hours if you take your time, but if you really sit down and master the intricacies (and deal with its shortcomings), then online is a deal-maker.
6.6
Passable
OVERALL
(out of 10 / not an average)
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- Write Your Own Review of Stormrise (X360)
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Stormrise Review
by admin on Feb.02, 2010, under Review
March 31, 2009 –
When I previewed Stormrise, a new real-time strategy title from Creative Assembly, I was hopeful. The game, set in a dystopian future with plenty of ruined cities and stormy skies to enjoy, was designed from the ground up for consoles. Playing the preview build, I was intrigued by the Whip Select control system (which I’ll explain in detail later) and the battlefield camera, but a number of bugs and framerate jitters kept me from enjoying the full experience. Unfortunately, those issues weren’t just limited to the preview build. Stormrise has a lot of good ideas and is a sincerely valiant attempt to make RTS work without a keyboard and mouse, but the game’s technical problems, coupled with some truly frustrating control limitations, ultimately makes Stormrise a disappointing entry in the genre at best.
Stormrise takes place in a world torn apart by massive fire storms. After a catastrophic technological incident known only as The Event, pockets of humanity were forced underground into cryogenic hibernation in a desperate attempt to survive. The people remaining on the surface began to evolve over the countless years thanks to their exposure to the storms and they eventually became powerful beings known as the Sai. Now that the original threads of humanity — the Echelon — have awakened from their underground slumber, the two forces have begun to clash. You fill the boots of Commander Aiden Geary, a leader of the Echelon Special Forces and a strange player in these troubled times.
Check here for some gameplay clips.
In terms of gameplay, Stormrise is far from a traditional RTS. It’s not so much about building a base and commanding armies as it is jumping from node to node with small groups of soldiers. All the action takes place right down on the battlefield, as opposed to from a bird’s eye view. When in control of a unit, the camera sits just above its head and you can move your cursor around from its perspective. In this way, you can tell it where to go and what to attack. In order to select a different unit, you use the trusty Whip Select system to jump from one unit to another. By holding the right stick in a certain direction, you can highlight a unit’s icon on screen and let go of the stick, which switches you to that unit’s perspective.
Besides controlling units, your other obligation in Stormrise is to manage the pre-determined resource nodes on each map, which must be captured first and can then be turned into shielded turrets and refineries. The biggest strategic element in Stormrise is figuring out how to go about holding onto these nodes, as they’re a vital aspect of resource gathering and some can even be used as spawn points for new units. But besides node control, commanding units are what you’ll be doing the most in Stormrise.
But you don’t have to command one unit at a time, of course. You can group up to three units together and you can also issue Indirect Commands by moving the cursor over a friendly unit’s icon, hitting a button and dragging the resulting arrow to a new destination. These techniques, along with the Whip Select system, are great in theory, but in practice it’s a whole different story.
Charge! I guess.When it works, Whip Select is a neat idea. Being able to quickly jump across the battlefield is very handy, especially because the levels in Stormrise are multi-tiered and are rarely flat planes. But when the action starts to heat up, things fall apart.
Controlling a massive army is next to impossible in Stormrise. Sometimes, you need large forces to overwhelm the enemy but trying to whip between the groups is cumbersome. Even mapping different groups to the D-pad does little to alleviate the frustration. By the time you’ve built up an entire army, the screen is completely littered with icons and keeping precise track of your units is a disaster. Stormrise works much better when you’re working with smaller scale conflicts.
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