Stormrise

It's the post-apocalypse. On Earth. I think it's Earth, anyway. I mean, they never actually say where it is, not even during the 5-minute FMV that opens the game. But everyone's talking with American accents, so let's just pretend either way. So it's a post-apocalyptic let's-pretend-it's-Earth. Not entirely sure what precipitated the apocalypse in question, but it was obviously something really, you know, big and apocalyptic. Anyway, some unspecified time later, it seems two factions sort of got up from all the dust and rubble and everything. There's the Echelon, your regular butch space marine-types, who apparently survived the fallout by means of some sort of artificial hibernation, and then there's the Sai, the guys who didn't bother avoiding the fallout and got all sorts of cool mutant powers and stuff. Well, they mostly just got these dangly tentacle things that hang off their heads, but that's probably where they get their powers. Makes perfect evolutionary sense or something, apparently. Obviously the two sides don't get along, because that's no fun at all. So they spend most (all) of their time killing each other instead of doing anything tedious and practical, like rebuilding civilisation. You blunder into the midst of all this when you're yanked out of hibernation and promptly redrafted into active duty in the Echelon war effort. "Oh, hi! It's, like, four hundred years later," says a hypothetical designated waker-upper. "Here's your mech suit. Have a super day!" It might be four hundred years later, I'm not actually sure. It didn't say.

Now, I've played some bad games in my time. Games like the Da Vinci Code, for example – an awful game of an awful movie of an awful book. We're talking a pretty distinguished legacy of awful here, all crammed into one awful game. Stormrise manages to be worse than a whole heritage of awful. That's impressive. It's also the only impressive thing about Stormrise.

Most people would recoil in horror at the suggestion of an RTS on console, but I recently played Halo Wars and it was a riot of fun. Sure, it lacked some of the complexity of traditional RTS's on PC, but its control suite was robust, intuitive, and fundamentally efficient. Its unit and counter-unit paradigm was reasonably balanced, while its level design ably facilitated – even encouraged - variable and contingent gameplay.

Stormrise has none of this. It hit me about 5 hours in that Stormrise feels more or less exactly like an inverse tower defence game, where you're basically waging a war of (very, very slow) attrition through a series of outrageously overpowered enemy fortresses. And not even a decent tower defence game. There's no real strategy or clever counter-offensive play here – you really just churn out troopers, keep chucking them at one enemy installation until it eventually explodes, and then you move your little guys on to the next one. In theory, anyway, because Stormrise has the most appalling pathfinding AI I've seen in over 20 years of gaming. Instead of navigating terrain in any sort of remotely intelligent way (like moving around obstacles), units have this hilarious tendency to cluster up against every single bit of scenery that sticks out, and just keep trying to walk through it while enemy turrets turn them into hotdogs from just two metres away. At least, it would be hilarious if it didn't make you want to smash things with small children. Micromanage them? See, in Stormrise, you don't have one of those cool overhead views that most RTS games have. You view your units from a third person field view, with very limited camera control. And then you have this tendency to get in the way of your own view. When you're not getting in the way of the camera, you can always rely on the environment doing it for you. Yes, you'll spend a lot of time looking at walls and floors in Stormrise, usually just before you have to reload your game.

Then there's the Whip Select feature, only it's trademarked in case evil people want to steal the idea, so it's Whip Select™. Whip Select™ replaces the reliable, time-tested method of moving a skimmer around to focus on and take control of units. With Whip Select™, you flick your thumbstick in the direction of a unit, highlight it, and your viewpoint jumps there. I know, it sounds kind of okay in theory, doesn't it? It might even work out alright if you've got only three or four units in play. Unfortunately, this is an RTS and you usually don't, so you'll spend a lot of time creeping the crosshair around the edges of the screen, trying to find the right unit. Imagine trying to do this all in the four or five seconds you have before the unit clustering up against a stray brick is turned into hotdogs by the enemy turret two metres in front of them, while all you can see is the floor. Call me a pessimist, but I don't think any evil people are going to be stealing the Whip Select™ idea any time soon, or ever.

There's also a tactical map. Forget about it, really. There's more story. Forget about that too. There's even some sort of twist, but the story wrapped around it is so thoroughly abysmal, that it has no significance whatsoever. The graphics are ugly, the voice acting is worse, and the script is the most contemptible stuff this side of a straight-to-video Steven Seagal movie. Don't ever play this. The only reason it gets any sort of score is because it runs when you put the disc in. I'm not convinced this is entirely a good thing, but credit where credit's due. It runs.

Pros: