Stormrise

This is my first review I made, so why not start with a bad game?

Stormrise is a product of solely developed by Sega, no other studio was involved with the development of this game. In the early days of the consoles, with both Sega and Nintendo competing for a big part of the gaming market, Sega with the Genesis/Mega Drive and Nintendo with the Nintendo Entertainment System. In those days Sega also developed games. But now Sega has strayed away from the path of consoles and focused itself on the games.

Well, one of these games Sega developed is Stormrise. Maybe a title that says little to you or for some people a lot. When I bought the game I was pretty optimistic about it, despite some negativity around the game. Once I got back home, I inserted the disk into my PS3 and was expecting a good game.

So the game commences immediately when you start the game for the first time, immediately starting up the campaign. The short intro gives you a bit of information about what happened to Earth. It was the 21st century, where the human race had mastered Mother Nature by controlling the weather of Earth. But then something tragic happened. A catastrophic event, known also as the Event, destroyed almost all fertile land, entire cities and most of its population. Countries struggled to build bunkers as fast as they could, but soon the public realized that there wasn’t enough space for everyone. And then the panic rose. The bunkers were closed as they were full and the people outside the bunker doors were doomed, yep doomed. The people, who got lucky enough to get a place in one of those bunkers, were put in to a dreamless sleep as they were locked up in cryogenic chambers, to sleep through the storm that’s raging outside their bunkers. And then you, a commander of the Echelon, awake in a pod. The strange thing is that you are the sole survivor of an entire bunker that once held thousands of people. And from that point on, you’re put in active service.

Now I’m going to discuss the 2 factions: The Echelon and the Sai.
The Echelon: The Echelon were the lucky ones to be asleep in a bunker. They use high-tech weapons and vehicles. Their vision is to rebuild civilization and they see themselves as defenders of peace.

The Sai: The Sai were the remaining people that were the unfortunate ones as they were left outside in the storm created by the Event. But after centuries the people started to evolve, adapting to the harsh environment of the new Earth. The Sai uses an energy that’s called Sai energy, pretty cheap. This Sai energy gives the Sai extra strength and other powerups.

Well, that were the factions, now let’s continue with gameplay, which sucks. The camera’s horrible, for instance it doesn’t always do what you want. You’ll try and move it to the right and it won’t move. Pressing select gives you the map, and how dare they call it that? The only thing you see is a lot of orange and black. That orange and black are supposed to be terrain, your units, the enemy units and control nodes (which will be discussed later). The map is useless, you can’t move the cursor or whatever it is. You can’t identify your units let alone the enemies units.
Okay, now let’s talk about the gameplay.

You don’t have a bar on the bottom of the screen that lets you know what units you have, like in Endwar, instead you have to use whip select. They say “It’s a fast way to command your units fast and effectively”. Well it’s not, even worse it’s useless. With the right stick you select your units. But the tricky part is selecting the right unit, if you only touch the stick lightly it jumps. Plus if you have a staging area somewhere, where there are like 15 units, good luck picking the correct unit.

The units aren’t that special. You have your standard riflemen, medium infantry, then the heaviest infantry, light vehicles (buggies), medium vehicles (tanks), heavy vehicles (tanks and walkers) and, of course, a powerful unit that’s just as good as a tank. Yep, this game makes absolutely no sense at all.

But there is ONE big fail in this game. Picture this situation, you are standing with 7 riflemen on a good defendable spot. But then, the enemy appears, with 2 riflemen and 1 heavy infantry unit. Your forces and the enemy’s forces get into a fight and you lose. Now you might be thinking What the fuck, but yes that’s what happened to me. Not once, not twice, but 15 times. In the same campaign mission, level 3 to be correct. And that’s also how far I’ve gotten with the campaign, because this game sucks ass, hard.

Let’s take a look at the graphics. Well that’s probably the only thing in the game that has been done well, except the popup videos that pop up in the right side of your screen. The environment is well done, the effects, like explosions are good and the textures of the units are nice as well.

This game has an online option, that’s actually being used, surprisingly. There you have to destroy the enemy and capture all control nodes. These nodes give you the only resource that’s required in this game. The nodes are upgradable with 3 modules, which have 3 levels. A turret, a shield and a refinery. Pretty simple, before you can hit the turret you have to destroy the shield. After destroying the turret you can destroy the node (refinery is almost immediately destroyed). You start at a warp portal which is your staging area. Here you can puke out an unlimited amount of units using the portal, but only if you have enough energy.

So the overall score is bad. How bad? Very bad. Was this worth my money? No, I regret buying this game. The gameplay sucks and makes no sense, campaign is bad and only the graphics are good.