As the first of StarCraft II‘s spiritual successors to make it to a public launch, Stormgate will be releasing free to play for all as an early access title on August 13th, but before then, founder’s pack buyers and beta players have been given two weeks of early access-ception. Thanks to the beta key kindly provided me to me by developer Frost Giant Studios a few months ago, I’ve been able to dive in ahead of the general public.
I was disappointed by the beta build, and unfortunately since then I’ve grown increasingly skeptical of Stormgate as more and more red flags cropped up. Even so, I expected the early access build to be better than it has turned out to be. It has a lot more content than what I’d played previously, but it’s still a long, long way from feeling like a finished game, or even one that’s ready for public early access.
The biggest new addition is the third (and final?) playable faction, the robotic space angels of the Celestial Armada. Whereas the first two factions played it very safe mechanically, the Celestials are at the exact opposite extreme, feeling like a whole new game unto themselves. Aside from a variety of smaller differences in their economic mechanics, their main gimmick seems to be maintaining various forms of energy.
Most Celestial units are spellcasters, though in some cases these “spells” are auto-cast and just buff their performance in some way. But it means your army will lose a lot of efficacy if they run out of energy. To support this, you can build power banks that will recharge nearby units, and there’s a top bar ability that can help them recharge on the field.
Celestial buildings don’t require workers to construct them, but they do have to be placed in a power field projected by your existing structures. Your main structure is a mobile mothership, so I suppose the intention is to have it follow your army so you can pepper the map with power banks.
Power banks also tie into the other core gimmick of the faction, a global energy pool created by power banks that fuels your structures. In the beta, this was effectively just a population cap but for buildings; in the current build, you can still construct buildings when out of power, but their efficacy is severely limited until you get back into the green. Using top bar abilities also consumes power, and there’s also some kind of temporary power thing that recharges over time, and… I’ll level with you guys, I have no idea how this mechanic works. All I know is I always seem to be out of power no matter how many banks I make.
I find the Celestials much more aesthetically appealing than Vanguard or Infernals, and the unit energy mechanic is neat, but I do question the wisdom of having two factions with almost no new ideas and one that’s nothing but new ideas. Celestials’ learning curve is more of a learning cliff. Wouldn’t it have been better to give every faction a mix of fresh and familiar mechanics?
We’ve also gotten our first taste of the campaign. There are currently two three-mission chapters of the Human Vanguard campaign available. The first chapter is free, but you need to pay for the second. I’ve played only the free chapter.
The story and gameplay would both best be described as “fine, I guess.” It’s inoffensive, but it’s nothing we haven’t seen before. Admittedly I don’t know how exciting the tutorial missions could possibly be, but it doesn’t inspire one to spend on the paid chapter.
The poor-quality animations of campaign cutscenes are taking an absolute drubbing on social media, and this isn’t one of those Mass Effect: Andromeda situations where people cherry-picked a few awkward moments that aren’t representative of the whole. The character models and animations are just shockingly poor quality across the board.
Co-op has also gotten an infusion of new content. We now have five playable commanders: two for the Vanguard, two for the Infernals, and one for the Celestials. Only one, Blockade of the Vanguard, is fully free to play. The others have their progression capped at level five (of ten) unless you pay to unlock them. StarCraft II had a similar system but offers one commander of each faction for free (or two of each faction if you bought Legacy of the Void before the free to play conversion).
I was disappointed by the lack of variety seen in the current commanders. Whereas StarCraft II co-op commanders often felt like entirely new factions or introduced totally unique approaches to playing the game, Stormgate‘s seem to offer only minor twists to the base gameplay of their faction. Maybe more inventive ones will come later, but SC2 managed a good variety of gameplay even with their initial selection.
There are also several more maps for co-op missions, but I don’t know if I’d call them “new” maps. One is an almost exact carbon copy of Dead of Night from StarCraft II, with the exact same mechanics and even nearly the same map layout. There’s also a “new” one that has the exact same story, mechanics, and dialogue of the original Stormgate co-op mission from beta (which is also still in the game). It’s literally the exact same mission with a slightly different map. The lack of creativity is shameless.
A final noteworthy addition is the BuddyBot, an optional AI available in co-op and custom games (not competitive games) that can be set to automate some or all of your economy.
I’m not sure how I feel about this as a concept. RTS games need more tools for accessibility to attract new and casual players, and I don’t think many people find building workers to be exciting gameplay, but it’s hard to judge how much streamlining is too much.
Regardless, BuddyBot is very slow and very dumb, so it doesn’t make that much difference in the end. Even if you do turn it on, you’re probably going to still need to manage much of your economy yourself. I like having it build workers for me, but it seems better to do everything else yourself.
Beyond that it’s pretty much the same game it was in beta – that is to say, severely unpolished. The graphics have improved a little, but they’re still very unappealing and lack the visual clarity that a good RTS needs. All the audio I was praying was placeholder apparently isn’t.
So much of the criticism of this game has focused on its visuals, and I don’t disagree with those opinions, but I think the audio issues actually bother me more. This game sounds so bad. Combat audio has so weight whatsoever, and unit dialogue is inaudible. They spent the money to hire Simu Liu to voice one of the main characters, and I can’t hear a word he’s saying most of the time.
It’s still missing core features, too. The 3v3 mode that was supposed to be one of the core pillars of the game isn’t coming until next year, nor is the map editor.
I’d also like to point out that the micro-transactions in Stormgate are very expensive compared to StarCraft II. Regional pricing may vary, but for me a co-op commander costs $12.99 in Stormgate versus $6.25 in SC2. A three-mission campaign chapter is also $12.99, compared to $11.99 for the nine mission Nova: Covert Ops DLC in SC2. The full nine mission Vanguard campaign (which isn’t fully released yet) costs $32.50, compared to the $49.99 campaign bundle in SC2 that contains the full Nova DLC, the campaigns for Legacy of the Void and Heart of the Swarm (each over 20 missions long), and several co-op commanders.
To be fair, you would have paid more if you bought the expansions at release — I believe Wings of Liberty was roughly $70, and the following expansions around $40-50 — but again those campaigns are about three times as long as the content Stormgate is charging $32 for. SC2 campaigns also had a lot of ways to customize your units and heroes, so they had more replay value.
I really don’t like the gamer culture of savaging any game that stumbles a bit on launch, and I try very hard not to feed into that toxicity, but I’m just not seeing a silver lining here. There’s so many other janky or missing features that I haven’t even mentioned yet. You can’t pause or save mid-mission in campaigns. There’s no offline play. There are no targeting graphics for AoE abilities. Every unit has too many abilities and upgrades to keep track of. The armour mechanic is incomprehensible.
Seriously, I’ve seen armour explained like 20 different ways, and none of the explanations seems to agree with the others, and I still have no idea what armour actually does.
All the marketing about this game focused how this was supposedly the same team that built Blizzard’s legendary RTS titles (despite the fact it employs only a handful of ex-Blizzard devs). They all but declared it would be StarCraft III. They set the expectation for big features, high polish, and genre-changing innovation, but I don’t think they’ve delivered any of that. Their ads on Facebook are calling this a AAA game, but it just objectively isn’t. Godsworn is more polished and more fun, and its dev team is just two people with a Patreon page.
For what it’s worth, the 1v1 players seem reasonably happy with the game, perhaps not surprisingly since that mode seems to have gotten the lion’s share of developer attention, but I’m just not interested in competitive play.
I like SC2 co-op enough that just the same thing with a new coat of paint still holds some appeal, so I can see playing Stormgate‘s co-op a bit more, but I don’t think I’d feel comfortable spending money on it, and since almost every commander’s progression is pay-walled, it’s not going to have much longevity for me.
When I played the beta, my impression was that Stormgate had the potential to be a good game, but that it needed about two or three years more development before it would be ready for the public. Now I suspect even that may have been overly optimistic.
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