Stormgate is a pretty confusing game. It's an RTS made by ex-Blizzard developers that's almost, but not quite, completely different from StarCraft. It's free-to-play, but its business model makes you feel like you're getting a harder bargain than if you'd just given thirty bucks to get it outright. It's available now in Early Access, but it's been available for several weeks now in a sort of gravity-defying Super Early Access (which you had to pay for).
All this has made me very tired and made me miss the days when you would go to a store and buy a game in a box for a certain amount of money, and the whole game would be in the box, and you would go home, put the game on your PC and play until your mother would say, “Richard!” (only my mother calls me Richard) “stop playing on that computer and go outside and do some exercise! Do you want to be dead by 35?” Well, I'm 36 now, Mom. Almost 37. So who's laughing about her heart palpitations now?
Hmm. But what's most confusing about Stormgate is that it's a potentially interesting strategy game. Unfortunately, it shows its dullest side first, with its intriguing trio of factions buried under a crust of concentration-test-approved blandness, and a campaign that's barely shown you anything good before asking you to pull out your wallet.
The basic premise of Stormgate is this: imagine StarCraft falling in love with WarCraft and together they spawn an army of baby demons that all come out of… well, don't imagine that part. It's a clever and elegant RTS that follows the rule of threes, with three very different factions to play as and three different ways to play them.
Unfortunately, the first method is currently the worst. Stormgate is a six-mission single-player campaign that puts you in control of the Vanguard: Stormgate's technologically advanced human faction, as they wage war against the Infernals, Stormgate's demonic faction. Its story revolves around a tough-minded female soldier named Amara, whose father was present during the Infernals' initial invasion, as she attempts to rally the Vanguard against the machinations of an Infernal named Maloc.
The narrative is typically Blizzard in its approach, from the flashy opening cinematic with its expensive-looking CG animations, to the cursed sword Amara obtains early in the story that certainly isn’t going to corrupt her in any way. The problem is, none of it is particularly compelling. Amara has all the charisma of a Star Wars prequel Jedi, while the demons are all pantomime villains from Clive Barker’s amateur dramatic society. It’s worth noting that developer Frost Giant has said that some of the voices and animations are placeholders, but I’m not sure new voice talent would change the fact that Amara is terrible company.
This real-time strategy game is pretty boring and has a few passable but uninteresting RTS missions. The free prologue has a character-centric mission that tasks you with completing a level with a limited number of units, and two missions that involve building a base to conquer one or more enemy bases. All of this is fine, but nothing I haven't seen in thousands of RTS games before.
Also, right now, everything I like about Stormgate has a big “but” attached to it. Base building, for example, is slick and satisfying, with nice animations for assembling structures. Yet once built, I find the various buildings hard to visually parse, meaning I tend to forget which structure is which. Combat is flashy but lacks weight, especially when larger units are fighting. I like the quick menu that lets you issue build and recruit orders, but I don’t understand why unit selection and order confirmation aren’t universally bound to one mouse button or the other. Left-click should ALWAYS select units, Frost Giant, while right-click should ALWAYS issue orders, even if you’re deploying a special ability or confirming a building. Everything else is heresy. I’ve spoken.
By the third mission, which asks you to build and defend a base against three demon bases, I was about to get to grips with Stormgate, even if I hadn't really enjoyed it yet. It was at this point that Stormgate said to me, “well, you've had enough goodies, mate, time to get to work”. Playing the remaining three missions in the campaign costs nine pounds. If the previous three missions had been a blast of fun, I might have been tempted. But they weren't, so I didn't.
Instead, I turned to the game's single-player multiplayer and skirmish modes to take a look at the other two factions. This is where I discovered Stormgate at its most interesting. While the Vanguard may be a bit boring, the other two factions, the Infernals and the Celestials, are anything but boring.
Of the two, the Infernals are my favorite faction. Frost Giant has clearly thought about how to make them truly evil. For starters, they don't build structures; they sacrifice meat to literally bring them out of hell. Every building you “build” opens a gaping fissure in the ground from which your structure eventually rises. Likewise, you don't really “recruit” units. Each unit type automatically generates charges over time. Once a single charge is full, you can instantly summon that unit onto the battlefield. This means you can build armies very quickly and rush them towards the enemy for a nasty surprise.
Playing as the Infernals brings back fond memories of being a horrible little prick to the fantasy heroes in Dungeon Keeper. It’s a feeling reinforced by the creative demon types. Even your base demon, the Brute, has a nasty trick that lets it sacrifice itself to split into two smaller, AI-controlled demons.
The remaining faction, the Celestials, are less engaging than the Infernals, but are arguably more intriguing due to their sheer weirdness. Imagine a bunch of Lord of the Rings elves getting into some New Age crystal crap and then starting building planes, and you'll have a rough idea of what the Celestials are like. Their worker units are literal blue prisms that absorb energy from resource sites, while buildings are built by Bible-faithful angel units that transform into a selected structure on command. They're slower to build an army than the Infernals, with a heavy emphasis on air units. But if you can get those air units in the air, the Celestials are very difficult to counter unless you're adequately prepared.
I want to stress that this is a very, very basic introduction to these factions. Most units have special abilities that can be activated on command, while the Infernals and Celestials can be triggered faction-wide by accumulating a bespoke tertiary resource. In the case of the Infernals, you accumulate ritual power by killing enemies, while the Celestials harvest energy by placing certain types of buildings. The maps also have a wide range of control points that provide bonuses of their own, encouraging you to build satellite bases alongside your main headquarters.
In short, there’s a ton of strategic nuance to how these factions were built, which makes it all the more unfortunate that Stormgate’s mechanical diversity is obscured by the game’s post-Overwatch art style. To be honest, I never liked this semi-stylized approach to art design to begin with, and I’m even less enthusiastic about it now that it’s been adopted by every big-budget multiplayer game developer who wants me to care about their characters without actually setting up a narrative foundation. Still, I really don’t think it works in a strategy game where demonic aliens tear through reality to grab humanity by the lungs. I want Stormgate to be grittier, grimier, heavier, more impactful, not presented with all the gravitas of a Saturday morning cartoon.
Stormgate is a potentially good game, but it makes a bad first impression. Six missions, only three of which are free to play, don't make for a good campaign or a bargain, while the game's most interesting factions are hidden in the multiplayer, where you have to learn a lot on the ground to get the most out of it. That said, I don't think it's a game to dismiss. Behind its bland art style is a tactically very chewy strategy game. If you're a fan of the genre and have friends who are, you'll have fun in its 1v1 multiplayer, which, I stress, costs nothing to try.