Spiritual successors are hard, and with Stormgate, developer Frost Giant, a veritable who’s who of ex-RTS developers from Blizzard Entertainment, is attempting the impossible: making the next great RTS, which means making a spiritual successor to WarCraft III and StarCraft II. I’ve spent a decent chunk of the last week with Stormgate’s Early Access, free-to-play release, and Frost Giant seems like they’re on the right track — though there’s clearly a lot more to do. By the end of my time with it, I mostly wanted to play StarCraft II, so I guess that’s something.
If you didn’t know better, you might look at Stormgate and think it was a Blizzard game. It certainly has all the look and feel of one. Stormgate quite literally looks like a combination of WarCraft III, StarCraft II., with a pinch of Diablo thrown in for flavor. Like StarCraft, you’ve got three factions here: the Human Vangaurd, the Infernal Host, and the Celestial Armada. Squint hard enough, and you can see the Terran, Zerg, and Protoss, respectively.
That said, it’s not a 1:1, and Stormgate’s a clear fusion of sci-fi and fantasy that makes it stand out in the RTS space. The three factions have their own unique properties. Vanguard, for instance, fuse high-powered sci-fi weapons with swords and hammers. Their units also have the unique ability to gain veterancy as they take out enemies, granting increased health and unit-specific upgrades, and they can have several worker units build a structure to make it go faster.
The Infernal Host seems like a combination of the Zerg and Undead from WarCraft III, with a splash of the Burning Legion thrown in for some visual flair. Their workers, called Imps, fuse the with buildings they make to bring them into existence, and they can sacrifice some units to top off or boost the power of others.
Last but not least, you’ve got the Celestial Armada, a race that is a fusion of the biological and mechanical, and the most similar to the Protoss. Their units are powerful, and their bases are mobile, so they can move (and build) in places the other factions can’t. And just like the Protoss, they have a ton of unique units with several abilities for you to dig into when it comes to micro.
So there are three unique factions, and you mine two resources and manage your population as you build your army. It’s all very Blizzard RTS, but there are a couple of cool things that set Stormgate apart. First, there are creep camps, as in WarCraft III, but they aren’t there just so you can get experience; instead, killing them gives you access to towers that give you vision, resources, health, speed boosts, or energy. Other players can contest these camps, making them worth fighting for, and the camps themselves do respawn over time with tougher monsters.
Remember that energy I mentioned earlier? Each faction also has a top bar of unique abilities that cost energy to use and grants them unique bonuses from enhanced resource gathering to combat buffs, so managing that is crucial during a game. There’s even a quick menu that allows you to build structures, train units, and research upgrades without having to navigate to individual buildings, which is great once you’ve got your economy up and running and you just need to dump resources into production or need to quickly train some workers.
So Stormgate has all the things you need to make a fun, engaging RTS, though it’s obviously still very, very early in development and there’s still a lot of work to do. While I don’t mind the exaggerated art style that Frost Giant has chosen to go with here, it might be a little too exaggerated. Maloc, a member of the Infernal Host and one of the main antagonists, is just a demon with a jet of fire where his legs should be and arms that are way too big for his body. I get that he’s supposed to be a unique, menacing take on a demon, but he just looks goofy. The same is true of Amara, the main protagonist of the Vanguard, whose hairstyle is… a choice. That said, it’s not all bad. I really like the look of the Vulcan, a big Vanguard mech suit wielding a mini-gun, for instance.
There’s also some visual clutter that can make it hard to tell certain units and structures apart. Personally, this was more of an issue for the Infernals than the other two factions, but it can be a problem in a genre where you have to be able to look at something and immediately know what it is.
What I do like, though, is the sheer variety of modes. In addition to the standard campaign, which so far is Vanguard-only, and comes with four free missions for everyone and a few more you can buy, there’s also a co-op mode that’s very reminiscent of StarCraft II’s (you pick a hero and control their army, gaining experience and abilities for completing missions), matchmaking, and basic custom games. It’s everything you need in an RTS at launch, though it’s obviously still early days and nothing is done. I enjoyed the campaign missions I played, though there is notably no load or save feature in missions, and I didn’t find the story compelling in the way that StarCraft or WarCraft’s is. There’s a running joke that Blizzard only knows how to tell one story, and so far Frost Giant isn’t doing a lot to silence that gag. But it’s early yet. Maybe they’ll surprise me. Who knows?
Outside of the campaign, I mostly stuck with the Vangaurd because I play Terran in StarCraft and because the campaign missions I’d played gave me a good idea of how they worked. If you’re trying to play the Infernals or Celestials, you’ll have to teach yourself, as the only thing Stormgate has right now is a link to several (admittedly good) YouTube videos that will walk you through how they work. There’s also a feature called BuddyBot that will help you out in non-ranked matches so you can offload stuff like base management, but I don’t think I like it that much. It’s great for casual players who just want to fool around, but it’s bad if you’re trying to learn because it just does stuff for you instead of teaching you and can screw up your base management and resource allocation. I’d rather have something that walks me through a build order, or gives me tips as the match goes on. Don’t get me wrong: once I learned how they worked, I enjoyed every faction, but Vanguard still felt the most like home when everything was said and done.
The PVP mode is fun and very Classic RTS™, but my favorite part of Stormgate might be its co-op mode. It’s basically the same as StarCraft II, which makes sense, because it was designed by a lot of the same people. You’ll choose a hero with unique abilities and a take on their army, and get dropped into a mission where you’ll do something like blow up convoys before they reach their destination. It’s 3v3 compared to StarCraft II’s 2v2 co-op mode, but it is a lot of fun, and ultimately a decent way to learn the basics of each faction. Plus, who doesn’t like fooling around with hero units with cool powers? And you can play with a friend. It’s a good time.
Stormgate left me feeling… pretty mixed. On the one hand, I’m not super invested in its setting, story, lore, visual design, or factions, and it just never grabbed me the way other RTS games have. On the other hand, I like its co-op mode, and it’s got some cool new ideas that add unique wrinkles to the RTS. Stormgate is fun, and Frost Giant is making a point of listening to feedback. I will say this, though: the first thing I did after closing Stormgate was open StarCraft II. It got me in the mood, reminded me why I love this genre and why I’m sad it doesn’t really exist anymore. I don’t know if Stormgate will be the next great RTS — it has dump truck-sized shoes to fill — but it’s got potential, and I’m interested in booting it up in a couple months and seeing where it’s at. And sometimes, especially for an Early Access game, that’s enough.
This preview was based on an Early Access build that is publicly available on Steam.
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replyWill Borger posted a new article, Stormgate's early access release makes me eant to play StarCraft II again and that's good, I think?
