14 DAY TRIAL // When Creative Assembly announced its plans to create a console real time strategy title called Stormrise, a lot of people were skeptical. After all, the developer has a lot of experience with creating the Total War series, but until now, no one has been able to deliver a console RTS as popular as those on the PC.
The big gimmick of Stormrise is the new system of selection and control, called the Whip Select, which is supposed to make playing a real time strategy game on a console as simple as playing one on the PC with a mouse and keyboard setup.
The idea is to use the right control stick on the controller in order to “flick” towards a unit that you see on the screen. This will make the game select the unit and simultaneously center your view on it. It means that the player can quickly move through available units and issue orders, but it also means that he/she needs to be very much aware of where his/her units are, which can be difficult in the heat of battle.
The other big change that Stormrise aims to introduce is to fully simulate height and the impact it can have. Most real time strategy titles simulate height but do not allow units to fully exploit them. In Stormrise, parking a unit on a building means cover advantages, a better point of view, more attack power and a certain degree of stealth when they are not firing. In order to attack that unit, the enemy will have to either learn to scale buildings on the outside or risk a mission aimed at taking over the building, floor after floor. Adding underground tunnels will provide an extra layer of tactical possibilities.
Creative Assembly is also integrating units and heroes that gain experience as they survive combat and gain new abilities, while also dispensing with base building and resource manager in favor of introducing a checkpoint network that needs to be controlled by the players.
Stormrise is nothing short of ambitions but, as with other console RTS games, such as EndWar or Red Alert 3, we need to see how the ambitions translate into the finished product.