Console Monster: Stormrise Review

Console Monster writes: "Bundling me through Stormrise's opening sequence, I experience every crisis movie ever made, as it dragging me suddenly and uncomfortably from my bed and into a suit of power-armour, to be then thrown into a situation exemplified in every futuristic war movie ever made. In fact, the entire plot was a series of throwbacks to many an underage cinema trip. Stormrise is a tangled elastic-band ball of clichés, bouncing its way idly into my Xbox and straight back out again. Giving myself a shake down and entering the tutorial, I kept my mind open, for all I knew I was about to play the Game of the Year. I wasn't.

Met initially with some poorly rendered cutscenes, I wasn't impressed. It's not like I was expecting a celebratory brass fanfare and party poppers, but the grainy, pixelated splodge had me despairing from the off. Finally getting to the game, my character "Geary", a man with biceps bigger than battleships, was talked at by the ever-so-familiar hardened female commander, whose constant blatherings were only partitioned by the meek, diffident concurrences from our man Muscles. With my attention and patience already being tested, the game finally introduced me to the movement system, including the so-called "verticality" system. Lauded as a bold new genre-defining step, it fails miserably, achieving only a pale imitation of every other 3D RTS to grace my computer and Xbox for a fair old time. It's also clumsy as anything, clunking around like a dying lawnmower..."