Recent reviews by Anaryl, Emperor of Sol. GEH

This title has been on my radar for a very long time and on a moment of impulse I decided to try it.

This not one of those reviews where I wish I had a mixed review option. This is a solid do not recommend.

The game has a lot of things going for it. The idea of a perpetual war, in concept, is pretty cool. The logistical and construction/crafting systems are pretty impressive.

There certainly is a lot for a role based shooter fan to be doing in this game, and it truly does have a war vibe.

However, there are two major negatives that make this product non-viable. The first is one that's already kind of famous: the "community" or more precisely individuals in it. Whilst working on a set of entrenchments in an area where they might prove valuable I had aBrig. come up to me and tell what I was doing was useless and certainly not helping him.

This is gamer-employee syndrome - it's a major red flag - where players feel entitled to dictate what you should be doing with your leisure time as if you are some kind of employee of theirs. Unless you're paying me award wage, that's not the case. The usual kind of people going on about being 'cranesgender' and just the general obnoxioety of it are all major red flags. Worse still was when that flank collapsed and the enemy consolidated a bridgehead.

It was just a red flag but I could see how it was a major pain point for this title.

This would b e tolerable in of itself, if the control scheme weren't so horribly clunky and seemingly deliberately obtuse. For example, everytime I spawned I would have to go to the base pick up a rifle and ammo, and then exit that menu, cycle through each weapon and reload them, and any grenades also equip those. It's pointless and clunky.

But it gets worse from there: Whilst a lot of the game centres around fighting and digging in (hence the name Foxhole), the game forces you to swap between a shovel and your weapon in inventory. There's no swap keybind, one has to be unequipped for the other. This means if you're out digging a foxhole and a lone rambo runs up to your position, you have to quickly open inventory, swwap in your weapons, close inventory then aim and shoot.

It's just something that wouldn't be tolerated in a modern FPS game. There's no reason to make all this swapping all so necessary and so clunky. They should be equippable on different slots, shoulders can carry shovels and rifles, believe you me. There should be just be an easy swap - and you shouldn't have to equip your weapons every respawn.

The developer seems to understand that the game is bit clunky and unfair - as you can't access any in game menu from the respawn screen. Even after deciding I had had enough, the game forced me to wait until respawn to get out. That's just dirty.

Again, this is sort of something I could live with if there was a corresponding sense of realism or scale but there isn't. Some parts of do feel like you are being hit with artillery, but then again watching an AT gun get wheeled up 6 yards from a trench, fire into it and kill everyone kind of breaks the consistency.

To add insult to injury, there's no tutorials, the game forces you tp pick a faction which you are stuck with, without so much as a clue to what team balance looks like. I picked one at random and this resulted in choosing the team that had been winning due to numbers for some weeks.

Most of the environment, combat and tactics I saw, revolved around the teams defaulting to holding chokepoints, usually bridges or so, and the control of such areas see sawed along with timezone. It was strange since I was more or less able to walk through multiple defence lines and was instructed not to compromise the listening post. It might have made more sense to attack here than repeatedly throwing ourselves at a bridgehead.

I could live with the occassional toxic/domineering personality or funkiness in game play tactics; but between the controls and the way the community acts; and the way the teams fought using the environment, it all had those same red flags I've seen in post-terminal Planetside 2; or Star Citizen; or half dozen clans I've been in. It had the feeling of all being very arranged by 'commanders' on both sides to deliver the most gratification, rather than tactical or operational accomplishment.

There's plenty of games that do combined arms better in FPS. The concept itself is very cool. However, the clunkiness of the controls - deliberately so - are an offence to good design and respect between player and developer. As a developer myself, I hate this BS when you force players through clunky UI hoops just because you want to make demands of their time because you couldn't craft your incentives/tactical system well enough to permit fluid UI/UX interaction. Forcing inventory hard swaps for commonly used tasks, well you can imagine in battlefield if everytime you wanted to revive you had to swap out your primary weapon for your reviver and then put the primary weapon back - it's just criminal.

The game had a very toxic vibe - a very 'bossy' one as it were, with people leaving passive aggressive remarks (signs) and abusing each other in chat; or sexually harassing the chat. Adding the lack of controls or customisability; and the just general feeling that I was there to subsidise someone else's enjoyment with my time and money was fairly thick in the atmosphere.

High points for concept; low points for execution.

Stormgate is an interesting title from ex-Blizzard devs, who make no bones about using their existing art and design style at blizzard in their new title.

Rather than being a ripoff it appears at times to almost maliciously mock Blizzard.

The art style is a blend of Overwatch and Warcraft 3; and the game feels rather more influenced by Warcraft III than it does by Starcraft 2, despite the obvious similarities.

All round it plays rather well, is incredibly responsive and is extremely tightly designed. That it stands out as essentially a superior version of Starcraft II is pretty much immediately evident.

The game seems to have attracted the ire of Blizzard fans and its marketing team given by the repeated drama on the forums from thinly veiled industry veterans. This is really just icing on the cake watching Blizzard get sour at thew workers whom they ruthlessly exploited.

Unfortunately for someone of a macro RTS, as opposed to RTT, this kind of RTS style feels rather limited to me. No strategic zoom, limited scope and scale, little macro game - these aren't really things I feel people want from RTS these days.

However, despite my own preferences, I can tell it's an exceedingly well done RTS - and if you can pick two titles with the same pedigree, Starcraft 2 or Stormgate, then it's probably better to go with the company that isn't a soulless mockery of its former self.

At the end of the day, the main drawcards for RTS games like this isn't that its perfect or preferential, but whether you can find a match when you search ranked. Stormgate offers this.

So at the end of the day, Stormgate is your locally sourced, fresh "organic" produce compared to Starcraft 2, a battery farm, cruelty flavoured animal death farm.

This is a hidden gem. I've onkly just scratched the surface after seeing a shoutcast of a tournament match of Line War and it wasn't quite what Steam led me to expect.

Rather than control individual units, you place and set down factories, and other production, economic or strategic structures on the territory you control and manage the rally points and orders by drawing different strokes on to the game map.

This is very different at first but after looking over the keybinds, it's actually very natural and intuitive. The number of possible strategies and tactics vailable are quite numerous. It plays like a real time version of Civilisation, although with less emphasis on building and more on moving and ordering things around.


It's like a real time logistics/strategy game - rather than being obsessively micro focused. It's an excellent approach to removing micromanagement from RTS and bringing it back to strategy and tactics. My only quibble at this point was I would like to see some more single player features, like pause, bigger maps, matchmaking that functions a bit better as a match maker.

Overall, it's impressive for the price, and a pretty hot take on the RTS genre. Worth trying at least once, pretty addictive.;

It's really quite good. More like a kind of Planetside or Warthunder Coop without the grind or overt monetisation.

Weapons are powerful; good variety of aircraft. Flight mechanics like takeoff and landing simplified - but strong weapons with long ranges.

Lots of bots as well as players so target rich environment. Easy respawns - so back in the action pretty quickly. Still mechanics like radar, counter measures and weapons are better detailed and simulated than Battlefield 4 (plus HOTAS support) but nowhere as finnicky as something like DCS or Arma3.

It's like a tactical shooter, but for modern aircraft - and with nukes! You can also control all the vehicles on the ground. Plenty of missions come up emergently this way, giving meaning and depth to combat strike missions and dogfights.

Mission editor looks promising as does Workshop support. Still only early access.

UI needs work. Functional and responsive but cluttered at times, not enough functionality at others - ugly all the time. Could use a couple of dedicated 24/7 servers from the developer to stop that one random guy determined to ruin everything.

Excellent collection of single players, coop, PvE, PvP and PvEvP. More maps would be nice. Early access - but pretty good.

Active playerbase - and good reports all round. If this game gets enough attention, it could be a cult classic.

Utterly broken.

Servers simply do not work. No OCeania srvers, but it doesn't matter, SEA servers only stay up for ten to twenty minutes - and there's little synchronisation during that time.

Only buy at this time if you specifically support this game and developer. It's not in a playable state - at all.

Okay I'm hooked. This is a MUST-GET for space sim, flight and/or 4x/civilisation fans. Any inability to get through the tutorials and start guides is just your lack of motivation and intellect (yes it took me a couple of goes too)

Took a while to get past flight tutorial. Highly recommend watching someone do a playthrough (I watched a sn0wblinds tutorials on YT) - then following a start guide (followed another one for a Young Gun Start).

The game is really initimidating but it also goes a long way into taking the work of managing an empire out for you. I'd have been a lot less stressed about throwing my head at a wall if I'd known that what takes several hours of work in Star Citizen can easily be accomplised in minutes in X4.

I finally broke through into the game proper the other day - and damn. It's amazing what they have accomplished. It's criminal that Star Citizen churns through so much publicity and money, stealing oxygen from titles such as this. Whilst it's certainly not as pretty, it's completely functional! Star Citizen can't even get doors to work. The abuse of that game does a lot to set your expectations of needless BS in games.

Once you break into the game it's like Star Citizen/Elite/No Man's Sky with a civilisation/4x game that you can partipate in running the background.

Anyways will write/post a full review.

Does crash a bit.

I gave this a try in line with all the groundswell. Some of the actions around this title are red flags.

"Server at capacity" simply put, you should avoid buying this until you can actually get access to it. There's no provision for offline play or even provisioning enough capacity in future.

There was an obvious marketing push with astroturfers, streamers, et al bringing it up in tangentially related game forums - and all the people onboard that hype train were super pushy about it.

This is the problem with Games as a Service - they don't have any obligation not to oversubscribe their service and simply keep the money with the expectation that enough people are going to leave over time that it will meet their capacity.
We live in an economy - and shop in a marketplace - where a business or publisher can only enough capacity for 100 000 seats, but can sell one million licenses - and there's no penalty for that; especially if you just spam out with PR.

There are myriad other issues, such as the UI becoming unresponsive, forgetting bindings, a dozen premium currencies for 1 shot upgrades; it's really a Destiny 2 clone with as aggressive monetisation. At least with Destiny you get a discrete content pack.

Parts of the game feel like parts of No Man's Sky or Destiny tacked on. The gameplay is okay, but controls and movement aren't super responsive and the main movement mechanic is diving into prone (hence helldivers) - there's no smooth or fluid movement game like in say Naraka, the Witcher; or Darktide. It's a somewhat plain shooter wtih cool explosions.

All the maps feel like they are the same map; map controls are bit weird and clunky - mandatory 3rd person except when scoped - being unable to change from tap or press or hold on certain functions like scoping or reloading means that these key functions feel unresponsive - especially when there are enemies everywhere getting close because of the camera wrestling.

The environments are pretty but again, layouts feel like the same map each time - and I've played on the same biome on four different planets.

I could forgive alot of this if not for the server capacity issue. Completely locking people out of a sixty dollar game because publisher made a cost analysis and decided it would be better to just steal people's money knowing they wouldn't be able to deliver. 2 nights in a row it complains servers at capacity (when its 4am AEST). There's not even a quit button.

Overall, the game has a lot of interesting concepts and elements - some of which do and some of which don't work. The first time a player joined a mission with me, it really all felt like a walk in the park with them just calling explosions down everywhere, us clearing the map and getting all the loot.

It felt hard to get connected to the universe and all the elements since its hard to take it seriously. The game routinely disposes of your character, making it hard to develop any persistent attachment to anything. It feels like a headache or eating too much cheese - there's some property (probably the overt gameification) that makes it feel a bit like a kids game.

Maybe if I can get on and play a bit more I might change my mind - but server at capacity issue is a dealbreaker right now.

Counter-Strike has been running on nostalgia fumes for the past decade. Match-fixing, cheating and hacking at the competitive level has become the norm; whilst at the casual level, there is absolutely nothing new here outside a reskin reminiscent of Overwatch.

It's a forced upgrade, likely to facilitate marketplace and microtransactions ; because they clearly haven't done anything with content. Still 75% of the weapons aren't useful, no scopes, no prone, no lean, no vault. It's still the *exact* same game it was 25 years ago. Sure, the shaders have been updated, there's probably some new renderer under the hood and better support for running the game at 4000fps at 4k.

But in terms of actually evolving as an FPS. It has not done that, it hasn't moved with the times - it's stagnant. Besides, most fans would've preferred Half Life 3 before CS2 - but I think if anything CS2 shows up Valve as completely bereft of any creativity; and entirely focused on wringing as much value out of these zombie titles as they can.

It's just a below average game with a million people who play out of habit, sunk cost fallacy or separation anxiety. Battlebit is more evolved as a shooter; and offers way more game modes; Squad offers more indepth gunplay, Arma Reforger and the latest CoDs look better.

If one was to compare CS titles to the Simpsons, CS was Seasons 1, CS:Source was like season 7, CS:GO was like season 11 - then CS2 is like Season 25.

What is it?

Silica is a mix of RTS and FPS with a thematic background very reminiscent of the Dune series - you are part of one of two human factions - or bug like aliens territorial about their spice - which is a cool addition to the genre.

State:

It's very early access, the best way to describe it is early alpha - where it seems the mechanics of the game are in place but overall lacks a lot of content.

It seemed the standard amount of glitchy for any early access shooter of this type but wasn't particularly unstable. Things like lower quality models and visual and function UI are things you are going to be dealing with. Additionally it looks like there are four maps - with little thematic difference.

The Good:

Silica pushes the boundaries of the RTS FPS fusion genre - with a commander having a Dune like RTS interface and building similar units, buggys, tanks various kinds of infantry. Players in the server up to 40 so far can take countrol of various units and fight across the map - and indeed even in the base buildings.

The Bad:

Gunplay is somewhat lacking at the ranges at which you can see and engage the enemy; movement and weapons are presently very 'arcadey' - with little feel to the weapons, like recoil and weight, and basic optics. The differences between infantry units is purely functional - which is not a bad foundation to start from, but not super compelling gunplay either. The RTS mode, Commander is functional but barebones and painfully slow, since it is operating at player timescales. The maps are rather hefty desert maps which, whilst detailed have uncertain flow and take an enormous amount of time for the painfully slow units to cross. Resource gathering is *especially* slow.

The Ugly:

The multiplayer model. BI and the arma series are pretty old school in that they simply give you a server browser and server application. You either play on the ground by joining some random persons server, or play the commander mode by hosting your own. You can block joiners in the commander mode/set it passworded or to private - but it isn't really a great experience.

This, I think, has held back a lot of Arma content over the past decade because the rise of toxicity in gaming mediums and communities brought on by excessive parasocial conditioning, people aren't as keen on venturing outside official spaces. It's socially confronting in this day and age to have to front up to a server of 13 peop,e who probably all know each other - or worse have to browse Discord for games. I feel at the very least consolidating the player base with some officia servers across all of its games might help with this. I dunno, this might just be me though.

Conclusion:

Silica shows great promise - especially as an innovator in terms of RTS/FPS fusion. However the game is early access, and features can change before release. I can imagine if you're looking for a coop experience for your community, or are interested in the evolution of both these genres this is something you might want to check out. However, if you dislike unfinished content; or beta games, it might not be your cup of tea. Definitely a game there to play though.