Maelstrom

I don’t know if you can even find this game anymore, but it is not worth finding. I read some review that said this was an okay game for RTS beginners, but it is not too good. First off, the voice acting is terrible. There are many cut scenes in the game – between missions, in missions, etc. So you get to listen to bad acting a lot. Also, you have to move the camera around in the game. I guess this is supposed to be a cool feature, but I found it to be a distraction. Lots of times buildings and other structures were in the way so I had to swing the camera around to try to see my units.

There are three different factions in the game, but it would have been better without the aliens. Two human factions – the Remnants (Rebels) are fighting the Ascension (The Empire) over what’s left of the Earth after an environmental disaster. Somehow these random aliens looking for a new home world  come to play as well. The Remnant campaign is pretty weak – very easy for the most part. It also introduces you to the useless 3rd person FPS view which you don’t need to use to play the game. The missions were boring because you end up producing a ton of units and sending them to fight. They die and then you make more, ad infinitum, until you win. I actually had hope for the game when I started playing the Ascension campaign. They had some cool buildings and animation, but it soon bogged down into another grind.

Another annoying feature is the terrain deformation effects. You can have certain units sink, flatten, or build-up land, and other units freeze water. It looks nice, but is a major distraction. Also, the game has some crappy bugs; you get the crash to desktop variety plus a nasty bug that won’t let you progress to the next level. The game gets stuck and you have to force quit and reload your last save game. It was always a gamble whether I would make it to the next level or not. By this time I couldn’t even try to play the alien campaign and just gave up.

I think I may have paid $1 or $2 for this game, and now I know why. For $5 you might get some worth out of it, but personally I would just avoid it if possible.

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