| Stormgate | |||
|---|---|---|---|
| Gameplay & Story | Release Date | Pre-Order & DLC | Review |
Stormgate is a brand new sci-fi RTS featuring three races and a map full of side objectives. Read our review to see what it did well, what it didn't do well, and if it's worth buying.
Stormgate Review Overview
What is Stormgate?
Earth has become the unfortunate battleground between three factions that have different plans for their races: The Vanguard, human defenders of the Earth who utilize robotic technology; The Celestials, advanced aliens who use highly-advanced magic-like technology; and their demonic archnemesis, the Infernal Host, who seek to invade and lay waste over everything with their warmongering prowess.
Stormgate is a new real-time strategy game where you must build and expand your base, train new units, then set out to decimate your enemies before they bombard you! Build a variety of infrastructures to allow more resources, to train more powerful units, defensive structures to keep the invaders at bay, or special superpower weapons to lay waste on your opponents! Stormgate will have co-op and pvp options, from tackling the main campaign together with a friend in against AI, or play to up to 3v3 online with and against other players across the internet through Rollback netcode to ensure everyone’s inputs in the heat of commanding the battlefield are precise and accurate.
Stormgate features:
⚫︎ Traditional RTS gameplay
⚫︎ Campaign missions
⚫︎ Three playable races
⚫︎ Neutral creep camps on skirmish maps
⚫︎ Mixed resource bases; some only have one kind, other can have all.
⚫︎ Renewable secondary resources
⚫︎ Global abilities for every race
 Steam |
Free |
Stormgate Pros & Cons
| Pros | Cons |
|---|---|
 Convenient Production Mechanics Better Strategic Resources Wildly Flavorful Factions |
Visually Unimpressive Anemic Sound Effects Creep Camps Can Drag The Pace |
Stormgate Overall Score - 76/100
Stormgate is an excellent RTS that seeks to bring decades of genre experience into the modern age. The gameplay is polished to a fine edge, and the maps support a variety of playstyles to allow a refreshing experience each time. While it does suffer from a lackluster story and boring audiovisuals, that’s nothing a few improvements over time can’t address. This game is worth keeping an eye out for, and any RTS enthusiast would be remiss to not try it out at least.
Stormgate Story - 6/10
Stormgate’s campaign mode is very weak. It lacks the pull required for a strong first impression that can hook players into wanting to see more. Reasons vary, but the most problematic is its main character. Her development feels rushed, making her very unrelatable; just a character on the screen if you will. Other than that, the plot develops in a very predictable fashion, and there’s no real stakes involved that aren't shoehorned in for dramatic effect.
Stormgate Gameplay - 8/10
One could argue that Stormgate’s gameplay is the culmination of years of experience playing multiple RTS games. It’s packed full of excellent quality of life features that free up a player’s APM (actions per minute) into something else other than managing assets. Every race plays very differently, especially the Celestials and their space… magic. The combat is decently strategic as well, with an abundance of units that perform very specific tasks to round out armies. Even the resources can be used to one’s tactical advantage with an accompanying risk to go along with it. On the other hand, it is prone to slow-paced, even boring skirmishes and the pathfinding isn't the best. That matters a lot for RTS games, by the way.
Stormgate Visuals - 7/10
Considering its Early Access state, you could forgive Frost Giant Studios for not giving particular attention to the game’s visual appeal. After all, the most important thing for an RTS is its gameplay, without a doubt. Still, criticisms where it is due; Stormgate’s visuals are pretty lackluster. It’s not bad by any means, yet it’s not great either. Just watching the very first non-cinematic cutscene on the campaign is already quite telling of the quality you’ll face; passable, without any big attractions.
Stormgate Audio - 7/10
Stormgate has excellent music and unit voicing/sfx (or whatever you call the sound units that don’t talk make). On the other hand, its campaign voice acting and combat sound effects could use a lot of work. The former often comes off as awkward and the latter lacks the immersive excessiveness that a lot of RTS games pride themselves on. Actually, even a minor improvement will do wonders for its sound effects as it sounds like the units are carrying toys.
Stormgate Value for Money - 10/10
First of all, the game is actually being distributed for free. The only thing you have to give up is your time. Though Stormgate does have paid DLC, they’re completely optional and won’t hinder you from spending a hundred hours playing with friends or randoms in its ladder and custom lobbies.
Stormgate Review: A Bare-Faced RTS Gem
As a massive fan of RTS games, particularly StarCraft, Red Alert, and Command & Conquer (4 doesn’t exist and you can’t convince me otherwise), getting a new RTS to play that isn’t over a decade old is always a welcome thing. See, even though there have been other titles between those years, none have really hit the same way as the three aforementioned games have. Even until today, in the year of our Lord 2024, I still come back to StarCraft 2 (to get stuck in Platinum) and Kane’s Wrath (to lose against my friends) every now and then.
Stormgate was a title I was excited about ever since it was featured in a YouTube video by one of my favorite StarCraft 2 casters. It looked a lot like Warcraft 3 but with StarCraft 2 races, and as a StarCraft fan, that really got me going.
Of course, as with any RTS with campaign missions on the table, I immediately went into Campaign mode upon getting the game. Campaign missions are, after all, the easiest place to really abuse mechanics. Only the Vanguard race’s campaign was available on the paid early access, so despite having more interest in the Infernals and Celestials, I was forced to play as the humans for my first hands-on experience.
The opening cutscene was pretty good! Not amazing, but it delivered the premise well enough. But everything after that? Well, it kind of falls flat compared to the gameplay that followed. And that’s where the first achievement and problem for Stormgate becomes apparent.
Its gameplay and accompanying quality of life features are excellent. However, the audiovisuals took the hit for it.
I mean, sure, it doesn’t look bad. But you can’t say it looks great, either. If anything, it just looks… acceptable. There are a lot of obvious oversights such as its static unit icons (now that’s quite a rarity) and shroud terrain, which indicates the Infernals’ area of influence, simply being a retexture of the ground. But even on max settings, a lot of units just look… bland.
Okay, all the hardcore RTS players who set all their graphical settings to the lowest such that dead units just phase out of existence might not care, but it does make a difference when you’re watching it on casts.
The sound effects aren’t any better. Most of the time, I felt like I was watching nerf gun fights due to the dull and somewhat anemic sound effects of units fighting. Sure, the unit voicing is pretty good, but you’ll mostly hear the sound of "carnage" during fights anyway.
To be fair, Stormgate’s aesthetics are the only things I could find major faults in. Yes, the pathfinding kinda sucks and the skirmishes are oftentimes an utter snoozefest. Still, the gameplay is overall really good. It also comes with a set of very nice quality of life improvements that any RTS enthusiast would appreciate.
In my opinion, its best feature would have to be the quick-build menu. It allows convenient access to all of the faction’s buildings, units, and upgrades. Plus, it is designed to make the most efficient use of your assets, such as assigning construction to an idle or otherwise nearest worker. For the Vanguard, it even queues their actions so that they return to whatever it was they were doing earlier after they finish their job!
At the moment, I’m still working on the macro aspect of the game, so I’m sure that I and my fellow newbies aren’t in a position yet to make remarks about the balance. However, from first impressions, it seems like the Celestials’ ability to float their command structure around does present problems in the early game. But what do I know? I’m still stuck in Platinum on StarCraft 2.
The existence of neutral creeps also influence the game heavily. Normally, in games such as Red Alert 3 and Command & Conquer, you can expect a ton of harassment across the map to be exchanged between players during the early stages. But in Stormgate, it’s much more contained in a way that’s similar to Warcraft 3’s focus on gaining hero EXP through farming creeps. But since Stormgate doesn’t use heroes in skirmishes, the incentive instead comes from being able to capture towers that provide a variety of benefits such as sight and healing.
Of course, you can still engage in harassment. Stormgate has a variety of units that you can use to do so. However, they’re not as oppressive as the ones you can encounter in StarCraft 2, or as annoying to deal with as garrisoned buildings in Kane’s Wrath. In other words, Stormgate’s pace is much more tame, which I think would be appreciated by a quite a lot of players.
No need to reach 100-200 APM for 10 minutes straight just to get out of Gold, yeah?
Will Stormgate dethrone StarCraft 2? Likely not. To be honest, the two games feel quite different. Stormgate doesn’t have the volatility and pace of StarCraft 2, which allow the latter to support games that range from a few minutes short to an entire hour long. The units in Stormgate are also much more uniform, with far less harassment options for each race compared to the old man on the block. It also plays more like Warcraft 3 than anything.
The two will likely coexist with players dividing themselves between them depending on their preferences. Regardless, Stormgate is a great game with a lot of potential for its future. And I can’t wait to start playing with more people after the paid early access ends.
Pros of Stormgate
| Things Stormgate Got Right |
|---|
|
Convenient Production Mechanics Better Strategic Resources Wildly Flavorful Factions |
Convenient Production Mechanics
Unlike other RTS games where you need to either manually produce units or begin upgrades by individually selecting the appropriate building or setting them up in control groups, Stormgate allows you complete access to your entire lineup of facilities in a convenient and unified tab. This tab can be switched between building or unit production, or upgrade research. This frees up a lot of your APM (actions per minute) tabbing through multiple production facilities and allows you to allocate them elsewhere.
In addition, they optimized the building construction for Vanguard such that queuing a new building will automatically assign a nearby worker to work on it. It prioritizes idle workers first before assigning the job to a worker that’s gathering resources. They even set it up such that the worker will continue what it was doing before after construction is finished! This frees up a significant amount of APM to, again, put somewhere else… like making mistakes on your micro and end up getting obliterated by exploding imps.
Better Strategic Resources
Most RTS games tend to restrict themselves to set quantities when dealing with resources. This can be seen from games such as StarCraft 2’s saturation limit for minerals and gas and Red Alert 3’s single harvester limit for gold. Resource gathering rate is also mostly set in stone. However, things are slightly different for Stormgate, at least for Therium (the game’s advanced resource).
See, unlike many resource deposits in other RTS games, Therium is mostly renewable. However, it replenishes at a set rate, so there is such a thing as an optimum worker count where your rate of gathering Therium breaks even with its replenishment. So, you have the option of oversaturating it when you need a lot of resources in a hurry in exchange for a later deficit. A lot of strategies and rushes can be made possible with this mechanic.
Therium even enriches over time! However, this is an effect that spreads between patches, so if you rush to collect them by, I don’t know, throwing forty workers at the problem, then you’ll eventually "mine it out."
Wildly Flavorful Factions
Any RTS with multiple races worth its salt should have remarkable or at least impactful differences between their playstyles. In the case of the Vanguard, Infernals, and Celestials, this is a fact that’s easily identifiable within a few seconds of playing each faction.
For those who have played StarCraft, it would be much more convenient to imagine Stormgate’s three races as souped-up versions of the former. For example, the Vanguard builds structures in a way that’s quite similar to the Terrans. That is, they dedicate a worker unit to the construction all the way until it completes. But unlike the Terrans, the Vanguard can accelerate the construction of the building by assigning more workers to it, albeit with diminishing returns (kind of like Warcraft III’s humans).
On the other hand, the Infernals work much like StarCraft’s Zerg as each building requires the sacrifice of a worker unit. To compensate, the Infernals gain an additional health bar called a &quo;shroud" (though I’m calling it shield because that’s what it is) while they’re within territories influenced by their buildings. This gives them the most convenient way to exert territorial control out of every race in the game.
The Celestials are perhaps the most unique of the three races. Though they have workers, they are insanely expensive. But unlike the other races, they don’t utilize workers in order to build structures. Instead, the workers are simply very efficient miners worth around three of another faction’s replacements. How do they make buildings, then? Well, they just warp them within a power field generated by their capital ship or by a Power Bank. Yes, they’re the Protoss, but without the need for Probes. Oh, by the way, their command building can move and cast skills. Very cool.
Each race also has unique mechanics that heavily influence their playstyle outside of their building system. For the Vanguard, they have access to veterancy bonuses. This makes units that have earned kills grow in power, making them incredibly difficult to fight if you keep losing to them in engagements. The Infernals have the Infest ability on several key units. Infested enemies that take lethal damage will spawn two fiends, which are essentially designed to overwhelm enemies with numbers. Lastly, the Celestials are heavily reliant on energy, which can be recharged on Power Banks, for powerful attacks and abilities.
We haven’t even begun to talk about all the other things that make each faction unique outside of the things that make them similar to other RTS games like their global abilities. Just know that the factions bring more than just what you can immediately see to the table–and that getting assaulted by the Celestials with their command building in tow early on in the game is pretty damn scary.
Cons of Stormgate
| Things That Stormgate Can Improve |
|---|
|
Visually Unimpressive Anemic Sound Effects Creep Camps Can Drag The Pace |
Visually Unimpressive
Perhaps it’s due to the developers focusing more on the gameplay aspects of Stormgate, but the visuals for the game is pretty rough around the edges for a lot of reasons. This spans from the static unit icons to the rather hollow-looking UI that looks more like an overlay than a proper interface. A lot of attacks also use the same effects, such as light beams and blade swipes.
The Vanguard’s Atlas, which is their long-range artillery unit, is a good example of Stormgate’s lack of visual flourish. As a heavy siege weapon, you would expect it to change its appearance significantly when you transform it from its tank mode to its deployed mode. However, the visual change is simply the Atlas lowering itself and pointing its turret to the air.
Anemic Sound Effects
Stormgate’s combat SFX is unfortunately some of the most lethargic things I’ve ever heard in an action-packed RTS game. It almost feels like every unit is carrying a toy hammer or a nerf gun instead of handheld weapons of mass murder. Even the death throes of units sound almost comedic that it throws me off from the carnage of every clash.
While sound effects shouldn’t always rattle one’s soul, it should at least aim to be a halfway decent representation of what’s occurring on the other side of the screen. But at the moment, it just feels very lacking in impact.
Creep Camps Can Drag The Pace
This isn’t actually a con and more of a quirk that some players might not like. Similar to Warcraft 3, the map is dotted with neutral creeps that players can farm for spare change. They also usually guard towers that, when claimed, provide some boon such as an AoE healing effect or lifting the fog of war around it. But the presence of these creeps provide players with an additional objective outside of breaking down their opponent’s front door.
In other words, Stormgate’s skirmishes will be slower and longer in nature compared to StarCraft 2 or Kane’s Wrath. At the very least, it will be so unless players opt for a hyper-aggressive playstyle and ignore the neutral creep benefits.
Depending on the player, this pace might feel lethargic. Hence, it’s good to set expectations in advance.
Is Stormgate Worth It?
Definitely deserves some attention
While Stormgate definitely doesn’t look pretty, it’s worth noting that it’s only on Early Access right now. Unlike gameplay issues, the audiovisuals can easily be fixed without altering the core experience. Hence, it’s only going to look prettier from here on out. As for the story, well, that’s definitely something to consider. But at the end of the day, it’s the PvP and custom matches that pull players in the longest. And with Stormgate’s solid features and mechanics, it’ll surely thrive for at least the foreseeable future.
| Platform | Price |
|---|---|
| Steam |
Free |
Stormgate FAQ
Will the other races in Stormgate have their own campaigns?
The campaign missions for Infernals and Celestials will be included in its free early access release.
Is Stormgate free to play?
Stormgate is free to play, but it will have paid DLC.
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Stormgate Product Information
 | |
| Title | STORMGATE |
|---|---|
| Release Date | July 30, 2024 (Paid early access) August 13, 2024 (Free early-access) |
| Developer | Frost Giant Studios |
| Publisher | Frost Giant Studios |
| Supported Platforms | PC(Steam) |
| Genre | Real-Time Strategy, Action |
| Number of Players | Single Player, Online Co-op(2-3), Online PvP(3v3) |
| Rating | RP |
| Official Website | Stormgate Official Website |
