You can activate your hero's special abilities from the traditional RTS view, but many of those abilities are pointless. What was the purpose? Controlling a hero this way is jerky and annoying, as well as a complete waste of time. Yet while Rise & Fall valiantly attempted to make the action element meaningful in the context of the gameplay, Maelstrom sticks it in and does absolutely nothing with it. And, no, there is nothing you can do to escape those moments, aside from trial and error.īut what could make this more fun? Why, giving your hero units special abilities and letting you jump into their shoes as if Maelstrom is a third-person action game, of course! This isn't a completely new feature, because last year's Rise & Fall: Civilizations at War used a similar mechanic. Well, with the exception of surprise deaths-falling meteors destroy your hero units and force a reload of your most recent saved game. The game almost always boils down to moving units en masse from one mission point to the next and destroying enemies, which is completely devoid of strategy. But the campaigns don't do the differences justice, alternating between mind-numbingly boring and just plain stupid. The human factions can terraform land, and the Ascension can transform mobile units into other structures. All three factions use water pumps scattered throughout the maps to their advantage, either for collection as a resource or, in the case of the Hai-Genti, for the conversion of water into poisonous mutagen. The Ascension gather DNA from the Remnant compounds, as well as the rays of the sun, while the Hai-Genti produce biomass. The Remnants are the most familiar to play, using farms to harvest sunlight and collecting scrap from the environment. To the game's credit, each faction plays differently from the others. It's all laid out in a total of four campaigns that start poorly and never veer from the low standard set by the Remnant story. But wait-you guessed it-a third force, the alien Hai-Genti, needs the deluged planet for its own devices. The gist of Maelstrom's single-player campaign is that a global catastrophe has left most of Earth underwater, and the human freedom fighters that call themselves the Remnants are fighting the stoic Ascension for control over the leftovers. You can take direct control of your hero units. It's hard not to walk away with the feeling that KD Visions spent more of its time making pretty water graphics than it did making the game fun to play. Maelstrom is a frustrating mess that showcases meaningless tacked-on features in lieu of functional RTS gameplay. It's a shame that the makers of 2004's excellent and inventive real-time strategy game Perimeter couldn't maintain their momentum.
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