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Monday, 11 June 2007 |
Right from the jump. Maelstrom hits you with its kitchen-sink approach, with the Earth decimated by no less than an environmental crisis, a meteor impact, a nuclear holocaust, and-oh, the humanity! Corporate globalization. Despite this ass-whooping ex-machina, two surviving factions cling to life: the Mod Max-esque Remnants and the conspicuously pristine Ascension. No sooner do these two nemeses reach a stalemate than a mysterious alien race called the Hai-Genti invades, throwing the world into chaos. Why, it's almost as if Maelstrom ripped a page from...every sci-fi RTS ever made!
But the rip-off-itude doesn't stop with mere plot; gameplay, too, takes the smorqasbord approach. Maelstrom features three building-block resources, each gathered in one of the classic RTS ways. You either build resource-generating structures ala Command & Conquer, harvest resources from stockpiles ala Age of Empires, capture resource points ala Worhammer 40,000: Down of War, or some combination of the three. It's an approach that fails thanks to its overcomplexity.
Each race employs a fairly unique play style. and all of them (especially the Ascension) enjoy hugely overpowered early-tier units. A rush of a dozen foot soldiers can take down an entire enemy base: as a result, Maelstrom's few original, nifty ideas—like the Ascension's transforming units or the ability to shape the land and control the weather—don't even come into play in most matches. And it doesn't help that the A.I. makes about as challenging an adversary as a pickled herrinq, rarely making use of the game's nifty features. |
Games 