As someone who has played StarCraft 2 co-op from the very beginning and clocked in 12k+ games on brutal and brutal+4 to +6 (on EU and NA), this game’s co-op mode disappointed me. Not only were the co-op commanders and missions themselves underwhelming, but also the base game itself was not up to par with what I would expect from a “next-gen” RTS experience. I do not care that much about the campaign or PvP (I do not believe they can create something better than StarCraft 2 or Age of Empire 2 in these categories), so I will not go into those topics in this review. The only reason I knew about Stormgate was due to my friends in StarCraft 2 co-op talking about how Monk (Kevin Dong) said he will be dedicated to creating a great co-op experience in Stormgate.

Even though I did not agree with some of Monk’s takes with mutator balance in StarCraft 2 co-op, Monk did a really good job with StarCraft 2 co-op’s commander design; they felt extremely satisfying to play, the game mode was designed in such a way that many problems could be tackled in different ways, increasing replayability, and thus, I stuck around to play with friends and randoms for many years.

When I saw that Monk was the Lead Co-op Designer for Stormgate, I was pretty excited to be honest since I gave him the benefit of the doubt and believed he learnt a lot from his time in StarCraft 2 co-op. If he really learnt lessons from StarCraft 2, he would have known that the most important factor in RTS is game optimization; it does not matter how great your commanders and missions are if the base game itself is littered with problems, as I will not even have the time to appreciate the work you put into the co-op design. The biggest reason that StarCraft 2 co-op was successful was that it had the solid foundation of StarCraft 2, a game with highly polished mechanics, units that have weight and significance to them, buttery smooth path-finding, and to a lesser extent, many fan favorite characters and maps to create co-op commanders and missions from.

Remember the first time you sieged Siege Tanks against units pushing into a chokepoint, used banelings against light units, or fielded Immortals against armored units? You could feel the effect they had on the situation and the fear in your opponent’s play when they realized you had these units. One of my friends in the group had this to say: “All units in Stormgate feel like wet paper bags. I attack with them and use their abilities, but I am not getting any feedback on whether they were effective or not. You would use Destruction Wave [an ability that allows Alarak to push enemy units away. This ability one-shots units with small HP pools], and the viscerality of it felt so good. You got immediate feedback. His abilities had weight to them.” Another friend made a comment while playing Stormgate: “I don’t know dude. The guys at Blizzard made a deal with the devil when they made the path-finding algorithm [for StarCraft 2] because I cannot see how else they could make it this good. It just works. Stormgate is just not like that.” When you have StarCraft 2 co-op veterans uttering such sentences about your game that is supposed to be a spiritual successor, you know you have failed.

I would like to get the “It’s Early Access though” argument out of the way. Being an Early Access title does not excuse you from poor optimization, lack of quality content, and an excessive number of things in the game being placeholders. From what I can see, the shop is fully functional, so you guys are asking players to spend money on a game that does not have a solid foundation. In Early Access, it is not “I give you guys money and hope for a good game down the line”. It is “You guys demonstrate your ability to develop a great game with the budget you already had before Early Access, and I will support you by buying things that I like in the game.” I am disappointed to say that they did not showcase this ability even though Stormgate had more than 35 million USD in funding, and they prided themselves with prior experiences like StarCraft 2 and Warcraft 3. I am sick and tired of Early Access titles doing this. This has unfortunately become quite common in the gaming industry where the motto is “get money now; fix later.” I cannot stress enough how important first impressions are. It will literally make or break your game, and they decided to release this game to the public in this state. They missed out on potential customers because of first impressions, but do they care? No, they do not. They will try making money in ways that are dishonest and disrespectful to the player; you could honestly call this game a scam, and it would not be wrong. Before trying to refute this claim, look up the definition of the word scam and understand that it does not have to be fraud in a legal sense for it to be a scam. Now, look back at the hype they generated for Stormgate when they were advertising. Finally, observe the current state of the game for what it really is, a bootleg amalgamation of StarCraft 2 and Warcraft 3. For more information about this game’s history with monetization, check out this review.

While I am not saying that it is impossible to turn things around (example: No Man’s Sky), the thing is, when that game came out, it was in a playable state and you could actually enjoy the game for quite a while before noticing the flaws. Here, I noticed the flaws even before starting my first co-op run. Unfortunately, StarCraft 2 runs laps around this game while it struggles to get a unit to move from point A to point B, and it is extremely depressing considering all the hype they generated about this game.

When we were playing as a group of three friends, I was playing from the EU, and my friends were playing from NA. I am not sure how the server in this game handles cross region play, but let me tell you this, they have messed up big time as I will get into later. The ping was alright at the start of the games when there were no massive armies clashing, and the path-finding algorithm did not have to put in much work.

The game’s UI was awful. It was a replica of StarCraft 2’s UI, but it felt like a bootleg version of the original that made me squint my eyes trying to find the words “Made in China”. I cannot view all the units available to a particular commander? How can such an integral part of the UI be missing? How am I supposed to know what this commander can build and deploy on the field? In StarCraft 2, before even playing the commander, you could study which units and static defense structures they got to play with even if they were locked. This is not the case here. I can just see the units that will unlock in later levels, but I cannot see my current options for that commander. This needs to be fixed immediately. I should not have to look up a guide on the internet for something as basic as the units that can be produced by a commander.