Stormgate‘s development began with the founding of the developing studio Frost Giant Studios by ex-Blizzard developers Tim Morten and Tim Campbell. The studio kicked off development with the goal of revitalizing the real-time strategy (RTS) genre that has largely disappeared from the modern games industry. To help do so, the title is launching free-to-play in early access, with the developers promising more story content, graphical updates, features, and mechanical tweaks leading up to the title’s full release sometime in 2025. Unfortunately, Stormgate has a very long way to go to be a successful entry in the genre, much less bring it back as a big presence within the industry.
Matches of Stormgate can be played out in various modes, each with its own strengths but built on the same foundational mechanics. During matches players gather resources, build up bases, recruit and upgrade units, and lead them in battle against opposing factions to be the last one standing. Matches tend to focus primarily on combat, playing similarly to the iconic RTS franchises from Blizzard Entertainment that the studio founders previously worked on. Unfortunately, the combat of Stormgate struggles to match the depth, excitement, or long-term appeal of those classic titles.
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The issues with Stormgate‘s combat stem primarily from the developer’s attempt to make a more accessible introduction to the RTS genre. Making mechanically-dense games more accessible is no easy challenge, and Stormgate opts to do so by flattening the delineations between its in-game units. In many RTS games, every unit has strengths and weaknesses on the battlefield that serve to define their role in a player’s army, with each in-game faction favoring particular playstyles. Having well-defined strengths and weaknesses allows players to pick from different strategies while also allowing them to counter the selections of their enemies by targeting their weaknesses.
This mechanical depth can be a lot to keep track of, especially for new players. However, it is also what gives players tactical decisions to make during matches and is largely responsible for the fun and immense replayability of the genre. But Stormgate does away with a lot of that complexity in the name of making it easier for newcomers to jump in and try the game out. This is nice at first, but it does make it difficult for the game to hold much long-term appeal as there is less variation in each game, while also making its matches not as exciting for veterans of the genre who want more options and decisions to make during matches.
Where Stormgate does shine is in its different modes. There are already a good number for players to choose from. There are the early stages of a campaign, up to three-player co-op against AI, 1v1 ladder matches, and larger multiplayer matches as well. With three distinct factions to choose from, there is a lot of gameplay for players to run through, but only if they get enough out of the game’s more basic RTS mechanics to make prolonged playtime feel worthwhile. Each of the factions also comes with multiple heroes to pick from, with each one altering the faction’s tech tree, but those different playstyles will cost you some money.
With Stormgate being free-to-play, attention also needs to be paid to its monetization and how the developers aim to support its development in the future. At the time of writing, there are five heroes available, with players having access to two for free. Each additional hero can be unlocked for $10, as can numerous skins for each one, which are around that same price range. Those prices are reasonable, but Stormgate‘s premium bundles for fans who want to support it are less so.
Players are able to purchase the Deluxe Early Access Pack or Ultimate Early Access Pack for $39.99 or $59.99 respectively. The packs come with various amounts of heroes unlocked from the get-go, army cosmetics, pets, and chapters of story content. However, even the $59.99 bundle still does not unlock all of the content, meaning that players who want to get all of the content for an early access game with hardly any story content, incomplete graphics, and many features still waiting in the pipeline have to pay as much as a full-priced AAA title to get access to all of the barebones content at launch. How Frost Giant Studios plans on monetizing it moving into the future will obviously only be revealed in time, but the starting store does bring some concerns to the fore.
With Stormgate launching in early access, there is always the chance that it will improve with sufficient development time. As it stands at release, however, it is difficult to see why an RTS player would pick Stormgate over more established competition. Its simplistic mechanics make matches grow boring quickly. Its story and world are so poorly developed that they are not even worth mentioning. With its heavily in-progress state, it seems better to wait and see if it improves before investing time in checking it out.
Stormgate is available now in early access on PC.
