Maelstrom is a very standard real-time strategy game that, while having some fundamentals such as base-building and resource-gathering, seems to have missed the point in knowing what makes a RTS good. It’s generally a B-grade experience where certain features such as enticing campaigns, solid AI and effective unit management have taken a backseat, while other unimportant features that don’t benefit the game in any way are given the front row seats.
Interestingly, the game’s story had the potential to be a real winner, but often the execution of the presentation and characters (who breathe no life into it) results in a rather dry experience from start to finish. The events of Maelstrom take place on a war-torn Earth where the human race has split in two; with both armies seeking dominance of Earth, and even an alien race pops up to rain terror on the humans, believing that the planet is ideal for their resource needs. So everyone is looking for something it seems.
A look at the Remnants.
The Remnants consists of ex-military personnel and survivors seeking refuge, and are ideally your hard-nut freedom fighters that make use of your typical U.S army units, such as tanks, gun turrets and flamethrowers. The Ascension are a group of intellectual humans who show their strength through high-tech units and abilities. Oddly, the third are a group of aquatic species known as the Hai-Genti, who are able to flood areas of the map to their advantage and rely on their biotechnology. Thankfully, each faction provides their unique differences in terms of separate campaigns, design, units and strategies to suit the different needs of gamers.
While the premise of each faction is certainly interesting, the execution is a little rough, especially during the campaign modes. You’ll meet the various dull and poorly-voiced hero characters that in turn ruin the game’s story. Equally, the dry settings and storytelling ruins any sort of immersion that could have been gathered from the array of strategic goals laid out during campaign missions. You’ll often need to secure areas, infiltrate enemy HQs and a variety of other goals, but the presentation is a real kicker that ruins any sort of enjoyment.
It isn’t primarily a presentation issue, but more or less a case of being a severely broken real-time strategy game. Maelstrom has overlooked a number of core RTS fundamentals, such as implementing silhouettes for your units as they run behind buildings or other structures, engaging game progression, a clean interface, and strong AI and pathfinding. The aforementioned examples are completely absent from Maelstrom, and are ultimately the major problems with the game. Playing the game is often a tedious task, since it boasts a terrible management system, and there’s an obvious lack of options when managing units (example: various formations).
Third-person AND a real-time strategy game? Meh.
Then there’s the issue of some of the new features the game implements, that are completely unneeded in the genre. There seems to be a new focus on breeding real-time strategy and first/third-person shooter hybrids, with Maelstrom not the first to bite by using such a feature. And unless someone successfully implements it, then developers deserve all the criticism for adding such outrageous features. Not only does such a feature bog down the real-time strategy gameplay, but it also makes it much more difficult to manage all of your units during the first-person sequences. There doesn’t seem to be any sort of strategic purpose of dropping down into this perspective either. It’s a feature that has been clearly tacked on with absolutely no thought process at all.
The biggest problem boils down to Maelstrom’s AI system. While it's often stated in hundreds of reviews that certain games have unresponsive AI and sloppy pathfinding, Maelstrom takes it to the next level by making such features virtually non-existent. There’s a restrictive AI awareness that only allows units to recognise enemies within a very close radius, and even then they may not attack without your consent. Pathfinding is truly a joke – units will use the most ludicrous path to get to places, and will often stand idly around whilst certain units try to pass them. On one occasion, I watched my tank move back and forth for ten minutes as it tried to make it through a gap between two buildings, of which only two or three infantry units were standing in-between. Not only was the gap fairly wide, but also the problem could’ve been resolved much quicker if my tank just went around the buildings instead. The AI and pathfinding can sometimes hurt a game to some degree, but in the case of Maelstrom, it just makes the entire thing unplayable.
Terraforming - probably the only good feature this game has.
It’s unfortunate in some regards too, since the game has a handful of nice ideas in place. The implementation of terraforming provides a number of unique gameplay options, but often feels underutilised. Terraforming allows you to alter the playing field in a number of ways by making surfaces rise into mountains, conduct floods and even level areas. It’s the overall execution on the real-time strategy fundamentals that are amiss though, making the game a tad primitive for its time.
Its stale look is all very much a part of this problem. There are plenty of instances where you can see the developers cut corners by using simple graphic methods, such as using flat surfaces and texturing them to appear as a building, even though they're lacking depth. Animation is extremely stiff, and shadowing and lighting are all over the place and poorly incorporated.
The game doesn’t even fare any better when it comes to the audio side of things. The biggest culprit is the terrible voice-acting, which is often on the point of being taken from a sitcom. The voice-acting sounds as though they've got in place a poor imitation of Mr. T – with such lines as “I’ll be there” and, “I’ll be there in one New York minute” said in such a way that is reminiscent of the character’s “I pity the fool” line. The lines eventually border on comedy - when you hear your units dying and shouting “I can’t hold it…” in such a way that you wouldn’t be hard pressed to believe they recorded it as someone went to the toilet.
Be thankful that it was I who painfully went through this game, and not you. Within a matter of minutes it quickly dawns upon you that Maelstrom somehow miraculously slipped through any sort of product testing, and was released in an extremely broken and dated state.
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