Stormgate Early Access Review – The Return of the RTS

The real-time strategy genre is considered dead by some players. Gone are the days of classic franchises like StarCraft and Command & Conquer, and Warcraft these days has existed for longer as an MMORPG than it ever did as a strategy game franchise. Regardless, we’ve seen several developers take a shot at bringing back the genre to its former glory, from AAA studios all the way down to smaller-scale ones.

Stormgate hopes to build on the foundations of the RTS genre that essentially pioneered the concept of eSports: StarCraft. Right from the outset, the similarities are quite obvious. Stormgate features an emphasis on asymmetric gameplay thanks to its three playable factions that all make use of wildly different play styles. Even the design of these factions have parallels to their counterparts in StarCraft, with the Vanguard playing a bit like the Terrans, the Infernal Hosts playing like the Zerg, and the Celestial Armada playing like the Protoss. While, on the surface, these similarities might make one think that Stormgate is simply copying StarCraft’s homework, looking deeper into the game and its various mechanics show that the new strategy game does enough differently from it to make things more interesting.

Before we get into the meat of the game, however, let’s talk about the elephant in the room. Stormgate has an art style that can, at best, be described as divisive. While some players won’t mind it too much, since the simplistic art style actually helps quite a bit from a pure gameplay perspective, allowing for players to understand what’s happening on the screen despite 50 units duking it out against each other and using all of their abilities, many players may instead think it might be too simplistic and cartoony, especially for a modern game released in 2024. I personally stand on the side of mostly liking the visuals, with a few caveats.

While the game tends to look rather excellent and easy to understand in regular gameplay, the campaign is where the art style’s shortcomings become clear. Since the campaign features specific characters, complete with names and histories, they obviously have unique models to represent them and their nemesis throughout the story. These models look rather rough, and it’s obvious that some more work will have to be done to make sure that important characters from the game’s universe don’t look like melted plastic action figures. On the flip side, the art style tends to match the game perfectly, and once you figure out all of the playable factions and their units, you don’t really have to look at a battle more than once to understand what’s happening.

"Stormgate has an art style that can, at best, be described as divisive."

The game features a few different modes, namely campaign, co-op, and skirmish. While the campaign is fairly limited at launch, with three levels that serve as the prologue and three more that serve as the first act for the overall story, the meat of the game undoubtedly lies in the skirmish mode. Stormgate offers a variety of ways to play: 1v1, 2v2 and 3v3, with each mode having its own matchmaking pool. The game also features AI opponents that come in 3 distinct difficulties: “Peaceful”, “Basic”, and “Practice”. Despite its name, Practice probably features the most difficult AI out of the three but as you spend more time with the game, the mode is not very challenging after all. Sure, it might start things off with a bang and manage to be challenging for you quite early on, the Practice AI wants players to to be more proactive in researching technologies and focusing on defensive structures in its base. However, I was able to beat it quite decisively once I got the hang of how my faction is supposed to function.

That isn’t to say that Stormgate is an easy game. There’s definitely a learning curve here, and that curve will undoubtedly be steeper for players that don’t have experience with games like StarCraft. The pace of gameplay is generally quite fast, and you’ll often have to keep several different things on your mind all the time to make sure that you’re spending the resources you’re gathering on building a bigger army, while also making sure to build new bases to get an even faster flow of resources, while also managing small skirmishes so that you can keep your opponent at bay.

Interestingly, in an attempt to help out players new to multiplayer RTS, Stormgate also features a “Buddy AI”, which is there to help you out. This Buddy AI will operate the same base as you do, occasionally making some extra buildings, researching technologies or making sure you don’t have to worry about hitting population limits. While interesting in concept, I personally found the Buddy AI fairly annoying, since it liked using up resources I was saving for specific technologies on unnecessary buildings like sentry towers inside the base. The potential for the Buddy AI is pretty great, and it seems like a step towards introducing more players to the genre.

"The pace of gameplay is generally quite fast, and you’ll often have to keep several different things on your mind all the time"

The game’s campaign also works well as a tutorial of sorts, since it gradually introduces mechanics and units for you to play around with over the course of the prologue. The first chapter, while not exactly a tutorial, still keeps some of the guardrails in place so that players can gradually learn about the Vanguard faction. Unfortunately, the Infernal Legion and Celestial Armada factions don’t yet have their own campaigns, and players hoping to learn how to play those factions will have to hop into some skirmishes against AI or other players and slowly figure things out.

While it’s an early access title, Stormgate feels like it’s off to an interesting start. While its art style is incredibly divisive, some players may outright hate the colorful and cartoony look, its visuals help quite a bit in making sure there is a clarity to even the most chaotic battles. Each of the three playable factions offers quite a bit of depth, with their own unique mechanics, units, and technologies to research. Most interestingly, however, Stormgate also offers a way for newcomers to the genre to enjoy themselves even in online matches, thanks to the Buddy AI. While things might still be a bit rough, especially some of the character models in the game’s campaign, there will undoubtedly be plenty of work done on the game to smoothen its rougher edges.

While it isn’t exactly there quite yet, Stormgate is one of the more exciting strategy games for fans of genre classics like StarCraft. There is an emphasis on fast-paced tactical gameplay that isn’t really matched by many other titles out there right now, and that’s a niche that Stormgate, with a few updates along the way, can easily fill.

This game was reviewed on PC.