Customer Reviews

Maelstrom

5 star:		(1)
4 star:		(0)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(2)

 

 

Maelstrom is a real time strategy game that lets you play as one of three sides, the Remnants which are basically scavengers with modern day weapons, the Ascension which uses highly advanced vehicles which can transform into mechs, then theres the alien race - Hai-Genti which rely on organic living structures and assorted alien beasts...

The Hai-Genti have designs on taking control of the earth but first they need to make the earth more comfortable so they intend to flood it with water... The Remnants and Ascension counter this with use of terraforming the terrain creating mountains to block off the rising water or digging trenches to divert the water away...

This game has so many innovative ideas on the table... First the deforming terrain... You can actually blast huge craters into the ground and after a skirmish battle the map is totally looking and feeling like a war zone... Secondly theres the 3rd person camera for hero units, you can take control of a hero in combat and shoot down enemies or drive vehicles all like a 3rd person action game... Add in day night cycles and you have a game which is an amazing amount of fun!

If you play as the Hai-Genti you can capture water stations to flood the entire map with water...

The enemy AI is really challenging even on easy... usually my skirmish battles last 2 to 3 hours which is pretty refreshing from the tank rush battles of some other strategy games...

The graphics are very nice and in 3rd person you can see some stunning texture detail in the water effects and realistic explosions...

If you buy this game your sure to have alot of fun...

The game is decent. However bugs and glitches really beat the game down. My friends and I all got this game to play on multiplayer LAN. It seemed like a good fun game at first. The factions are interesting, the RTS play is fun. Unfortunately we never got to finish a game because the game would give us all errors and the LAN game would freeze. In addition to this the game takes seemingly forever to load anything in the game. The first person shooter bits seem like it could be fun enough, but on two different computers it has caused crashes. I do really want to like this game, but these problems make it impossible. The oldest computer we were running it on is about a year old. Two were running Windows 7 and one running Vista. We tried to run as administrator, XP compatibility and many other fixes. The LAN ran fine with other games. Even running the campaign still saw a lot of problems. I would rate this a four or five if any of my friends could get it running. Unfortunately without being able to play it properly I'm being as generous as I can be.

I've only played the first mission and havn't completed that. There's no tutorial so I didn't really know what I was doing. Then again, there weren't many options. I directed a squad of men (and a woman with a terrible Russian accent) around a riuned city looking for something, shot a few people (don't know if they deserved it) and was eventually flumoxed by a fence. Tall buildings kept getting in the way, forcing me to readjust the camera (annoying!). Oh and I had an armoured quad bike but it didn't follow orders very well and kept heading off in a different direction. I assume it got blown up I didn't see (building in the way).

All in all I'm about as impressed with this game as I was with Star Trek: Away team, and despite claims to the contrary the aesthetics are on about the same level. Rain? Really?

Also, am I the only 1 that thinks hero units in an RTS are an annoying attempt to remind players that there's a loose story element to the game? I find them quite tiresome, especially when they have contempt for authority.

My advice is to buy a C&C game. I've you've played all of them and you're looking for something as good then you're in the same boat as me. Noting to see here

I got this game at HalfPrice bookstore for $4.99 because it looked like a good time killer and I had gotten some good semi-oldies from them before. Plus, the features listed on the box were exciting and the box art was very good. Bad decision! The first in-game cut scene was outrageously horrible, with a Will Smith looking character bobbing his neck like an ostrich non-stop when he talked, sounding like a stereotypical 30's New York mob villain mixed in with a hint of an Irish accent. This just didn't fit, especially for a game trying to impress upon a hardcore war scene - the goofy mix that created that character (which I would later be in charge of and have to deal with) was just too distracting. Then when I finally got in game, it was a bit hard to figure out the controls. If you've ever played the Starcraft, Supreme Commander, Age of Empires franchise, or anything similar to that, you'll know they have the same basic control scheme, so if you've played one, you can easily get into the others. This game illogically doesn't follow the mold. While the UI and some left clicking actions are consistent with other games, a ton of it is needlessly different. The icons were hard to figure out, and the HUD was so tacky. Look at any screenshot of the GUI, (here's one [...] ) in the bottom right, can you honestly figure out what those icons mean if it's not a picture of a building? Greek symbols and duplicate icons? Really? And looking at the aesthetics of the tooltips just breaks my heart. They somehow managed to make something simple like a rectangle with context help text look ugly. And then, less than 10 minutes into the game, on the first mission, something did it for me that made me instantly turn off and uninstall the game, and made me wished I paid $4.99 to never play the game at all... I was experimenting with the HUD buttons, and I'm pretty sure I pressed a suicide button that instantly killed all my units, except for my wacky talking hero unit, because I had all my units selected when I pressed the button. In an RTS game, unit suicide should NEVER be that easy to do on accident, especially on the first mission! You probably shouldn't even have that as an option (unless its purpose is a kamikaze unit) - ARE THEY INSANE!?

1) No gameplay design sense, especially as an RTS.
2) Freaking bizarre characters that don't fit with the theme I felt they were trying to convey.
3) No sense of visual aesthetics, it's definitely not cohesive. This is one of the things that gets way worse as you move from looking at screenshots to actually playing the game (like in the new Command and Conquer games).

It's safe to say I didn't play long enough to even get into any of the unique gameplay features (like third person hero mode and terrain manipulation) they mentioned, because if I tried to be patient long enough to get to those aspects, I would have had a heart attack first dealing with the fundamental.

Maelstrom by all means is horrible. First the story is ok but a bit similar to that of Command and conquer 3. Two human factions battling for control over the earth when a alien species decides to but in. First the graphics they are ok but a bit predated. Second the sound. It is overally repetitive you may get a headache from the same 4 words said over and over again. Explosions sound fake and character voices are horrible. The worst thing wrong with this games is it's gameplay. Moving units is horrible you tell them to go somewhere they take a horrible route and may end up going in the opposite direction you send them. Most time it takes them for ever to shoot at a target. other times they might just not shoot. Terraformig takes forever. building structures are horrible. finding resources are extremely bad and take for ever to harvest. The only interesting is the ability to take control over heroes to the third person view. But targeting and shooting are nearly impossible unless you are in a vehicle. Other than that the game is utterly horrible.