Stormgate has been anticipated for a while. Announced in 2022 and bolstered with a 2.3 million dollar Kickstarter in 2023 , Stormgate has spent the last couple years pitching itself in a simple way: a new real-time strategy game made by some of the people who worked on Warcraft 3 and StarCraft II.
As those franchises continue to languish, there's a big gap in the marketplace, and RTS circles have been buzzing about Stormgate regularly since the announcement. Following its release into Early Access on July 30, I've had the opportunity to complete what exists of the single player campaign while also managing to put some time into the game's online multiplayer. The short is that the game feels a little messy and a little too complicated, and it is attempting to please a lot of different demographics of players without making the game truly appealing to any of them.
It's the details of these appeals that matter, though. I know that most people are thinking about Stormgate in terms of online multiplayer, but I think the storytelling and scene setting provided by the single-player campaign does critical work. The games that it is riffing on have had extremely long lives because they have provided a platform for head-to-head competition.
StarCraft II's elegant triangular system of Terrans vs. Zerg vs. Protoss has resonated with players for more than 20 years, and there's an electricity in those legacy Blizzard properties that is obviously difficult to replicate.
The place where that.