Stormgate Reviews

Yeaaaah, no... This game should still be cooking in the early access. Not be released. If you wished for some cinematic feeling like in Warcraft or Starcraft, this just has their guts on them, smelling like them but isn't actually them... Its a poor disguise. I won't mention the ridiculousnes and marketing move to pay for the game and rest of the (only first) campaign seperately. But i will mention how it requires you to be online in order to play SINGLEPLAYER CAMPAIGN! Also, god forbid if your conection gets interupted cause it will boot you out of whatever mission you were doing and back to the main screen! It did this to me several times even with my internet being fine. I do not care about the co-op or multiplayer but i heard that might be the only thing thats actually sort of good and actually thought out. Im here for the campaign only and let me tell you, the 12 missions are definitely not worth the 24,50€ price tag. I can see the potential it has, the characters, the spirit... but as of now, it falls flat on its face. If you wished for cinematic cutscenes or animated conversations as you could have seen in Starcraft 2, this won't be it. Stills of the characters in dialogues with like 1 or 2 alts for different mood is a cheap move. The whole thing has a very bland and underwhelming tone to it. Ofcourse it ends with a cliffhanger but im sure as hell not looking forward to more campaigns. The units are recognizable from each other and look nice but there isn't much strategy to what you produce for an army. You can never go wrong with a muderball of mixed forces. I appreciate the command limit of 300 but the static defense could use some work. In the campaign there is also an upgrade table and overall faction bonus table, think? But don't worry, the 12 missions definitely don't give you enough money to buy every upgrade, why would you want that? For the sound, well, the soundtrack isn't very memorable. Same goes for the units, cause you will always hear only your hero anyway. The impact of gunshots and fighting is somewhat convincing but it could be better. As for characters themselves, the design has improved since early access. Main character Amara definitely looks and acts as a protagonist now. The voice acting is very good too but the scenes don't let it show enough, as i mentioned before with the stills of characters. So, i do not recommend it as of now. Either wait for big sale or wait till all the campaigns are out... Or just stay far from this and hope for something better to come this way. Zerospace, don't screw this up...

the game definitely has potential and has shown improvement but it is still very rough around the edges rn, I would recommend it just to try the pvp but campaign and co-op are a scam I spent 25$ for the early access campaign (3 missions) and now I have to spend another 25$ for the rest? and 10 whole dollars for each co-op commander, and only 1 free one? I understand needing to make money off a f2p game but this is just a complete rip off, especially for a game with such slow and honestly lackluster development

What a criminal waste of opportunity. The campaign is being sold piecemeal by a series of microtransactions. My $25 purchase got me 3 hours of campaign missions, and then it just became an app for spending more money. Plus the missions weren't even very good. Not terrible, but the voice acting is terrible, the characters are forgettable, the lore is so thin it's practically absent, and some of the campaign objectives are clunky and hard to interact with. Then I find out the devs want me to pay more money for it? They know darn well their players overwhelmingly play the campaign only and not multiplayer, so this is a clear calculation to string along as many of their players as possible. What a slap in the face -- and I don't think that's a hand doing the slapping.

Giving a negative as there is no meh option. Note I am only reviewing the campaign as I do not play multiplayer and all other modes are not released as of yet. Campaign: balance feels all over the place on missions. First few are very easy. I am sure to get into the swing of the faction and units. Mission five has a major flaw which they have not fixed in the past year it has been out. You can build up a full base, max out your army, and research all upgrades before beginning the defense part of the mission. This of course makes it extra trivial. Episode six is still not extremely difficult and has a "boss battle", but even on brutal is laughably easy, though at least the team had enough common sense to only take your heroes into the zone. Chapters 2 and 3 have some pretty challenging missions which actually feel brutal defending waves from all sides and then laughably easy and frankly boring missions where you roll around the map with an HQ doing basically nothing until the very end of the mission where you have to hold a point at the end. Heroes are a good idea, but make some of the content trivial such as spheres of doom that get two shot by the sniper character. Now the hub... in concept I like the drop ship between missions you can get extra lore, and switch out your hero's load outs. HOWEVER, I quickly found myself skipping through even the required conversations as they were one note and boring. Even a "final stand" speech at the end of the game which is supposed to be the big ONE LAST CHANCE moment was let down by stale dialogue and (what is beyond me) no music. The equipment system is completed through lockers where you can assign equipment to characters you bring on missions. This is a good idea. However, it becomes very tedious as you have to put the item into the main character's inventory from the stach and put it in the other character's locker. Made even more tedious because she only has 6 item slots which you want to use for her own items. Another system is the research and faction upgrades. This system is pretty solid. You have to choose between using resources you get by completing missions to upgrade individual units or upgrade your faction as a whole making heroes and/or units stronger. The issue is that they give you way too few resources. By the end of the campaign you can upgrade one unit out of twelve in your roster (each unit has 3 upgrades) and get the research upgrades. There is just not enough of the resource, perhaps you should get some amount from completing secondary objectives. Plot is pretty cookie cutter. First two cinematics hit pretty hard and are decent. Unfortunately there are more than one cutscene. By the end of the game the story is all over the place. Characters are introduced in a mission and then never heard from again. There is a betrayal that has no build up or weight. The third faction is mentioned and you occasionally see units/ghost versions of their units. They are mentioned a few times but no depth to who or what they are. You are just expected to know OH YEAH the celestials. The final cut scene in the game is supposed to be a dragonball z/ harry potter and voldemort duel (you know the one) but is done in a very poor rushed way. Over all a less than average experience let down by a very obviously unfinished experience. At the $20 price tag, I would say its ok if you have the expendable income. A few missions were enjoyable and brought back the original Starcraft 2 vibes. But over all I felt disappointed at what could have been. But at least you can pet the dog on the ship.

I can't recommend this game for the campaign (I don't do multiplayer). It really felt early Alpha with very little polish. * Mission dialogues sometimes don't play. * The writing is terrible. * The audio quality in the game is terrible. * Everything felt very rushed and unpolished. * Hero characters felt like rehashes of known heroes from Heroes of the Storm or Warcraft. * The story felt like a cheap knock off of StarCraft (Kerrigan). It made very little sense and I ended the campaign with a... "oh, that's it?" feeling. Shame. I really wanted to like this and I expected better from this team. I didn't download this game prior to campaign so the "free to play" aspect doesn't mean anything to me. I paid for the campaign the same I would pay for other games with a much higher story telling standard and game polish. If this is where you expect to make money, then you need to rethink your strategy or start giving a ****. Cash grab if I've ever seen one. I've never left a review like this before, I tend to be very constructive in my feedback. If the developers don't care, why should I?

Aug 05: Bought the $32CAD basic edition to play the campaign, and somehow this only includes 1/3 of 1/3 (missions 4-6 of just the Vanguard race) of the campaign. Literally 3 extra missions for $32. Mistake on my end I guess for not reading the fine print, but when there are multiple axis of paid content (the options in Steam versus In-Game are different) for a game like this.... just wow. For the quality of what you get, I was already considering $32CAD to be generous for one third of campaign, but this is predatory slop. In reality, it's $39CAD for just the Vanguard campaign at a minimum and there are tons of ticky-tack extras that you can pay more for. The 'recommended, basic bundle' is anything but. I expected better from a studio who marketed themselves as making a spiritual successor to StarCraft II. edit (Aug 11, 2025) -- noting that the monetization was completely changed 48h after launch, with no compensation for folks like myself who burned and beta tested the live game with real money. Neato!

I've been a big supporter of this game for a while so it feels sad to write this review. I bought the basic version of this game for 24.99 thinking I was getting all the missions. Instead I got 3 missions and a "hero" for a game mode that isn't even complete. I can't get a refund because of my playtime from early access. Feels like I got scammed.

"The Stormgate Deluxe Early Access Pack includes the complete Vanguard campaign with all three chapters, each featuring three story-driven missions, plus exclusive cosmetic items and supporter recognition rewards. By completing campaign missions on Brutal difficulty, players can unlock unique pets: Fuzzy Moth (Mission 6), Terror Byte (Mission 9), and Bobble BOB (Mission 12). The pack also provides access to all three exclusive hero characters. " Well that's was a lie

Pre-release game was promised the campaign, which never happened, now I find out that I paid in order to own a free-to-play version while the campaign costs additional $$? WTF

As a Warcraft III and Starcraft II mapmaker who has tens of thousands of hours in RTS games, I can say that after playing this, I have abandoned all hope in the future of RTS, With so many devs from War3 and SC2 working Stormgate, I thought it would be the next big RTS game, but I couldnt be more wrong. The Devs continue saying "We have left early access now", I dont know what they are thinking. Nothing in this game is complete. Their main focus and the only well developed part of this game seems to be the 1v1, which I couldnt care less about. The editor after 2 years of early access can only make melee maps. Maybe if they released it with the editor there would be hundreds of custom games and a real player base but they still refuse to just complete the editor instead of giving attention to literally every other game mode. The co-op mode has only like 3 maps and the commanders are so uninteresting, especially with the 9 dollar price which is even more expensive than the high quality SC2 commanders. The 3v3 game mode is still not even out so everyone is stuck with the same repetitive 1v1. And worst of all, the campaign is so underwhelming and absolutely not worth the price. Its barely higher quality than most player made SC2 custom campaigns, and I somehow prefer the beta version from months ago. they recycled half the missions from that version but got rid of the best ones (Like why ditch the cool micro mission?). And the story is so dry and uninteresting. If youre a fan of competitive 1v1, trying to make custom games, hoping to enjoying a co-op mission with your friends, or just playing the story mode campaign, this game has a way disappoint you!