Storm Reviews

This is a surprisingly clever and satisfying puzzle game with simple mechanics. I'm up to autumn now, and I'm really enjoying the twist on mechanics each season brings. The challenges each stage are familiar (good conveyance of mechanics), without being repetitive. As others have noted: it is a bit of an annoyance that the keys can't be rebound, but this is such a minor nitpick, as keyboard interaction is infrequent anyway. Fairly unique take on a physics puzzler, and I am happy with this purchase.

TL;DR- Don't buy this game. I forced myself to finish this one in order to review it for IGN, but if I ever have to look at it again I'll hurt something. The puzzle mechanics are confusing and unresponsive, the abilities work 40% of the time, the objectives are unclear, and the game never looks as good as the trailers imply it does. Don't waste your time.

[h1]A peaceful experience to enjoy occasionally[/h1] Storm is a beautiful and peaceful game where you must lead your seed to a fertile ground using elements of nature, such as air, water and lightning. In some levels you can even conjure a tornado and control it with your keyboard to carry the seed around, although this is not where the game really shines, since it sometimes requires quick reactions and defeats a little bit the purpose of admiring the breath-taking sights. This is an experience to enjoy in small sessions. I’ve been playing this game for years and enjoyed each level without any pressure to end it quickly. In Storm, one does not just rush their way through the levels. Instead, try listening to the calm music and noticing the nature’s sound, particularly the wind blowing and the rain. It is really a unique experience, so much that the puzzle in each map will be like a secondary objective. I did not care too much about the Spirit mode, which is a timed challenge that allows you to replay all the game’s levels collecting spirits within a short amount of time. However, the “regular” mode was quite fun to play and took me around 10 hours to finish. Admittedly, I could have finished it sooner if I wasn’t appreciating the scenario and the soundtrack. The somewhat awkward controls didn’t bother me too much, but they can be a bit frustrating in some levels where casting the right element at the right time is essential. Most actions can be done with the mouse, but some of them requires the keyboard and they are not very intuitive. Once I accidentally pressed the “reset seed” key (CTRL) instead of the “speed up” one (SPACE), which made my seed to go back to the starting point when I had the puzzle almost sorted out. I recommend to play Storm simply to relax after a hard day. If you’re after a challenging puzzle game, it may disappoint you as most levels are quite easy to beat. Some of them I am pretty sure I took an unintentional shortcut, as the way I carried the seed was completely atypical and bizarre, but it accidentally ended up in the right place. Laugh at your mistakes, enjoy the scenario, and listen to the beautiful music – you may find Storm to be a better game than it looks like.

Storm is a puzzle/platform game where you use the elements to guide your seed to good soil. I have tried this game a few times earlier but quit because of bad controls - I am allergic to badly ported games. Now I have an XBox-controller and gave this game one more try. Unfortunately, Storm didn't convince me this time either. It's a shame because I really want to like this game. It's incredibly beautiful and has a great sountrack with relaxing sound effects. Also, it isn't developed by any big giants but by the much smaller Eko Software. I love the charming graphics but beyond that there isn't much in this game for me. I just get frustrated over stuck seeds and unmanageable controls. I can theoretically solve the required puzzles, but making the controls do what I want is a completely different matter. Maybe it is something for you if you like this kind of challenge, but for me this game experience turns into a stressful, frustrating mess. And I have to say it is a shame because, again, I love the concept and the visuals. [b]2/10 seeds[/b]

I bought this game because it advertises as being a "relaxing game". It is not relaxing. I got stressed out during many of the challenges.

First thing I want to say about Storm is this; ignore the metascore. That score is coming from a bunch of stuffy cublicle workers who work for big, conglomerated gamging sites. This is not a game for them, so it only stands they wouldn't like it. Do you enjoy puzzle games? Storm is for you. Did you enjoy Journey, Flower, flOw, or Puddle? Storm is for you. Storm isn't perfect by any means, don't get me wrong. But it is whimsical, relaxing, and nowhere near as frustrating as critics complain it is. If you are on the fence, watch a few videos of gameplay on Youtube; I would still recommend snagging it on sale though.

The idea is very good, but: - controls are atrocious, especially autumn tornadoes, it feels like pure random luck with them. - cannot set sensitivity or rebind keys, menu controlled by keyboard only, game is mostly mouse. - the places where the seed is suppose to go are sometimes same color as everything else, and you have to guess. Overall it feels like better Bad Rats.

This game is really fantastic ! Graphics are great, music is calm and controls are good enough to end the puzzles easily when you have the right solution. One of my favorite game. Important note : for the Spirit mode, you can complete the levels even after chrono has reach zero. Time is for scoring only. No stress...

This game is so calm and relaxed it is a great way to blow off some steam after you have a tough day. Sometimes the puzzles are difficult to complete but your mind will be much clearer after seeing these great graphics and music. This game shows an accurate if not exact likeness of nature.

Review of Storm, also referred to here as the "Rain Cooldown Waiting Simulator" Though it's touted as "family-friendly" and "serene," it is only so thematically. In terms of actual gameplay, it is anything but serene, and far beyond what any but the most obsessive-compulsive and patient kids will tolerate. In a nutshell, it is eye-poppingly, hair-tearingly, crying-out-loud frustrating, featuring arbitrary, artificial difficulty, abysmal controls, and more than anything, lots of waiting for the 10-second rain cooldown to go, go, GO. Come ON, do I have to wait another 8 seconds to try something else on the 23rd try, again? Really? What I mean by "arbitrary" and "artificial" difficulty is that, too often, because of some minor quirk, the right solution doesn't work. In fact, there have been a number of levels where I did the correct solution to no avail, then spent another 30 minutes waiting for the rain cooldown timer over and over as I tried different solutions. When I checked the solution, it just worked differently -- like, for example, using lightning to destroy a land formation to free a boulder, but the boulder falls the wrong way for whatever reason. The worst is when you're on a multi-step puzzle with really fussy steps that are time-consuming (mostly because of that awful rain timer) and unreliable, and the nature of the puzzle means that a messup in timing or pixel clicking accuracy (especially with the clunky, imprecise controls and UI) on step 2 or 3 means you get knocked back to step 1. I'm pretty patient with these sorts of things, but this just beat the hell out of my patience. It's just infuriating when you've finally gotten it to work right on step two of a conceptually-simple three-step puzzle after 20 minutes, only to be sunk by some quirk of the third step and have to start all over. My kids (10 and 13) scrunched their face and lost interest after giving a genuine, hours-long try. You should not have to utter the words "life is too short for this" for a supposedly tranquility-inducing game. I really want to like this game. I like the idea, I like the intent. But playing it is like threading a needle with an excessively thick and frayed thread, with a mandatory 10-second retry timer and a 75% chance that something will come and randomly knock the thread back out every time you've gotten it almost through, so you have to start over. It genuinely feels random all too often -- waiting for sparks from the grass fires to float in just the right way to a log somewhat nearby, waiting for the seed to float just right, etc. And then you're constantly fighting with the UI, since the mouse-scrolling is hyper sensitive and quickly shifts the screen whenever you get within two inches of one side or the other -- which you will do constantly as you try to drag the mouse just right to generate a wind path. It's a puzzle game where the right solution depends not only on whether you did the right thing, but a confluence of factors, half of them outside your effective control, that sometimes really don't quite come together for many tries, forcing you to start over and repeat the frustrating sequence of these puzzles again. Again, I want to like it, but the developers have made it just punishing because of artificial difficulty and poor controls -- it's not difficult because it requires cleverness, but because it requires a confluence of things that feel random and/or not practicably controllable (i.e., will the wind carry one of these sparks that long distance just right? I had to do the same action 10-20 times before it did it just right... etc.). Developers, difficulty is good. Replay value is good. But the game being difficult because your controls are poor and because the structure of the game itself blocks successful interactions most of the time, even though the player does the right things, is bad. And forcing the player to repeat the right solution over and over and over, waiting patiently for that long rain cooldown timer, is not replay value. While I appreciate the music and art style, I have come to be highly irritated by these problems in the game, and I can't but strongly recommend against it. IF the rain cooldown timer was shortened reasonably and some of the more nose-scrunching puzzles (Winter days 3 and 4, for example) were made less unreliable, I might be more forgiving of its other faults. As it stands, I find that every time I quit this game, it's a rage-quit. Aaarghghgh and all that. Side Note: I am clearly obsessive-compulsive myself, as else why would I have twelve hours in the game? I guess I feel I have to give it a run all the way through if I'm going to give it a review as unfriendly as this...? Maybe masochism. But you can't say I haven't given it a really solid look.