Storm Striker: A FUN Game isn't a GOOD Game

storm Striker is a game an incredibly fun one at that a third person hero shooter with a varied cast some cool character designs it controls well there's little downtime between fights it's fast-paced and it peaked at seven concurrent players as I was writing the script wait how many but how I was just singing this game's Praises how does it not even have enough players online half the time to actually form a Lobby well just because storm Striker is a fun game that doesn't mean it's a good game all right so let's start with this what is Storm Striker well I'll let the game guides that they give you at the very beginning of the game do the talking here storm Striker game guide game rule storm Striker is a 5f5 battle game where players compete to capture points or moving object Christ okay look you know what we'll actually we'll talk about the problems that I have with that later so a 5v5 hero shooter let's just get this out of the way first storm Striker is not an OverWatch clone whatsoever sure you're playing Heroes you're fighting over objectives but the way the objectives work even if we just focus on that is completely different from OverWatch and there's also the fact that having objectives in this genre doesn't make you an OverWatch copy that's just what the genre is so what about some of the core gameplay mechanics of the game well the biggest one is the fact that characters are able to switch their abilities some some are just purpose shifts like swapping an ability that pushes enemies away into one that pulls enemies closer to you but then there are others that just completely alter the play style of your character for one example let's look at Alman the base version of her e is just a little Zone around her that she'll do some damage in and the alternative version of it is the sand hand every character has about two or more abilities that they can swap on the Fly whether you're in spawn or just in the middle of a fight if you're a psychopath so you can stick with one set of abilities if that's just your preferred way to play a character or you can swap on the fly if you need to adapt to whatever the hell the enemy team is running and speaking of characters this game does not shy away from having some creativity with its cast one of my favorite characters is a disruptive DPS called Lucy who swaps between either being a fully melee focused disruptor or a fully ranged AOE Focus disruptor personally I prefer playing as the ranged AOE variant but if you want to be pulling enemies towards you and just ruining their days then you can swap to the melee one and you'll still do just fine it all comes down to preference like one of the best parts about this game is the fact that it doesn't shy away from making fully melee characters or just giving characters melee options there is Lucy like I was just talking about there someone who can swap between being ranged or melee but there is a whole host of melee characters available that are all designed in different ways one of my personal favorites is warmonger a tank who has a command grab that just lets him pick up anyone and throw them into a wall and then he's just got an ultimate that lets you suplex people the characters in this game are brilliant I absolutely love it to bits but my favorite part is that the melee characters at least for the most part are pretty welld designed sure there's some that have a few issues I mean Alice is kind of awkward to control and then Shifu just has a fullon 100 to zero hard CC combo but for the most part all the melee characters are great there's no issues that you could possibly have with them all the melee characters are given the tools that they need in order to thrive which is just a phenomenal change of pace for this genre because so often in Shooters whether they're hero shooters or just general ones if you ever make a character who's more focused on melee combat they end up in one of two categories either one they're incredibly frustrating to play as because you just lack every tool that you would need to add actually get into your range so that you can be effective or they are so incredibly frustrating to play against because the tools they have that help them get in range are incredibly oppressive to play versus if you want a game that has similarity to this in terms of melee characters having strengths then I would highly suggest giving gigantic Rampage editional look so if you think the melee footage from this video actually looks pretty cool then definitely check out gigantic because you can actually get into a game but speaking of characters well this is where the first major problem I have with the game comes from on the very first day I played this there were only five characters that I could play one tank two DPS and two supports now luckily I enjoyed two of these five so it wasn't that bad but imagine if none of the five appeal to you what do you do then because you want to know something it costs 25,000 ingame credits to unlock a new character want to know something else not only are you unable to spend money or like that on the game to boost your currency numbers and just buy a character you gain anywhere from 100 to about 500 credits per game couple this with the fact that you genuinely cannot get into a game to begin with you're trapped with being unable to play any of the characters you actually want to outside of the training range sure the very next day they actually updated the free rotation with three new characters one in each role that doesn't change two things one I cannot unlock new characters anyway it's an unbelievable pain and two the rotation can barely be considered a rotation considering it just has not actually changed aside from that update of three characters to us it doesn't rotate I spoke with some veteran players who said that it used to be a fully free to play for every single character you could just like the second you got the game you could just go in but because players would end up locking in some of the most difficult characters like Rocky do 300 damage die 14 times they'd end up quitting the game immediately afterwards which is why the devs made the changes that they did there was genuine data that if new players started on a ranged character they were nearly two times more likely to continue playing the game but that doesn't change the fact it takes at minimum about 50 games if you want to unlock one character but since the amount of credits you earn per game fluctuates wildly based off of winning losing and the stats you have mid game it's impossible to put a number on it and you just are grinding forever and when it comes to players locking in difficult characters you know something else that doesn't help the complete lack of a tutorial as well as the training range being put bluntly dog and I mean going back to that game guide video they gave you the first time you load into the training range sure it tells you how the game works but it doesn't do it that well a better tutorial would genuinely just be having floating text boxes in an AI match to help players actually understand things better you could even have your free rotation characters on offer in a second tutorial match after the first one if people didn't Vibe with whatever first character you put them on in the initial tutorial then it's fine they can lock in someone new and I should also mention that the training range like what the hell is this there are two other entities in this two dummies on different teams and all the other in here is useless like what is the purpose of this area at the back what are these moving boxes with range numbers attached to them like they they don't help me knowing range numbers doesn't help me at all what do I do with with any of this at the very least the training range does help you find out if you actually like how a character plays but then you're confronted with the fact that even if you do like how they play or if you don't like how they play it doesn't matter because you can't unlock them to begin with the odds of actually being able to try out that character are so low whether we're talking the complete lack of players online or again the fact you can't afford the character and you know how I was talking about AI matches a second ago this game's AI is some of the worst I have ever seen they stand still when they run out of cooldowns they literally shut down if they have no buttons to press they get trapped on map geometry sometimes and they can't path towards the objective and also the game tries to pretend that the AI characters are real people since they'll use names of existing players I had an AI Ally one time that was called something like TTV Aon and when I was trying out the characters in the AI matches I had one game where I had a real person on my team and even then that was only one game of about 10 and one real person the other three on my team were just more AI Bots but the biggest issue this game has is the complete absence of marketing alongside a complete lack of an English team like I came across this game by accident just scrolling through Steam since I needed something to play while I was waiting for smt 5 Vengeance the odds of anyone watching this having actually played it are low and if you want to get into a game you basically have to join the Discord where there are effective ly scrims set up around 8:00 p.m. EST where people try and scr together a group of 10 so that they can actually play the video game and this ends up creating a bit of a negative feedback loop because the players who've been playing since like the launch back in November 2023 are really good at the game and they absolutely destroy the new players just by existing which results in most of the new players not having fun and quitting the game since they can barely get into matches and when they do they're just sitting in the spawn on all game potentially not even able to play the character they actually want to play it's similar to older fighting games that slowly lose their Community as new games in the series come out and if a new player shows up and tries to get into the game they get swatted down by the veterans who just Eclipse them in terms of skill this isn't a problem that spawned from the devs or anything like that but it's certainly something that spawned from the fact that they have not shown off this game whatsoever the dev team is fully Korean and in Korea the game seems to have a bit of a more active community but it's still small all around so while there's a lot of issues surrounding the game the gam playay itself while not perfect is incredibly enjoyable it doesn't make up for all the shortcomings this game has but like I said it's absolutely a joy to play though it really does have some glaring issues one of the big ones that I noticed is the fact that audio is just a mess stuff sounds like it's either too far away or too close it will swap between being way too quiet and way too loud and the range on it nearly never seems consistent to me and while movement does feel very fluid there's also the fact that sometimes it's just very strange your jump is very floaty you're slow to get up into the jump but then you drop like an absolute Rock but the one thing that I truly dislike is the fact that you can't stand on half of the map geometry there is loads of characters in this game who have some insane Mobility I mean I have a clip from one of those members in the Discord server who is playing racky doing some Mario Odyssey type platforming to get up into a crazy position but odds are that position is just going to be completely wiped from the game because for some reason the devs don't want you standing on all this cool map geometry that you can get to if you're good at managing the movement of your character I just don't really see the point of having so many mobile characters in the game if you're not able to actually use that Mobility to get different Vantage points and the game does seem to be veering into a bit of an OverWatch support healing problem at least from the games that I've been playing it feels terrible if you don't have two healers although that can definitely be easily fixed with just some number adjustments across the board and honestly the devs have been communicating well with the players as to basically everything that's been going on in the game so I do have faith in them sure they make some questionable decisions but the few hours of actual matches versus real people that I got to play were so so incredibly fun that I definitely think the devs can make something out of this game I want nothing but the best for storm Striker cuz I truly believe that this game has the potential to stand on its own one the devs mentioning in the Discord how they're actually planning on investing more money into marketing so I'm very hopeful about the future of this game and I can't wait to see what it has in store it sparked the same Wonder in me that OverWatch did back in 2017 when I first played it so really I hope that it can take off well and I hope they can fix some of the issues that it has as it stands right now I don't know if I could actually recommend storm Striker to people some of the issues are just too large to ignore with good gameplay aside until issues like the difficulty of getting new characters teaching new players how to actually play the game and of course letting players actually Express their skill with the immobility that you have given us I don't know if I could truly recommend this game to anyone but if you've been watching the gameplay that I've had on in this video and you think that this game does actually look fun well definitely give luck it's free on Steam so it's not going to take much of your time just you know play at APM EST so you can get real games versus real people storm Striker cannot be called a good game but it can certainly be called one of the most fun that I have played in a very long time that's all I have for this video so I do hope that you enjoyed it for a brief bit of self-promotion I have a twitch Twitter Discord all that in the the description so if you want to give it a look you know where to go and I go on if you're still here drop a like sub comment all that YouTube stuff and I'll talk to you next time lads [Music] [Music]

Channel: PixelRory

Views: 21,323

Keywords: pixelrory, irish, irish review, gaming, storm striker, moba, hero, hero shooter, 5v5, storm strikers, review, game review, game discussion, game design, game design discussion, fun game, good game, gaming review, overwatch, overwatch 2, ow, ow 2, overwatch season 11

Id: 4JWL3289AI0

Length: 13min 59sec (839 seconds)

Published: Wed Jun 19 2024