Maelstrom

Rating ESRB: Teen Genre action Publisher Codemasters External Links Official Maelstrom Website

From the makers of 2004's Perimeter comes the, um, interesting new Maelstrom: The Battle for Earth Begins. The gist of Maelstrom's single-player campaign is that a global catastrophe has left most of Earth underwater, and the human freedom fighters that call themselves the Remnants are fighting the stoic Ascension for control over the leftovers. And of course a third force, the alien Hai-Genti, needs the deluged planet for its own devices. It's all laid out in a total of four campaigns that start poorly and never veer from the low standard set by the Remnant story.

The game plays pretty similar to most RTS games: start with a group of troops, meet with another group somewhere in the map, build a base, gather resources, and fight the enemies. Each campaign plays quite differently. The Remnants focus mainly on gathering resources, the Ascension gather the DNA from the Remnant camps, and the Hai-Genti mean to change the water into a poisonous biomass.

Reading into this game, you hear of course about the "new" feature of suddenly going from the "god view" into a Third person reminding us of 2006's Rise and Fall: Civilizations at War but at least they did something with this fun little feature. Maelstrom does nothing with this feature. If anything it makes the controls a little more jumpy and questionable.

Your Heroes, like most RTSs these days, have levels and skills, but I must say don't waist your time, the point of this game is beat the mission, beat the mission, beat the game, and turn it in for store credit. One thing I can give this game is its level of difficulty. From the start it's just plain hard. And I must say the soundtrack is appealing. The orchestral sound is quite a reviving feel of games past.

The TCP/IP multiplayer is somewhat functional and features a decent number of maps for up to six players. This actually makes the game slightly fun, even if the fun is derived from making fun of the game with your fellow players over a Ventrilo server. You also have the choice to skirmish against the computer, but you'll have to turn the AI up because the normal setting is god awful and easy.

Maelstrom does have its good points. But overall I'd have to say It's just not up to par with current RTS games these days. They tried to hard and it seems like they had a deadline that they were rushed to meet.