steel storm: burning retribution

posted by misterhaan in gaming, review on apr 10, 2012

i didn’t know much about steel storm: burning retribution before i started playing it, so probably my main draw was i thought it had a cool name. i got it with humble indie bundle #3 and hadn’t heard of it beforehand. maybe it was largely the title (not sure if it really needs the “burning retribution” subtitle — it certainly makes it seem more hardcore), but i was eager to try it out.

turns out it’s a top-down shooter, which luckily i’d grown to like while playing shadowgrounds from an earlier humble bundle and then alien swarm at a lan party. you control a futuristic hover tank and blast your way into and through enemy installations, disabling their infrastructure single-handedly. that’s pretty much all the story it has, delivered as text mission briefings you have to read yourself . . . or ignore because they aren’t actually useful.

in addition to not being all that useful, the mission briefings show before and after (but importantly, not during) the loading screen. if i want to read the briefing (which i did, just in case) that takes some time. waiting for the mission to load also takes time. if the loading screen would have shown the briefing they could have taken the same time, which would have been nicer than having nothing to do but wait while the mission loads. also, just at the end of the loading, it’d show a quick glimpse of what appeared to be loading / compiling output with some red text. maybe something didn’t load as expected, but apparently the game was showing some of its insides there. further story issues included having an objective to destroy the extractor, then coming across a building that shows a health bar named “small enemy base” which is apparently the extractor since the objective is complete once you destroy it. this wasn’t true of all of the destroy-that-one-thing objectives, but it happened more than enough to notice.

realistically though, games like steel storm aren’t really played for the story. they’re played to shoot stuff and have it blow up awesomely. for the most part, it does a great job of providing that. i had my main fire button down almost constantly, despite that it shows you an accuracy stat at mission completion, because if there wasn’t something where i was shooting right then, there would be soon. of course there are enemy units that shoot back at you, but there are also plenty of containers and stationary explodable targets. some of them contain powerups, but largely it’s just fun to see and hear them explode!

you start with the ship’s minigun and can find up to eight other weapons throughout the game, but only have four weapon slots and each weapon fits in one of the four slots. i liked this except for when a weapon i didn’t want would show up during a battle and swap in for the weapon i actually wanted to use. at least when that happens the weapon you were using is dropped such that you just have to fly over it to swap it back in. it also makes you think about picking up new weapons by taking them away when you die — you don’t necessarily get to keep a weapon until you reach the level exit with it. you see all of the weapons before you’re halfway through the campaign though, which is slightly disappointing. thankfully the terrain has a lot of variety so the second half of the campaign doesn’t just feel like more of the same.

there’s no manual saving, so you have to finish a mission for the game to remember your progress. this of course means you probably can’t sit down and play it for five minutes, as most missions took me 10 - 20 minutes. i expect most people would prefer to play long enough to get through at least one mission, so this probably isn’t an issue even if it’s not my preference.

a couple of the missions had specific issues that got to me. the first one looked like i had gotten myself stuck, when actually there was a way out that didn’t seem like a way out because you had to hit it just right, and if you weren’t quite right you got damaged (which deterred me from trying again). the second was a mission with an unexpected time limit. i think there was just one with a time limit (the others had goal times but if you took longer you just got no time bonus), but it was really frustrating to be playing along and then suddenly fail the mission. i like to take my time so i’m against time limits in general, but this was even worse because i had no idea that running out of time was even possible. there wasn’t even faster music when i was close to out of time like mario does to help you know you’d better hurry up and finish. i’m not sure if i skipped reading the briefing for that mission or if i just assumed from my experience with the game up to that point that i could just ignore anything it said about hurrying and take my time.

music though brings us to a part of the game that worked better. steel storm has a great electro / industrial soundtrack with a lot of energy. it fits in nicely with the futuristic explosions, which sound pretty good themselves. the graphics are also pretty good; largely in a comic book style with thick outlines and bright colors.

the levels aren’t just straight through either — i came across numerous branches where i could go up an elevator, check out what’s through that opening to the right, or keep going straight. the changes in elevation worked well, with the camera raising or lowering to stay the same distance from your craft. i stayed with the default camera options which had me always aimed toward the top of the screen, turning the map around me to maneuver.

steel storm also has coop and vs modes, but i haven’t tried that out yet. i suspect coop would be fun since it would increase the speed at which explosions happen, which is basically my favorite part. the one available dlc (which i don’t have) adds a healing gun which would probably be useful to help keep your teammates alive.

it took me 10 hours to play through the campaign on easy (which was challenge enough for me). even though i’ve pointed out a lot of issues here, very few of them take much away from the game. i ended up enjoying it, though i usually found myself playing it in smaller doses of a mission or two at a time. the possibility of eventually playing it with friends makes its current price of $5 plenty reasonable.