Maelstrom is a powerful circular current of water (usually the result of conflicting tides). For Codemasters it's a game with several unique features.
Maelstrom is a powerful circular current of water (usually the result of conflicting tides). For Codemasters it's a game with several unique features.
The game was released in 2007 and was developed by KD-Vision, the ones who also developed Perimeter. The publisher for both titles is Codemasters and I'm sure that they believed this will be a success. In the end, the game was less than mediocre and everybody disliked it. Let's see why.
Maelstrom has a post-apocalyptic setting and features three factions. The script was made by Sci-Fi author James Swallow and it must be an interesting read - not like this game. The three factions that are present in the game are the Remnants, former U.S. military that rely on stealth, modding units, and hacking; Ascension, a corporation that controls shielded Mechmorph war machines and an alien race called the Hai-Genti, bent on taking over the planet. This alien race pollutes the water supply and cannibalize their units to make killing machines. All three races struggle to conquer the Earth who is now in the wake of a meteor impact, ecological disaster, and nuclear holocaust.
If the first two factions fight over the last clean water sources, the aliens come here to terraform Earth and claim it as their new homeworld.
The Remnants are a guerrilla fighting organization who are waging a campaign against the Ascension. Mostly recruited form the remains of the armed or security services, they were founded by James Buchanan, a former US Navy Officer. They tend to use low-tech, improvised weaponry and vehicles.
The Ascension are the High-tech faction in the game. They are the last remaining corporation, with exclusive access to high technology units. They are lead by Arlan Khan, who sees himself as mankind's savior but pursues this in a totalitarian way. The main thing that identifies the Ascension is high-tech that can transform for dual use.
The Hai-Genti are aliens who come to Earth in the middle of the struggle between Ascension and Remnants. They use no mechanical units, and are a race of bio-constructs, each engineered for a specific purpose. They thrive in water, and this gives rise to their tactic of flooding the environments in the game to gain an advantage. They are fleeing a dying planet, and are lead on Earth by Mammon. They have no desire to cleanse Earth of human life but rather to terraform it in order to claim it as their new homeworld.
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After all this was presented, I can tell you that the game lacks anything that could make it a real strategy game as it's supposed to be. You can build bases, create troops but in the end is all the same thing and the one with the most resources and most troops wins. Like in Supreme Commander, the power comes in number not in skills.
