The strategy RPG genre is often one heavily saturated with new games on the PC. It's becoming more difficult every year to stand out among the crowd, yet that is what Fireglow is trying to accomplish with their upcoming North American release, Stranger. GamingExcellence recently had an opportunity to take a late build for a test drive, and have put together our impressions of the game from our brief experience. Does Stranger have enough content to captivate its intended audience, or will it get lost in the sea of releases this year?
In theory, Stranger should be an interesting game. While it does fuse elements of real-time strategy and role-playing games, it doesn't do it with any genuine measure of success. Much of the gameplay is botched by horrible AI pathfinding problems, issues compounded by an erratic and often aggravating level of difficulty mixed with a convoluted user interface.
Nearly every aspect of this game is inconvenient, from simply trying to navigate maps to trying to control your troops in battle and making an effort to care about what's happening with the storyline. Whatever good ideas Fireglow brought to the table at the game's inception are mangled and broken in their final configuration
Presentation - 4.0
Graphics - 5.5
Sound - 6.0
Gameplay - 4.5
Lasting Appeal - 4.0
Overall -
Stranger certainly lives up to its name. This role-playing/real-time strategy hybrid is decidedly strange in every respect, from its bizarre setting to its unusual game mechanics and its gawky interface. Russian developer Fireglow Games seems to have set out to make something rather offbeat, but then followed this philosophy so far off the beaten path that the end product turned into a surreal, inept jumble of half-baked ideas. Despite a couple of interesting innovations and some traditional hacking-and-slashing that sticks close to a familiar formula, the game is simply too odd and too clumsily made to appeal to either RPG or RTS gamers.
The Good
* Surreal story and setting
* Blend of RPG and RTS game styles.
The Bad
* Story and setting are so surreal that they verge on nonsensical
* Horribly nonintuitive interface
* Derivative clickfest gameplay.
CheatCC writes: "Stranger combines genres in a way that doesn't blend entirely harmoniously. Like mountain chains created by the colliding of tectonic plates, Stranger displays its scars from the forced assimilation of the disparate genres prominently. Other games have been able to do it well, but Stranger lacks the finesse that would incorporate all gameplay elements wholeheartedly, such as the storyline, character development, control system, move list, menus, and overall direction. There is no shortage of things to do in Stranger, but the questions seem to be what are we doing and why?"
