hy do game developers keep doing this to me? They show off cool ideas that could bust open a stale genre, and then fail utterly to create a fun game around them. Maelstrom is infuriating in this way. Weather, temperature, and terraforming are all painstakingly modeled to have actual game effects. You can drown the enemy, take advantage of storms or clear skies in different ways, and set things on fire with incendiary weapons. What you can’t do is control your units, build a base, or capture resources without dealing with a truly horrific number of bugs and broken implementations.

The most basic command in just about any RTS is the attack-move. This tells your units to move to a location and attack any hostiles they see en route. Sounds simple, right? In pretty much every RTS for the last 10 years, it is – but not in Maelstrom. Groups will often split up and take wildly divergent paths to reach their objectives, which opens your forces up to being picked off piecemeal. Frequently, I watched three out of a dozen or more units engage the enemy while my remaining troops milled about doing nothing despite repeated attack orders. The only way I was able to get any measure of obedience out of my troops was to break them into tiny squads – three or four units apiece – and give each of them new specific attack orders every time their target dropped. As you can probably imagine, this is an incredibly irritating way to play an RTS.

Just to be very clear, I’m not talking about my units being stymied by blocked paths or weird sight lines. I’ve logged more hours than I care to think about playing real-time strategy titles; I know very well how to deal with those common problems. These issues go far beyond anything that players could be reasonably expected to compensate for. At times, Maelstrom borders on unplayable.

Maelstrom has other problems beyond the impossibility of controlling your armies (an admittedly insurmountable problem in an RTS). The rules for placing buildings during base construction are inconsistent, and make planning a base layout incredibly difficult. Stealth abilities are horribly implemented; since there’s no feedback on units’ detection radiuses or your visibility, you can’t stay hidden with any degree of reliability. The list of Maelstrom’s annoyances, large and small, goes on and on.

The ideas present here – physics modeling of nearly everything onscreen, the use of heat and cold to affect the world, even possessing heroes in a third-person action style – are great. I would love to play a competent game that encompasses these creative and unusual concepts. Unfortunately, Maelstrom is not that RTS. There’s absolutely no reason to put up with the frustration of doing the simplest of tasks in order to check out the futuristic abilities that you’ll eventually command here.