A mix of RTS and RPG elements that's hard to swallow.
Developer Fireglow is best known for the Sudden Strike series, a line of real-time strategy titles set in World War II, so Stranger definitely represents something a little different. It's a weird hybrid of real-time strategy and role-playing coated in a rather generic layer of fantasy and magic. Despite having some good ideas, severe pathfinding issues, a wildly erratic difficulty curve, an unnecessarily cumbersome user interface, and uninteresting quests, characters, and storyline really make it a hard game to enjoy.
It's unfortunate the game turned out as it did, since chopping away all Stranger's thistles, thorns, and other annoyances reveals solid roots. As a comparison, think of Blizzard's WarCraft III, specifically the way you had to creep around maps with a hero, smashing NPC mobs to gain experience, unlock skills, and occasionally get cool new items. That's more or less how Stranger works, requiring you to command one of three hero units around a square map and kill creatures for loot, skill increases, and to complete quests.
Despite a solid base of gameplay possibilities, things start to get all tangled up as soon as you go to do anything. Take the crystals as an example, which drop from enemies in red, green, and blue varieties. By assigning these to your hero you can activate magical abilities he's unlocked and powered up through skill point accumulation. The system takes on a greater degree of depth when you consider the magical field created, depending on the color of crystal used, can dampen enemy attacks, and you can even combine assigned crystal color types on your hero to create more powerful fields. For instance, assigning blue and red crystals to your hero allows you to use magenta spells and skills, and green and red gives lets you use yellow. It's a system that takes a little getting used to because you don't actually trigger any of your magic skills. Instead, they auto-cast in combat. So, for instance, if you use your skill points to learn the green healing spell, set the spell to active and allocate green crystals to your hero, the heal will have a chance to trigger when you get into a fight.
Managing this odd system requires you to use a drag and drop icon and sliders that are almost silly in their level of inconvenience. Combine this with an inventory and skill management system that's noteworthy simply because it's so clumsily designed, requiring you open far too many windows to perform simple tasks (particularly when trying to change equipment on mercenaries). The interface doesn't really ruin the experience, you'll get used to it after a while, but it's frequently getting in the way and serves as an unnecessary source of frustration.
Surely the hirelings should help, right? You'd think added numbers would greatly augment your ability to withstand the large groups of powerful enemies you regularly draw, but too often this principle doesn't apply. The pathfinding for hired goons is flat out terrible. If you're near any kind of structure at all and give a general move order to your squad, they'll start walking every which way, including into territory you haven't explored yet which, guess what, draws even more monster attacks.
You might not notice this issue at first since early on you won't have the crystals or metal to hire a group of significant size. Once you've got twenty or so hirelings running about, trying to keep the melee and ranged soldiers in position while moving into any structure or narrow gap in the environment (which are everywhere), results in a total collapse of organization and more often than not a game reload. To fight effectively, you basically have to run in either your hero or heavily armored infantry to an enemy encampment to try and draw out opponents to a larger open space where your troops are already in position. If you instead trust they'll faithfully follow your movement commands into hostile territory, well, you're not going to be happy with the results.
Then there's the fantastical story, which fails to inspire anything more than boredom. And that's too bad, as with a compelling tale filled with vibrant, identifiable characters it's possible to stomach poor gameplay in order to continue the tale. Stranger's plot and cast of characters are so removed from reality, so unfamiliar, cardboard-thin, and devoid of humanity that it's difficult to do anything with the whole narrative construct than simply hold it at a distance and arch an eyebrow.
If you're a gamer with a GeForce 8800 GTX 768 MB video card, the card we were using, it seems the game suffers from an irritating graphical flicker on a regular basis. There's a patch out that's supposed to fix it, but it didn't do anything for us. That aside, the visuals are certainly serviceable, with character models ranging from robed, fireball tossing wizards and hulking armored constructs to an assortment of the kinds of genre-staple goblin and orc-types. It's by no means a look that could be called original, but if you don't experience the kind of graphical bugs we did, it won't be all that hard on the eyes.
Closing Comments
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.
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