What happens when too many concepts are thrown into the blender? Warshift 2 wants to be a real-time strategy, third-person shooter, and role-playing game all in one. While I applaud the ambition, a bit more reservation would have gone a long way.
The original Warshift was released way back in 2016, and, coming from a single-man team, it was praised as an indie darling. Sure, it wasn’t perfect, but a lot of its shortcomings were forgiven for it being a single person’s passion project. Ten years later, and the same solo developer has brought us Warshift 2.
Set in a Bleak Future
An alien bio-mechanical race known as The Enclave is sweeping across the Universe in a bid to end all organic life. Humanity is utilising its own Cyber Legion to stop the threat, hoping to hold the line at their outer colonies. You, the player, must pick your side and fight through 25 campaign missions to lead your chosen army to victory.
Commanding an army
Each army has several commanders at its disposal; these are your hero units. One is picked for you for each mission, and this is the unit you control in third person. Switching to tactical puts you in an isometric view where you can build, gather resources, and command troops. Each hero unit is unique, and you could be a battlemech one mission, a hybrid flight/aquatic creature, a cyborg, or just a scout jeep. Your hero unit will also level up during the mission, and you can apply stats and change equipment during the course of the battle.
The hero unit can be killed, but after a brief cool-down, will respawn at your Ark, your base of operations. Herein lies one of the problems I have with Warshift 2. Your hero seems woefully under-powered sometimes. Each hero has a power meter, and everything seems to drain it.
Using boosts, flying, and almost every weapon draws from it. Too many times I had the cool-down message pop up on screen, and while this is in effect, there is literally nothing you can do. If this happens during aerial missions, you plummet to your death. Putting points into any stats during level up feels almost negligible. I mean, I saw the number go up but didn’t feel it.
A Question of Pace
To level up, you must return the hero to the Ark, which can often mean trekking back across the map. To expand and build, your hero must connect with a nearby energy node for the initial construction. For each building, you must wait for construction, then plonk it down, meaning you can’t queue buildings up. So you get situations where you want to place a building but don’t have it ready constructed, but then can’t place it because your hero has wandered off.
Don’t get me started on the unit AI. Firstly, their pathing gets them stuck on terrain far too often. If you leave them unsupervised, say defending an outpost, they have a habit of wandering off to die! I watched this happen one time: an enemy unit pops into their range, and they go off chasing it until it dies, but they don’t return to base and instead get picked off one by one as more enemies pop up.
Outside of the tutorial, the missions started very simplistic, almost an extended tutorial in itself. The mission always had a set structure; there was no variation in completing them. Just follow the objectives; even some of the building tabs were greyed out so you couldn’t experiment if you wanted. Then, all of a sudden, you were given free rein, and the difficulty spike shot up. You had an enemy hero constantly picking at your defences, you were in a constant stalemate, and any advance from you always left you at a disadvantage.
Presenting the Battle
Presentation-wise, Warshift 2 gives us the bare minimum. Don’t get me wrong, we have nice menus, great models, and a high-energy electronic soundtrack, but the plot is non-existent. What there is is hidden in mission briefings; there are no voice-overs and no substantial cut-scenes. You just move mission to mission in an often disjointed manner. The faction you play doesn’t even matter as the campaign is almost a carbon copy for each side.
We do get some live-action FMVs in the form of victory screens, but I suspect these were purchased assets. Sometimes they did show some progression of plot, but they felt strung together in a way Ed Wood would be proud of. There was also some “suspicious artwork” used for the human avatars, but I can neither confirm nor deny any use of generative AI.
Technical bugs, like the game hitching when it attempts to loop the music, buttons on the screen that have no explanation, and a camera zoom that doesn’t actually zoom (it just adjusts the camera’s y-axis) all add up to a frustrating experience.
A one-man team
I really didn’t want to be too harsh on Warshift 2. This was a single-person team, and for what they have managed to do, it is impressive, and I was planning on giving them a huge leeway. That was until I managed, out of curiosity, to look up some gameplay of 2016’s Warshift. To my surprise, it was almost identical. All the models, art aesthetic, and even maps were directly lifted from the first game and reused in the second.
While I have no problem with people reusing assets and updating their game, it is the fact that they named it a sequel that I take umbrage with. Had it been named “expanded edition” or “remastered”, I might have been more forgiving, but that “2” in the title carries a lot of weight and expectation. A sequel suggests an evolution of gameplay and mechanics carried over or even adapted into a new experience. Not a carbon copy of the first.
From what I can tell, they have expanded the campaign and made the Enclave playable. Skirmish mode returned, but from my experience, multiplayer is non-functional. The extended campaign has highlighted Warshift 2’s structural flaws, as the first game, from what I have read, was carried by its multiplayer mode.
Final Thoughts
After a ten-year gap, this feels like a rushed release, an attempt to score easy points by doing what worked the first time. Had they gone in and tightened some of the more glaring issues instead of just expanding what was already there, this could have been something special. Because I did like the idea and I saw the vision. However, this product falls well short of what is acceptable in this day and age.
Developer: Cyril Megem
Publisher: Cyril Megem
Platforms: Steam, Epic, Xbox
Played on: Steam
Key Provided by: PressEngine
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