visceron's Review of Stalin vs. Martians

While this light hearted RTS endeavors for satirical humor, there is nothing funny about the gameplay.

User Rating: 3.5 | Stalin vs. Martians PC

By visceron | Review Date: May 14, 2009

Since gameplay is usually the most important part of a game, I will discuss this first. The most common complaint I hear about this game is that no strategy is required. This is definitely true. I was able to complete the game by only using the strongest tanks available with some exceptions. However, spamming mass amounts of a single unit works in most RTS games. You can only achieve as much strategy as you put into it. Unfortunately it's hard to come up with many strategies when given such a limited number of unique units. The main difference between the three different types of units is armor, attack, and speed. My biggest qualm with the game is the control. I am referring to controlling units: selecting and ordering units. The unit selection is terrible. When dragging to select multiple units, sometimes the selection box doesn't appear until the second or third attempt. This is especially painful when ordering new units I thought I had selected, only to find out I was ordering around units thought to be deselected. The 'selection box' is also incredibly small or difficult to find when selecting individual infantry. This makes a particular mission very frustrating. This mission requires you to keep your infantry spread out to prevent them from all be killed off by an 'area artillery' attack. Besides the difficulty in selecting units, sometimes it takes a few seconds for your units to respond to an order, if they do anything at all. Not to mention the terrible path finding. Some individual units of a group will move in the opposite direction as ordered to find their way to the ordered destination.

From a visual stand point the graphics are outdated and mediocre. There are no graphics options in the game and altering the user.cfg file only results in graphical glitches. The problem with the graphics is all the missing animations. Several units show no animation when attacking. There is no attack cursor, which may not seem like much of a problem, but leads to some confusion. For instance, the first 'commander ability/power' you get works automatically upon purchasing. Some of the later abilities require you to click somewhere on the map. It is impossible to know this since the game gives you no information as to what these abilities are nor is there an attack cursor to indicate you need to click somewhere. What's worse is if you order a unit to do something, you are no longer able to use the ability even though game already used up your resources for selecting the commander power.

The game music is the best part of this game. I counted in the credits 7 tracks. I believe 2 or 3 of those are only heard in the intermission videos, so it's good, but repetitive. The sound effects become quite annoying and are cheesy sounding. Finally units will say the same thing over and over again, but I am used to that from all the other RTS games I have played.

The story to this game is somewhat amusing even in its limited form. The funniest thing about this game, is the idea itself. The story consists of 12 short mission briefings. There are also 3 appalling intermission videos.

This game takes about 3-4 hours to complete, if you bother to finish it. There is no multi-player. It's a fairly easy game, so you won't be replaying the missions very often, except for the very flawed and poorly designed missions. Did I mention this game is completely scripted and plays out exactly the same each and every time? Yep, it is. No reason to replay other than to show others how awful it is. My recommendations is to just show them the videos posted on YouTube.

My recommendation is that if you really want to experience this game, don't. I posted a blog so that you can experience the entire game in 15 min without the frustration of playing this mangled wreck of a game.

Stalin vs. Martians

While this light hearted RTS endeavors for satirical humor, there is nothing funny about the gameplay.

Wow... I've never seen something more stupid in my life.

Don't Look Directly At It...