Agents of Storm

Occasionally it's nice to go into a game not knowing much about what it is you're about to play.

Agents of Storm is definitely one of those games. It's kind of snuck under my radar, and that means there are only three things I know about it.

First, it's by Remedy, the team behind the legendary Max Payne, underrated Alan Wake, cult classic Death Rally, and the upcoming Quantum Break.

Second, it's got a tropical setting (a fact I derived from the App Store screenshots). Third, I think it might be about special forces or something, because the app icon has people with headsets on looking serious but also smug.

I'll know for sure soon enough, as I begin my week with Agents of Storm, bringing you three updates across seven days.

Hooray! I was definitely right about all three of those things.

And even after just a few moments with Agents of Storm, it's obvious that this is yet another take on the strategy management genre, as popularised by Clash of Clans, and made even more awesome recently by Tiny Realms.

You're collecting two forms of (what are essentially) currency to spend on new buildings and units. These currencies are Blue Jade and Gold and they're collected by ships and brought to your cool island base.

There's another currency in play too, right from the very off: these are the Diamonds that mostly cost real money to obtain, but can be won through completing objectives.

I have just one worker to build and upgrade structures, and buying another is going to cost me more Diamonds than I think I'll ever earn naturally.

It's a bit of a pain, because it really would be nice to have two things being built at once, rather than this restrictive artificial limit of one.

I'm not massively impressed, if I'm honest, and though there is combat here - which I'll talk about in a few days once I've played more of it - the core building gameplay is very similar to what's come before, except much much slower.

When you're not upgrading your HQ at a snail's pace you're fighting an evil bunch of naughty-doers.

It's here that Agents of Storm begins to differentiate itself from the strategy management crowd, and it's here that I've definitely had the most fun so far.

Once you've built them you'll have a small fleet of boats at your command, and you bring them with you into battles. You start at one end of a small level, are shown pre-plotted routes through enemy territory, and must decide which vessels will go down which channels.

Each of these channels will be defended by at least one gun emplacement of some variety, and at the end of it will also have small blue barrels to shoot down from their storage.

The barrels can then be used to temporarily knock out defences that lie at the end of the stage as well as during what is essentially the boss encounter - a fortified island you must destroy to complete the area.

Each level feels like a teensy little military puzzle. Which boats do you use, where do you send them, and when do you set them off?

You can play a fair few levels before all of your boats are sunk and you need to create more to continue, but once they're all gone the wait timer issue lifts its ugly head from the water once more.

Which is a pity, and I've never known why a developer would want to stop you from having a jolly time in a manner such as this.

But still, Remedy does, and it hurts the overall experience.

After a full week with Agents of Storm I'm glad to be shot of it.

The resources continue to trickle in, even after seven days of play, and the wait timers on upgrades are already pretty huge. To try and counteract this, I spent some cash, thinking that the game would get better. It doesn't.

£2.99 / $4.99 down, but a few hundred Diamonds richer, I went about upgrading buildings and engaging in research that would have taken, no joke, about a week and a half of regular play to earn normally.

Long wait timers are fine for me in F2P games, but only when I've sunk in months of play, not days.

With my Diamonds I also bought a Pagoda that increases the amount of XP I earn (though this only gives me speedier access to things I can't afford), a base extension that unlocks the ability to play with friends on Facebook (why this isn't free is beyond me), and I sped up the creation of new boats so I could play the puzzle combat bits more.

I even bought a guest boat for a particularly tough mission, but this then left my fleet immediately after I completed the stage.

I got perhaps another 15 minutes of play before the game wanted me to stump up more cash, to which I say "kindly go away, Agents of Storm, you are not a good enough game to merit that kind of money"- a phrase I imagine Harry's heavily edited in the interests of decency here on PG.

Don't be fooled by Agents of Storm's top of class presentation, and don't be tempted to start thinking the totally enjoyable missions make up for the rotten core gameplay loop.

This is an awfully greedy attempt at grabbing as much cash from you as possible, and stonewalling anyone who doesn't cough up.