I’ve been struggling with my review of Sega’s Storm Rise, and mostly because I’ve been struggling with the interface. Developed by Creative Assembly’s junior studio in Australia, the selection mechanism is a registered trademark – Whip Select (TM) – and it’s a bit of a lie since most of the time you cannot whip, and if you do, there is no guarantee that you will select what you want.

Unit selection boils down to this: you use one of you Xbox 360 joysticks to point in the direction of the unit you want. Once it is highlighted, you let go and *poof* there you are with your new unit.

It doesn’t work very well because the main combat view is a 3D third person grunt level view of the world and once you have more than two or three units in a general area, selecting the one you want out of that lot requires more attention than it does whipping. The tactical display isn’t very good for much of anything, and I keep getting stuck in very early missions.

What’s really peculiar is that this selection mechanism looked so easy when they showed it at last year’s E3. But looking back, it’s become even more apparent just how controlled that demo was. It was intended to show off different units and how you could use crossfire to your advantage and all that neat tactical stuff, but now, having spent time with the controls, I am reminded about how spread out many of the units being controlled were, how the demonstrators kept them separated for the most part. You don’t always have the luxury of doing this in battle, though, so I inevitable grab the wrong guy or march him too far ahead.

I may not get very far in Storm Rise, but that in itself is a review of a sort. This is a disaster on just about every level. A real review will be coming up shortly.