Frozen Hearth Review

At this stage in the review, you may think that Frozen Hearth is a moderately playable if not particularly inspired RTS. But sadly, Frozen Hearth feels for all the world like a game that was entirely written out on paper, then instantiated and released with little or no play testing. The result is that the controls are simply too incredibly clunky to allow the player to enjoy any of the game’s depth. There’s a gem of an illustrative example in a single two-word phrase: “attack move”. Try as I might, I simply couldn’t find a way to tell my units to attack-move in this game (that is, move to a location and attack any enemy combatants encountered). This seems like minor oversight, simply a nice feature that didn’t quite make it onto the list of “things we want in this game”. But consider the implications for a minute: your troops simply cannot travel unsupervised, because if they stumble upon an enemy squadron during their trip to a resource node, they will happily be chewed to bits rather than be deviated from their goal. Every RTS game has a normal move option, of course: it’s useful for escaping, or for forcing your way through enemy lines to a particular goal. This is no excuse for leaving out the entire other half of all movement in RTS history.

What do we have instead? Something deep and dark. Something that sounded good to somebody somewhere along the line of this game’s development. And that something’s name is called “the stance system”. Your units are given ‘stances’ which dictate their behaviour when at rest: they may be set to attack all enemies on sight, or to only attack when fired upon. These starting stances seem alright, but the system quickly devolves into madness: one stance for preferring ranged combat over melee, one for attacking only buildings, and worst of all, the paragon of unnecessary clutter in an RTS, on stance that simply commands your units to never attack anything at all. I simply cannot imagine a single instance when this final stance would ever be handy, even given the most tortured gaming scenario. But just to make things extra difficult, the eight or so stances are all cycled through the same button, meaning that if you want your units to take a particular stance, you need to click several times to find the right one.

The lack of attack-move, coupled with the incredibly clunky stance system, means that Frozen Hearth has somehow managed to make difficult the simplest and most fundamental aspect of every single RTS game ever made: getting your units to attack enemy units. Think about that for a second: this is an RTS game in which it’s actually a bit of a headache to figure out how to get your units to attack your enemy. You can move your units near the enemy, and then fiddle around with their stances until you strike one that lets them attack (most don’t), and then your units might go ahead and go for it. Or you can order all of your selected units to fire on a single enemy, if you don’t mind going through the game focus-firing every single enemy unit. In my playing this game, I lost the very same level not once, but twice, simply because my soldiers stood smiling by as demonic monsters walked right up to them, slowly ate half of their bodies, and then continued on to the packbeast I was meant to protect. Even after specifically preparing for the onslaught, I could not figure out how to get a spearman to respond to the pair of jaws working up his leg. Maybe I’m just to dumb to figure the game out. Or maybe Frozen Hearth is like playing chess by using a pair of tweezers held between your toes.

I wish I were writing an obituary for Frozen Hearth, because then I could at least chuckle to myself when I reach as deep as I can for the nicest thing I can think to say about the game, and I come up with “difficult”. Sometimes you come across a real tragedy in indie gaming when a studio produces a unique and nigh avant-garde approach to a genre, but doesn’t quite have the polish to pull it off. In these cases, it’s sad to see a creative idea so harshly blocked by mechanics and quality issues. But Frozen Hearth slips one solid step below this level: behind its flaws lies not a new idea or an intriguing premise, but just a mediocre RTS at best, and at worst, a pain to play.