Netstorm: Islands at War is a Real-Time Strategy game situated in the world of Nimbus, the sky world with floating islands that are in constant struggle for dominance. In Pyrosphere, the central sphere of Nimbus, you'll square off against your opponents. Prepare for one of the greatest battles of your life. This is NetStorm.

Your ultimate goal in NetStorm is to capture enemy High Priests from your opponent and sacrifice them to the Furies of the Storm. Your own priest is the most valuable unit in the battlefield - it is your ultimate vessel of Knowledge and Power from the Furies. You will begin with your priest and your home island awaiting commands. In front of you, there is a whole map of floating islands which you need to conquer. In order to reach them, you will need to build a Temple assigned to one of the Furies, so you can start producing energy needed to build other stuff, collect storm power from nearby geysers for resources, build bridges to connect to the other islands, and finally, to produce your war machine in your workshops. This is where NetStorm takes its place as one of the most original strategy games ever made. Your victory depends on each bridge piece you'll build, on each unit you'll place and it will be different in each battle you'll play.

There are many different units you can use during the battle, and each one comes with different attacking range, health and abilities. You can choose them once you build a workshop dedicated which units you want to put into your production: shooting units for attacks (ground/flyers), blocking units for additional defense, or transports to improve your economy. Your units are also dedicated to one of the three Furies. However, in most cases you will need at least a few of each group. The more workshops you build or upgrade, the more units will be available for you. It also depends how knowledge you possess. Furies can grant you more powerful units after each successful battle you'll achieve. There is also one important thing: all of your shooting units will attack automatically the nearest enemy unit, so it's up to the player when and where to build them because the usage of the unit placement is the most important aspect of the game and has a big strategic value. You can also use the spells, which are more like a hidden Easter eggs on obelisks which you have to capture first.

You can choose to play the campaigns, where you can start learning how to play in very detailed tutorials, or, you can skip and practice in priest-training missions and play the main campaign for the freedom of Nimbus. If you think that you are skilled enough to take a challenge from other players, you can move to the multiplayer. This is the most played part of the game and you can meet the ever growing NetStorm community here. However, things are very different in multiplayer than they are in single-player.

In multiplayer, you will start in the sphere of Sereni: a peaceful sphere where you can chat with other players, set battles in rings or just fly your island across the sphere zones. When you're ready, join a battle ring and start playing other players. Each multiplayer map is generated randomly, so you will never play the same map again. In each battle, there can be up to eight players fighting at once. The battlemaster can set a pretty much each detail of the map to generate, such as the resources, island density or available spells/units. The goal in multiplayer is to secure the map with outposts which can capture the islands to you, attack your enemies and finally find and sacrifice their priests for more powerful units, because as you have already guessed, you will start with only basic sun technology. But don't worry, each time you'll log in or off your knowledge and game stats will be saved.

One of the good sides of NetStorm is that you can actually see the whole map at the very begining. Each map you'll play in multiplayer is set differently, which means the geyser's (resources) locations, neutral islands (shape, lenght and possitions) and so many other factors, all of which determine what kind of strategy should be used. On top of this variety the added factor of building cost-less bridge pieces (also known as bridging) is similar to fast paced tetris-like games. You have to make skilled and incredibly fast moves when bridging against another opponent in order to secure the map. To sum this up you need good reflexes and you also have to pay attention because you can get outbridged pretty easily. Unlike other RTS games, where it can take an hour for your troops to reach the other side of the map, in NetStorm, within 2-3 minutes, you are already heavily involved tangling with your enemies bridges attempting to wrap around him and secure the skies. NetStorm is like chess game, with the pieces set up before the game and unit placement with deep knowledge required to play. NetStorm is also like a 1st person shooter as you are required to make fast decissions, each false move can cost you the valuable resources and islands. The combination of both theese styles makes NetStorm one the most original strategy games ever made.

The catch to NetStorm is that it is hard to find a fair game in multiplayer because the players are very different in experience and speed. Also in order to host a game of your own, you first need to setup your router/firewall settings (according to tutorials) or you are forced to connect to other players as a client (thus leaving them to set the battle).