The distinguishing feature of a desert isn't sand, or heat, but absence. It's one of those fussy middle school factoids that's only good for annoying others; nobody wants to hear your protestations about Antarctica's low annual precipitation at Pub Trivia Tuesday. But it comes to mind when roaming through Amorra, the setting of the real-time strategy game Frozen Hearth. Like the Antarctic, Amorra is an iced-over desert of absence. But where one lacks rainfall, the other is found wanting for other qualities. Like originality. Or creativity. Or technical competence. Or the artistic panache expected of a finished product. To play Frozen Hearth is to self-deprive, to go without the basic components of a healthy game ecosystem.

To be fair, desolation is central to Frozen Hearth's premise. The land of Amorra is besieged by the Shangur, a horde of demons not unlike

It's here that I'd hypothetically point to the hybridization of the RTS and the MOBA as Frozen Hearth's finest touch. As the game's closest thing to an original offering, it's burdened with the responsibility of shoring up the otherwise dull experience. And perhaps it might have, were it not undermined by Frozen Hearth's variety of technical woes. The game is unusually taxing on a fairly robust system, regularly experiencing frame rate dips, screen tears, and janky miscellanea on medium settings. Unusual, because the game isn't much of a looker even when the graphics are turned up to eleven. The rudimentary units become indistinguishable when the action heats up, and the Avatars run the gamut from garden-variety shirtless warrior to humdrum hooded priest.

Units move over the terrain in a preternatural, detached glide--that is, when they're not vibrating ineffectually against each other like electronic football pieces. Sic too many on one foe, and the rest mill about absentmindedly when they can't find room to attack. Unchaperoned units wander off into enemy formations, seemingly on a whim. Pathfinding is unreliable; two adjacent units with the same destination often take different routes. There's no attack-move command, so should your units come under attack in the midst of their travels, they'll plod along heedlessly until they're killed. Many a campaign match is lost because a hero or a unit gets tragically separated from the group during a few seconds that it's unattended, usually a long way into a tedious, multistage battle of attrition that needs to be repeated in full should you fail in the home stretch. The unreliable mechanics suppress your ability to play the mind games that run astride better strategy titles; any time you lift your head up to survey the field, something goes wrong.

Intermittently it feels as if Frozen Hearth were conceived as a challenge to see which side could better shepherd its particular herd of cats. Or click on a singular desired unit out of a shapeless mass of like bodies. Or trick the artificial intelligence into a lapse of logic while the other side is preoccupied fighting against the unergonomic user interface or the uncomfortably close camera angle. It's a challenge, to be sure, but so is crossing the Sahara. The desert might even give more back.