Mordheim: City of the Damned

3.5/5 if you don't know the tabletop. If you know the tabletop subtract 2 points from the score. Yes, it's that bad. Still, I give it 3.5, because I would rather play this than give a penny to GW for their overpriced plastic garbage.

I wanted to love this game. Machanics are smooth, cool races, cool story, terrible gameplay experience. I get wanting to make a challenging game, but losing 3 out of 5 missions due to being outmatched and having my warriors miss 50-60% of the time grows old so fast. Add on top of that that all upgrades do next to no actual upgrading of characters. Gold required to do anything, but earning gold is almost nil. Their vision of a "hardcore" experience ruined the entire experience.

Another game that you'll play because you love the original. Otherwise there are better alternative, I guess. I like the fine-grained leveling and interesting tactics in the game, as well as the transparency of die rolls and outcomes. No mystery meat there. That there is no save is nice, too. It's not a game that plays friendly - you can lose warriors, and boons and items are not epic. This is Also the graphics are faithful to the WH world and appropriately grim. It does represent the miniature game well. But... - It's SLOOOOOW because of the ugly slow animations it forces upon you - and even offscreen AI (!!!) - Interface is meant for a console and annoying - It can be crazy hard in some missions. I gave up on my cultists because of the damned II-I. - Magic (and many skills) is useless without the Paranoia patch. With the patch, mission become too difficult, though (because it's developed by hardcore players). - Don't reset your PC. You'll lose EVERYTHING - Even with the nice quests, gameplay is repetitive (because it's faithful to the original game)

The actual gameplay is pretty good, but the combination of forced Ironman mode and heavy reliance on the Random Number Generator (die rolls) is a recipe for frustration. The default actions are often counter-productive, and sometimes easy to mistake at a glance, leading to disaster. You can't reload, and either have to carry on with whatever's left of your party, or start over from scratch. Balance isn't great. After several "learning experience" losses with each faction, I suffered 5 consecutive defeats with Possessed team, then tried an Imperial Mercenary team and won 5 in a row, followed by trying again with Possessed and losing 5 more battles. Skaven are absolutely brutal against the player at low level. Combat itself is rather enjoyable, although bearing absolutely no resemblance to real combat, more like stacking bonuses and effects in a collectible card game. The unforgiving RNG WILL kill a lot of your characters, such as several of mine who suffered stuns on the first hit of the game, and promptly died without ever getting to make a single attack; I was outnumbered from there on and lost badly. In one battle, I accidentally clicked the left mouse button instead of the right on one occasion, causing my Leader to cast his "default" spell (a really stupid choice for a default action), and was promptly struck dead with 999 damage. Another battle lost. No reload option.

I can't hate a game so clearly crafted with a love for Warhammer lore and a game that's sadly no longer in print but was my favorite Warhammer iteration. Everything a fan could want is here. I'm willing to accept one combat action a character when there's a lot of characters and a LOT of the mechanics here to play with. Tons of info is available to calculate every turn based action. For every action there's a reaction. Firing a gun leads to arm fatigue. You want to avoid traps? Spend a turn to attempt perception. You're surrounded by enemies? Your unit may flee unless bolstered by an ally or your holy sign which both you and the enemy can steal to route the foe. Everything you can do the enemy can do too, and AI seems pretty solid. It looks nice, sounds good, I like that you have some wiggle room to run around within circles designated by action points so you can jump a bridge to escape or clamber up a roof to get a sniping perch. That said there has been some pathfinding issues I've seen and I'm a little sorry they swapped out wound points for a standard HP meter which makes fights WAY longer than they need to be. That said the campaign experience of the table top game is here and it it's illustrated beautifully. Is it perfect? No. But it captures the atmosphere and essence of a game I used to love.