Warhammer: Shadow of the Horned Rat

One of the first serious PC games I remember playing, and easily one of the hardest games I have EVER had the pleasure of beating. Regular saves pre-battle / pre-move / pre-decision are an absolute must as the game will remorselessly leave you crippled after a bad battle result. Lost a main hero? Too bad - they're gone for good. Got your Bright wizard to a fantastically high level but he's been instantly flattened by a cannonball? Too bad. Gone. Several branches in the fairly simple but epic storyline and most of them completely depend on player choices. Stay to help the dwarves defend their city from Skaven? You could lose a lot of troops but victory will gain money and a dwarf unit ready to join the ranks. Move on and leave them to it and you may well just get ambushed by the same army and face a much harder fight. Literally every good choice or strategic blunder in battle could influence your chance of having ANY hope of victory in the final battle. I think I got to the end 4 times out of 9 playthroughs and only won once, it was to difficult. Prepare for the most RSI in your index finger ever as you frantically whack the boost morale button during each combat. Tiring, tense, and highly re-playable.

Apparently they did something to fix the bug with being stuck at "Preparing for battle". I gave up on getting the game to work a couple of years ago and was majorly disappointed. Lo and behold, it works just fine now! I read a couple of recent reviews saying it worked just fine now, so I tried installing again and had zero trouble getting it to run. Can't say how thrilled I am to be playing this game once again!

The game is a great, simple strategy game. You can find some complexity but combat is easy not compared to the strategy games now, it is easy and fun to play not a high bar. So no high expectations just a good simple early strategy game in the Warhammer world, the animations are simple but great, the controls are not as good but easy to get used to. The only downside is the monitor window is small the controls big but that was probably because of the video power back in 1995.

While this game is good with the lore and animations, its age definatly shows in its graphics and the control scheme. I found it very clunky to use and with no tutorial it is very much the 90s sink or swim kid philosophy.

Bought and tested today (June 2018). The game works properly on my setup (Windows 7 64 bit, i7 2600K, Nvidia GT 1030). Probably some updates since 2015 where I see a lot of complains about "crashes at first battle" on 2015 reviews. However, the game isn't very handy compared to its sequel Dark Omen (which is a pure gem, hope Gog will add it to the store). I am happy to have the opportunity to test it, but I will stick on Dark Omen. :)