Warhammer 40,000: Rites of War

Some 30 years ago I collected every Eldar miniature and felt mystical awe while reading about the mystical Harlequins. Then there was Rites of War. It offered a unique imagination of Eldar, as extremely brutal and rugged. I loved it. In all other depictures of Eldar, they are soft and fragile. They might still have a hidden and black agenda, but most they act as a bunch of wimps in comparison to RoW. So, I crave for another go at RoW. Yet, it will take another 4 to 5 years to forget how awful and terrible RoW is as a strategy game. Basically, you make a defensive line, wait a couple of turns to let the enemy break its neck on your defenses, and then mop up the remaining stranglers on the map, and maybe find a few artifacts here and there. The strategic options are very limited. You have units with an attack range between 1 and 3. It works like paper-rock-scissors, 2 kills 1, 3 kills range 2 and 1 kills range 3. There is a bit more depth, with range 2 providing support to nearby units, psykers that utilize a few spells, and terrain that affect unit movement based on their movement type. Oh, and keep a line. That´s about it. You might have some fun with leveling up units, despite that it hardly has impact on the game, as your enemies level up accordingly.

Nice to have this again after lossing the ancient cd-rom. P.S. If this game isn't starting make sure that directplay is turned on in the windows features. Seems to have been off on both my windows 10 machines.

Bought this game as it was released, in 1999, i still got the box here. But never managed it to run on an OS later then Win98. So i was very glad to find a working copy here. After downloading it i was happy to see that the mission editor is in and working fine. Now i can finish my selfmade campaign. Overall, for young eyes these graphics and sounds may are annoying. Behind all its simple looking is a solid hex round game, with classic w40k units, and, even if modern tablet apps look better, they have ndo not have the spirit of the old games. And no story. By simply copy the german text files in, the game runs great even in german. Wer das deutsche Original hat, braucht nur die englischen durch die deutschen Textdateien ersetzen um alles auf Deutsch spielen zu können.

Turn-based strategy games are not my type of games. I got this one as a gift and decided to try it out though. In order to appreciate and get into this game, you need to do a bit of studying. There are different bonuses and abilities for the different units and races that can't be completely ignored. I think that just comes with the territory for this type of game. It's still probably on the more accessible side of things compared to other strategy games. I only played the single-player campaign, which consists of 24 levels. Each level took 1-2 hours to complete for me. Although it's quite a bit to get into in the beginning, there isn't much variety between the levels. The objectives change a bit and more units and abilities become available, but the feeling towards the end was more that I had seen what the game had to offer, than wanting it to continue. My main critique with the game is the experience system. As opposed to some other strategy games I've played (C&C, Warcraft etc), you don't start each level from scratch. Units surviving the previous mission can be re-used, with experience and abilities gained from previous levels. But if they die during a level, they're permanently gone and will have to be replaced by a completely fresh unit. Without knowing how difficult the later levels were, I had to play carefully to avoid losing units that would take several levels to replace. In the end, the game never gets really hard and the AI on normal difficulty makes many questionable moves. On top of that, it turns out the CPU matches your experience level. Just for a test, I played the last level with all fresh units. And fair enough, the CPU units were all fresh as well. So while it's cool to hang onto maxed-out units, it doesn't really matter in the end. Still, I'm not a fan of how this feature was implemented in the game.

This game is a "rara avis". A turn-based strategy game a la Panzer Tactics where you take control of the Eldar facing the Space Marines and later the Tyranids (in an era where the Tyranids were a recent addition to the tabletop game). The game has a very exquisite execution of its concept, being one of the best turn based strategy games I have ever played.