Warhammer: Shadow of the Horned Rat

This is a faithful adaptation of the Warhammer tabletop game, and by "faithful" I mean it doesn't pull any punches and it doesn't hold your hand -- it tries very hard to kill you. One of the most punishing aspects is that you can only gather a small number of reinforcements between battles, so over time you find your army shrinking unless you win missions with very few casualties, which is NOT easy. This can be frustrating because you might win through to the eleventh or twelfth mission only to be slaughtered, and then you realize the problem is that you took too many losses back in mission four or five. Because you have to conserve troops so carefully, a winning strategy leans heavily on artillery and wizards (kill the bad guys from range). But, there are some random rules (like artillery misfiring and spontaneously exploding) that can ruin even this strategy. The sequel, "Dark Omens", is a more polished game in almost every way, and I'd love to see that game on gog as well. However, if you like Warhammer and are looking for a great story and a challenging game, Shadow of the Horned Rat can be a rewarding experience.

The download seems to be missing a number of important files necesary for this to run (did a system wide file check after install), or their not extracting correctly... in any case after multiply tries I've decided to go for a refund, way more trouble then its worth... Maybe at some point GoG will sort out the problems with this game install...

It was my first WARHAMMER game on PC. For a kid playing the tabletop it was just awesome, to see the realisation on PC.

You take control of a mercenary warband and try to complete contracts around the old world of warhammer! Your units take experience through battles and you gain gold so you can afford their expenses and hire new units to join your rank! Warhammer Shadow of the Horned Rat is the first try from Games Workshop to create a real time strategy game for pc around their tabletop wargame and they made a good job for back then! So prepare your self to fight Orcs, skavens and much more!

The graphisms are not a 2024 AAA, but pretty much everything else is ok. Maneuvrability is easy to get a hang of, and the managing of a mercenary companies un the Border Princes kingdoms is exeptional. Also Skavens!