Mordheim: City of the Damned Review (PC)

Mordheim: City of the Damned taught me to both appreciate and hate misses, those moments when, despite his training, natural ability and weapons, a warrior manages to deliver a blow that fails to touch his opponent.

My Skaven, nimble overgrown rats that stand low to the ground, managed to escape some powerful strikes delivered by their bigger opponents, mainly those tall and Germanic humans, but they have also had their share of attacks that never reached a target.

When the enemy misses, I praise the Horned Rat because that gives me a chance to take them out next turn and means that I avoid annoying and pricey injuries that can quickly bring a mercenary band down.

When I miss, I make a mental note to fire that particular warrior, which I never go through with because they have already gained enough experience to make them a solid member of the team when they don't clumsily fail to connect with the enemy they are supposed to cut down.

Mordheim: City of the Damned is a challenging title with a lot of depth that will certainly appeal to those who love the Warhammer fantasy or the idea of mixing turn-based combat with a lot of management elements.

Rogue Factor developed the title and publishing duties are handled by Focus Home Interactive, with the experience only offered on the PC.

Story

Mordheim: City of the Damned is witnessed from within the Warhammer fantasy universe, a historically driven title because it chronicles events that took place about half a millennium before the virtual present day in the Games Workshop created fiction.

The city is set within the borders of the Empire and is in the unfortunate position of being struck by a comet, which causes massive destruction and also introduces an alien new substance called wyrdstone, also known as warpstone, which represents a distilled form of Chaos power.

Because the substance can be used to power impressive spells, turn metal into gold and cause extensive mutations, all the factions in the world of Warhammer want to acquire it, but none wants to enter the city in force.

Mordheim: City of the Damned results

This means small warbands of mercenaries are called upon to do the dirty work of gathering the wyrdstone, and players are in full control of one of them, able to choose between the classic humans, amoral but still pretty recognizable, the Sisters of Sigmar, all female and ruthless in battle, chaos-controlled and fan-favorite Skaven.

Each of them has unique character and objectives, but Mordheim: City of the Damned offers players four different ways of experiencing a unique take on the Warhammer fantasy setting.

Rogue Factor manages to deliver a lot of atmosphere, and I especially appreciate the way the team uses writing to make the Skaven feel scary, afraid and scheming at the same time.

Gameplay

Mordheim: City of the Damned offers a turn-based battle experience, enhanced on a strategic level by army management and role-playing elements, a very faithful take on the miniatures title on which the entire experience is based.

Depending on the type of missions, forces will start off either grouped together or scattered and gamers will then have to decide what's the best way to achieve their primary objective, which most of the time involves taking out the enemy mercenary band.

Each unit has some movement points and a more limited set of battle actions that can be combined in a variety of ways, with the player able to directly control how each character explores the environment and interacts with it from a third person view, which sometimes feel a little unwieldy.

Play Video

When enemies are encountered, players will have to decide how to engage them, and then it's a question of action choices, solid use of special abilities and items to see who emerges victorious.

Mordheim: City of the Damned is a game of percentages and the combat delivers the same experience that the rebooted XCOM created, with big sighs of relief when an enemy fails a crucial attack or misses his chance to run away from a fight and curses associated with those moments when my troops manage to get surprised or hit even when the odds say that they should evade the assault.

Tactics are also important outside of engagements, with gamers having to choose between devoting moves and characters to the secondary objectives and the collection of wyrdstone and a focus on combat and the spoils that it can bring.

The game features randomly generated maps for all skirmishes, offering gamers variety at first but also creating some repetitive looking landscapes later on, but uses environments hand-crafted by the developers at Rogue Factor for the story-driven battles.

“The game also has a deep strategic layer, where gamers need to work with limited resources to pay their mercenary band, acquire more items for them to use and improve their standing with factions that can grant unique bonuses.”

There's a lot to take in, from a variety of stats for each character to the wide variety of weapons and skills that they can learn as they carry on the experience and the way injuries modify how they perform in the field.

Mercenary bands in Mordheim: City of the Damned are only a defeat or two away from failure, and the sheer learning curve means that I quickly lost my two initial teams because I was unable to pay them before making more progress with a Skaven setup.

Gamers need to evaluate the strengths and weaknesses for each faction and then create a solid tactical plan for the various challenges that the title can throw at them, sticking to it as much as possible during combat.

The learning curve and the difficulty of Mordheim: City of the Damned might lead to frustration for some players, but I found the setting and the combat mechanics enough to keep me engaged, trying again and again to do better as a mercenary leader.

Graphics and audio

Mordheim: City of the Damned manages to deliver an interesting take on the Warhammer fantasy universe, but the focus is clearly on the gameplay rather than on creating a spectacle for gamers to simply look at.

The city itself uses the classic architecture of the setting, but both the buildings and the characters are relatively basic regarding detail and textures, with a relatively low number of animations and no impressive visual effects.

The graphical paucity means that Rogue Factor paid more attention to the layout of the interface, making it easy for gamers to see all the details of their units and allowing them to equip and customize them without too much effort.

Mordheim: City of the Damned features plenty of cheesy deliveries when it comes to the voice acting and a soundtrack that's both eerie and heroic, a solid way to underline the kind of experience that the battle deliver.

Multiplayer

Mordheim: City of the Damned is clearly designed with single player as the most important mode, but gamers can also take their squad online to try and take out their friends or complete unknowns.

There are no rule tweaks, which makes it easy to jump in after playing some of the campaign, but the stakes are higher, and it's always possible to meet an enemy who has carefully prepared and equipped his team to execute a tactics to perfection.

The game also suffers from some connection issues and the load times are just as long as they are in the single-player portion.

The Good

The Bad

Conclusion