Mordheim City of the Damned review, by Rick Moscatello

[Doom]

The most fun I’ve ever had being thrown down a flight of stairs.



There are so many Warhammer games, it’s tough to keep track of all the variants, much less all the variants that get transported to the PC. Mordheim City of the Damned is set in the Warhammer Fantasy world, but not the role-playing game, nor the mass combat tabletop miniatures game.

Instead, Mordheim is a small scale tactical miniatures game (the Warhammer 40k equivalent is Necromunda, which came out first and is a bit inferior). Bands of humans/skaven (rat-men)/chaos worshippers/female religious zealots (for the PC game, for now, with more options almost certainly coming later) roam through the ruined and chaos-plagued city of Mordheim, seeking treasure, particularly wyrdstone, a powerful magical substance that grows in the city.

When competing bands meet in the city (and they’ll always meet), battle over the resources ensues.

Combat is until one side is defeated, either through casualties or, more likely, a failed morale roll. Troops generally don’t get killed in Mordheim; defeated units take devastating injuries instead. Lose an eye? Sure. Cracked skull leading to stupidity? Sure. Lose an arm, leg, both? Sure. There are a wide variety of brutal injuries possible, and there’s nothing you can do to cancel these permanent injuries (beyond fire the soldier, possibly one you’ve invested much gold and time into leveling up).

And no, you can’t just load from an earlier saved game, either. Mordheim is brutal, and there are no takebacks. You can spend 1,000 gold on a hero, only to have his/her/its head caved in the second round of the very next battle. You can’t even reboot the computer—try that against a human and you might end up with all your warriors crippled, and their bodies looted of their precious items, too.


Of course he's missing an arm, he's a Mordheim character!

It’s this brutality that sets Mordheim apart from many games; even the most trivial battle is intense, with one false move being the difference between glorious victory or hopping around the rest of your battles on one leg.

The general goal of the game is survival, and to survive you must gather wyrdstone (usually called warpstone in Warhammer, not sure why they changed the name), and send it to your employer; you can fail to do so, but if you do that four times, then it’s all over for your warband. You can also sell it to other parties, but as the wyrdstone demands increase, doing so hastens your inevitable demise.

There’s a time limit for those deliveries, and realize injuries take time to heal (partially)…as your warband gains levels, you can hire back-up troops to fight while other troops heal or train skills.


Your main screen when not fighting.

Once you’ve recruited and assembled a warband, you then go to the Mordheim map to pick a battle site. There are a variety of battle types and maps, although, truth be told, they’re generally pretty similar: gather your forces, which hopefully aren’t too far spread out, and smash the enemy.

In addition to smashing the enemy, there is also a secondary objective; it’s usually hard to meet the this objective, but the rewards are good. Heck, “hard” is an understatement, often these missions are freakin’ impossible. Combat is generally joined by the second move, and three rounds of combat will finish most battles…the secondary objectives can take half a dozen turns or more to complete.


Where you pick your battles, or at least where you die.

The most difficult? Capture the enemy’s flag and carry it back to your wagon (base, where your flag is located). It can easily take four turns to get to the flag (assuming no enemies in the way), and four turns to get back. With the flag taken, the enemy is far more likely to fail the morale roll and end combat instantly. I’ve completed it twice in perhaps 30 tries.

There are four factions available. The human mercenaries faction is the most versatile, able to use most anything. The skaven are the most able to complete the side-objectives, because skaven move fast; they also are the most restrictive in tactics, with weak missile attacks and the inability to use many items on the battlefield (it’s sad how many great items, like magic bows and such, that I’ve had to sell because I have no way to use them). The Sisters of Sigmar are religious zealots—they also are weak with missiles, but have great melee attacks and solid magic. Finally, the chaos cultists lack the heavy firepower of the humans, but with more magic capability.

As your troops fight, they gain experience and levels. There’s an extensive system, with skills to be learned and equipment to be bought (and, eventually, enchanted), along with nine different ability scores to improve.

There are bugs, crashes, and design issues…but the developers are still working on the game, and it’s plenty playable out of the box, as it were.

Bottom line, however, the brutality is over-the-top. The computer reliably gets some pretty awesome lucky streaks---I’ve seen it make half dozen or more 50% chance rolls in a roll while I fail a like amount of 80%+ rolls…leading to a suddenly caved in skull of my leader before I even realized I was in any danger. Fun!

And it just makes me want to play some more…