The Warhammer universe is quite expansive, with many interesting stories to tell. And to tell these amazing stories, Games Workshop licenses out the Warhammer universe to make a large assortment of games. One of these games is Mordheim: City of the Damned.
Mordheim: City of the Damned was developed by Rogue Factor and published by Focus Home Interactive. The game started in Steam Early access in November, 2014. Mordheim then saw a full release on Steam on November 19, 2015 and a later release on Xbox One and PS4 on October 18, 2016.
Mordheim: City of the Damned is a tactical role-playing game similar to games such as X-COM and Invisible Inc. The game is based on the 1999 Games Workshop game of the same name.
You play as one of four races; Human Mercenaries, the Sisters of Sigmar, the Cult of the Possessed, or the Skaven. Each with their own ambitions of gathering as much of the precious crystal, Wyrdstone, as possible and using it for their own purposes.You create a warband made up of several different unit types and venture forth into Mordheim.
There is a single player and a multiplayer mode. In multiplayer, you test your warband against another player’s in a skirmish. In single player, you do the same, except against an AI. In the single player, there are two kinds of missions, regular missions and story missions.
In regular missions, your warband goes up against another controlled by an AI. Around the map there are Wyrdstones to gather and chests to loot, but you can only win by killing a certain amount of enemies and lowering their morale so much that they flee, or just wiping them all out entirely.
In story missions, you are given a set of objectives to accomplish. Once you complete all that you were tasked with doing, you will come away victorious.
When creating a warband, you are given a huge amount of customization options. You can change your warband’s name. Change the name of each of your units. Change the colour of each piece of their armor. There is just so much you can alter to your liking you can spend hours on end tweaking it to you’d like.
The graphics and music aren’t anything to write home about. They’re not bad, but they’re not anything special either. The game is rather dark, which is part of the whole aesthetic of Mordheim, but I did find myself raising the brightness a couple times just to see what was happening.
Warband management can be unintuitive at times. There are many different kinds of attributes that you can put points into that will raise a certain kind of resistance by 0.5%, but that 0.5% may be what saves that unit during the next mission.
Essentially, it boils down to a lot of micromanagement that can get confusing if you don’t go into the game with a somewhat decent understanding of how to best use the system to your advantage.
There is also a large variety of active and passive skills that your units can learn. And if their skills are high enough, they can learn the mastered version of a skill which is usually infinitely better than the original.
Combat is turn based, with each unit having a specific amount of movement points and attack points which they can use during their turn. Some skills will use movement points in conjunction with attack points, so you have to be quite strategic instead of just running in and swinging your sword wildly.
If a unit is defeated in combat, they are removed from the battlefield. At the end of the mission, they have a chance to gain an injury. It may be something like megalomania, which increases the cost of spells and makes them unable to use ranged weapons, or something like a severed arm, so now they can only use one handed weapons.
Like most games made with a Games Workshop license, there’s DLC. There are 2 DLC races; Undead and Witch Hunter. There is also four DLC unit classes; the Poison Wind Globadier, the Smuggler, the Wolf-Priest of Ulric, and the Doomweaver.
The thing is with the DLC unit classes, they can only be used with specific races. That means that before you go and buy them, you may want to go and figure out which race is your favourite to play. This way you avoid buying a class you’ll never get to use.
In short, I enjoyed Mordheim: City of the Damned, but wouldn’t recommend it if you don’t have to patience to micro-manage every aspect of your warband.
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