Developer: Rogue Factor
Rrp: £17.99 (Gog.com and Steam)
When it comes to the licenses few have had such a varied history than those of Games Workshop. Back in the early 90’s GW hardly ever gave anyone their licenses then at some point in the mid 2000’s they seemed to give it to anyone who could put together a barely functional bit of code. Now they seem to have hit their stride and (for the most part) give the licenses out to those with some level of talent… mostly. And I totally get the appeal of why someone would want to work with the intellectual property of GW, they have a lot to work with regardless of if you want to do a fantasy or sci-fi game. Hell they can even cover pretty much any genre you can think of, strategy, hack and slash, FPS, MMO, stealth there’s room for all of it and more.
This game… I have such mixed feelings about this game. I want to love it I really do but I can’t bring myself to do so but nor do I hate it. Like most games that are, as I call it, ‘Eurojank’ it sits somewhere in that strange middle area of ‘quite good but…’.
The thing about this game is it has a lot of systems that the player has to engage with. None of them are overly complicated individually but when all combined its a lot to keep track of. This in itself isn’t a bad thing particularly, but its how its taught to you that is. The tutorial is awkward, it separates itself into two parts, the first being a series of scenarios where you take control of warriors in turn based combat. The other though is a set of slides with a lot of terminologies thrown at you. The thing is players learn by doing so that kind of tutorial tends to not do so well. Thankfully the developers seem to know this and have included a tutorial that pops up as you start to play for the first time, problem is this tutorial neglects to tell you a few things that the slideshow ones do. So you end up doing both anyway.
On the whole this game is a pretty good strategy game with some really deep systems, if you fancy playing a kind of fantasy X-Com then this might scratch that itch. Just be warned it lacks a certain amount of polish.
