Take one part Total War, sprinkle in the setting of Lord of the Rings, add in some World of WarCraft spells and heroes, and combine them with a popular table top role playing game and you get Warhammer: Mark of Chaos which, like its sibling Warhammer 40,000, makes a pretty successful transition to the PC world, with a few problems here or there.
As described, Warhammer takes place in a mythical Europe where The Empire, a Britain like coalition of noblemen, and Chaos, akin to the Horde from the WarCraft universe, have just completed a brutal war in which the factions of Chaos have been driven to the north. The battles still rage on, as you find out, and new champions have stepped forward on both the Chaos and Empire sides to lead a new campaign for each.
The game starts out with an amazing cinema that introduces us to the game and its vicious gameplay. After that you have the option of jumping right into either the Chaos or Empire campaigns or running through the tutorial. The training module teaches you the basics of hero fighting, controlling your units, camera control, and some basic combat skills. While not as fleshed out as some might like, anyone who has played an RTS or strategic war game before should feel right at home with Mark of Chaos.
Each chapter of the campaign has you roaming over an overland map (very similar to the Total War franchise, but much more linear and restricting). You are forced to progress along a set path, sans some side missions, as you journey through the game. Along the way you’ll reach campaigns where you’ll be able to fight or towns where you can make camp. Before and after each battle you are treated to a cinema furthering the game’s overall narrative. These cinemas are really hit or miss as cheesy dialog is sometimes outpaced by impressive visuals but those on the Empire side look highly compressed whereas the Chaos side’s seem slightly cleaner.
Battles begin after a deployment phase in which you are able to choose the units to bring into the battle and position them within a set boundary to prepare for the upcoming skirmish. Each conflict has a set number of unit positions in which you can fill in regiments from your army. This makes it impossible to win a battle by simply having superior numbers, easily outnumbering the foe. One of the key elements to the game is unit facing, whereas a unit with its back turned to an enemy is an easy target, a regiment facing an oncoming assault is much stronger. Luckily the game makes you aware of this very early on and facing is as easy as holding the right mouse button and dragging your cursor in the direction in which you want your units to face. A green overlay will appear on the map showing you exactly where your units will be lined up, with a special overlay for your hero units.
One of the hit or miss elements of the game are the heroes, units which have special powers and affect the entire army around them. Heroes can be assigned to individual regiments within your army and they are the commanding forces of your platoon’s morale (more on this later). The hero is a key unit because they are the only ones who can pick up dropped items and treasure on the battlefield and usually they must survive in order to complete your mission. They play out much like a standard RPG character with levels, experience, skills trees, and a character screen where different pieces of armor and items can be applied to boost their skills and the units around them. Joining a hero with a regiment allows that hero to use their defensive skills (if they have any) to protect those units from an attacking enemy, which comes in handy since you are limited to the number of units you can bring into a battle.
Still, there’s a major drawback to the hero units and that’s the one-on-one battles they are usually required to engage in. When an enemy hero and your hero come together an aura surrounds them pushing all other units out of the immediate area. The two heroes engage each other using special moves and standard blows to kill each other. Since heroes are the major outlet of morale within an army, any champion dying or retreating will have a huge blow on their respective army. Unfortunately, you’re required to micro-manage this battle as the opposing hero will use as many special moves as necessary to kill you. While this is going on you’re also forced to content with the rest of your army as the battle still rages on, thereby splitting your attention between two battles including one which you need to attentively follow in order to win.
Another major problem with the hero units is that they are the only ones who can pick up items and treasure dropped during the course of play. A hero must walk up to an item to pick it up, and if said hero is attached to a regiment the entire group follows breaking your battle line to collect a few hundred gold. To add insult to injury, if you don’t pick up the items before the end of the battle you have no option to collect them after the battle is over. This is more problematic than it sounds because you could miss out on various special items that are required to compete in some of the game’s later, tougher battles.
When you aren’t engaging in battles you are able to set up camp in any number of towns along your linear path. Making camp allows you to recruit new units, upgrade existing units with armor, weapons, and specials such as a boost to morale. Unit upgrades are done on a regiment basis or upgrading to level 2 weapons only works for group of units you have selected and once they are killed and replaced with some fresh new faces your upgrades go the way of the dodo.
The game looks good, either fully zoomed in on each individual unit or zoomed out for an overview of the entire battlefield. Textures are crisp and clean and highly detailed and even the little things like bushes and grass stand out as top quality. The engine powering the game easily maintains a high frame-rate even on a moderate system at widescreen resolutions with nearly all the details turned on high. The game’s sound also stands out as very high quality as the aforementioned cheese-tacular dialog recorded well and with enough emphasis to make it believable.
Warhammer: Mark of Chaos presents itself very well, but some questionable design decisions and horrendous load times keep this game from truly shinning. The table top nature of the game makes a successful transition to a new medium but this type of gameplay has been done better elsewhere. This isn’t to say you won’t enjoy Mark of Chaos, there’s some engaging gameplay under the hood, but only true fans of the genre or franchise will experience them as many casual gamers may be turned away by its hardcore nature.
