View Single Post
  #1153  
Old 08-02-2017, 02:03 PM
Vivisectus's Avatar
Vivisectus Vivisectus is offline
Astroid the Foine Loine between a Poirate and a Farrrmer
 
Join Date: Feb 2011
Gender: Male
Posts: VMMCCCLVI
Blog Entries: 1
Default Re: Video Games - Watcha playin'?

I am getting rather obsessed with Mordheim - city of the damned. It is a cracking little turn-based tactical game, based on a spin-off tabletop game set in the Warhammer fantasy battles universe.

The tabletop game must have been pretty good - well balanced, challenging, and with carefully fine-tuned rules. You have to manage, equip and pay your band of troops every turn. In order to do so you have to gather Wyrdstone in the ruins, while fighting off enemy warbands in turn-based tactical skirmishes. Surviving missions levels up your troops, and allows them to learn skills.

Every 7 turns or so, your faction will demand a shipment of Wyrdstone, and they will demand more and more of the stuff every time. Fail to supply these too often, and the game ends. You get 2 missions (scouts can get you a third, for a price) and if you are unlucky they will involve warbands that outclass you badly... while the overall difficulty level steadily ramps up.

There is no saving. If you suffer a bad defeat, you will see some of your prize units permanently mangled, or needing lengthy recuperation... while still drawing their pay. You can fire them to save money, but training up new ones is going to take time. Run out of money by spending unwisely, and will have to play a few missions under strength and sell off all your equipment to keep your soldiers from going on strike.

All this gives the gameplay a wonderful sense of urgency. You have to make careful decisions, because getting it wrong may send your campaign into a negative spiral that is hard to break. This can be frustrating at times, but the cool thing is that the reverse is also true: catch a lucky break and exploit it, and you can turn a seemingly impossible situation around again.

There are some niggles as well: the interface for warband management is clumsy and unwieldy. There are some AI pathing issues that can be exploited.

But overall, this is a cool game that has had me screaming in frustration when that 90% hit chance blow just missed, or whooping in victory when my Leader just survived getting singled out long enough for reinforcements to save his ass. Highly recommended if you liked games like X-com, Jagged Alliance, or some of the turn-based Space Hulk games.
Reply With Quote
Thanks, from:
BrotherMan (08-02-2017), Crumb (08-02-2017), Dragar (08-03-2017), Kael (08-02-2017)
 
Page generated in 0.30661 seconds with 11 queries