Recently in my nerd-talk conversations with my brother, we spoke about Warhammer and Warhammer 40K games and he told me how most of them are pretty awful. Between the fondness of the old HeroQuest game first impressions of this reminded me of and wanting to be optimistic, I was hoping this would be a game to prove him wrong. After all I have collected but not played a ton of these games yet. But this game really just puts a notch in the point he made.
Story: Unfortunately this is not a game with a really developed plot. Taking place in the Warhammer Fantasy universe, just about all the unified plot you will get is an opening scroll text:
All Heroes die. Eventually, Inevitably. Method and character, Determine this land. Not the march of time.
Looting, Indulging. Mere distractions, From what you crave. An idea above trinkets, To last forever.
A calling.
A legend.
The ending is not much better with a similarly vague text scroll, explaining nothing or what effect you might have on the world. At best, you will get small mini-plots that might fit together from time to time in the form of quests that will be offered to you whenever you discover a new town, solving a problem for them to progress that plot. You will also be offered a few as uncovered quests when traveling around offering some progress, but there just plain isn't much here.... which is a real shame for even an RPG-lite like this.
5/10
Graphics: Warhammer Quest is about as close to a boardgame simulator as I have played since I was a tiny kid playing an MS-DOS version of Monopoly, and the look of the game will lean hard into this. You will play the meat of this game from a top-down view as you move your heroes around a map of whatever dungeon you are in, hacking and slashing your way through the game, and frankly it looks pretty good. The details put into this is actually really REALLY good, as each room and corridor it might place in your path is well detailed like the individual parts of a boardgame that the DM might lay out in front of you. They are varied and well detailed, but despite that due to how long you can play any given area of the game, you can expect to see many of the same rooms and hallways reassembled in now ways like you would that same boardgame set.
Furthermore, the game will also let you interact with this as you feel you need. Scrolling, zooming, and even spinning the map at will, this game will absolutely give you both a view more then close enough to admire the details painted into the room templates that make up the various rooms as well as the ability to zoom out, scroll around, and spin the view if you desire to see more of what's going on.
Still the panels are only part of the picture as you also have your heroes and enemies that also populate the world. These look pretty good too as 3D models, but it's pretty clear if you get close enough that these are not as detailed as they could be. Still they are clean, look great, and are animated smoothly.
But while this is the meat of the game, it is not all you see for there are also a few additional menus that are designed to look like either sliders moved by gears, pages of old books, or some combination therein that both look nice and make it pretty obvious how to use them at a glance. And finally the last thing you will use is the map, which looks about as one might expect as well. It's not meant to be real looking so much as some cross between models of the world and a paper map. It's not particularly standout, but it works very well.
7/10
Sound: There is no voice work in this game, at least for any lines said, but it needs none of that. Nor does it have a lot of sound effects. Yes you have the standard sounds of a swinging sword or the thwip of an arrow being let loose, and of course the clang and crash of blades hitting their mark. But there is nothing special to hear here. What is special is the music.
Simply put, Games Workshop and Rodeo games know how to set a theme, and the music here absolutely nails it! From the ominous music as you wander the map, to the mythically epic orchestration when combat begins to the more calming in towns, everything here just sounds perfect of a fantasy adventure through the world of Warhammer Fantasy. There are not a lot of tracks here, but what is here is absolutely perfect.
8/10
Gameplay: When you are playing an RPG (or an RPG-lite in this case) it has to survive on both the story and the gameplay. If either is strong enough, it can carry a game being weak in the other. But sadly both are weak in this case.
You will start this game with a dungeon crawl which itself will be a turned based affair. Each turn you will have the option to move each member of your party in any order and combination you desire, so long as they have not moved their max number of spaces. You can also use any ability or item your heroes have, at least that have a valid target and are available. These will show up whenever you select a hero in two "pop-up" menus: one for those items and one for abilities (at least if you have any). Simply click the one you want to use (options available will be bright while those not usable at this moment will remain darkened) and what you want to use it on and it will happen. If you want more information on any of them, just hold down that mouse button on it and the game will show you. Most of this information will also be in the "Journal" if you wish to access it from the options menu, but other things like character stats, you need to hold the mouse button down over the character on the map to see it.
When you are done moving everyone around, clicking end turn at the bottom of the screen will effectively roll the dice for what happens before you get your next turn. Often this will be nothing, but there is always the chance of an encounter that will happen, which could be good or bad... admittedly mostly bad, including potentially a random wave of monsters to fight.
Should this happen, the game will list all the enemy types you are about to encounter before returning to a the board and placing them.. and this will be when start to see why this game's gameplay simply does not work. First, you will find all melee based monsters have swarmed your heroes as tight as possible, removing any ability you might have had to potentially try to position your heroes since not all of them will be melee specialists themselves, completely moot. But if one of your team members is a wizard, this is going to infuriate you even more.
Wizard characters are unique in this game in that while they start relatively weak and with limited abilities, but they gain new ones far quicker then anyone else and have a system to power it. In the case of the one I kept (a grey wizard) his power came from two sources: an internal storage that has to last the entire mission and a dice roll each turn (which will increase in size every time he levels up). You will use this second set of points first and each spell has a cost listed next to it, making it easy to plan what you wish to use... and you will want to use as many of those random points as you can each turn because they can not be saved. The problem is whenever you have these random encounters, your wizard simply rolls a 0. Add to this the melee monsters literally breathing down your party's necks (all of them), and these random encounters will quickly drain the usefullness of your wizard as if he's going to take part in the battle, he will have to use up that first pool of very limited points, Yes you can get items to reload them, but even this is a temporary and expensive relief, especially if you find yourself dealing with many repeat encounters like this.
And those fights will continue the turn-based structure of the game, building on it in a few key ways. First you now add physical attacks to the actions your heroes can commit... but there is a catch. Unlike spells, items, or abilities, attacking by default means that hero can no longer move, requiring you to plan and position accordingly. In addition, when you end your turn, the monsters get a turn to do the same, many of which will cause effects based on hitting your heros... or even potentially by their own positioning. For example, a common effect of a monster being next to a hero when the turn ends is for them to be pinned, meaning unless someone else kills the monster holding them there, they don't get to move at all. This is yet ANOTHER problem with random encounters since they can take the form of reinforcements which get rolled for every single turn. If this happens, it will almost always assure your party is basically pinned and so surrounded even if they are not, they are not going anywhere, rendering all strategic planning you might have done useless.
Add to this the wizard issues above and this happening often will frustrate the hell out of you.. and it WILL happen. I have been in missions were every single fight would have 3 or so reinforcement waves happening, draining the wizard well beyond anything reasonable and keeping my heroes pinned in place without any kind of strategy being even an option... only for it to happen again when you just hack enough to start to get room to actually plan your fight... repeatedly.
But the absolute final and even more common frustration will be what my brothers and I have "affectionately" called "TeeHee syndrome" over our time playing turn based RPGs. Simply put, everything is VERY inclined to miss it's target. When you see a monster or a hero with one or two attacks, this is kind of acceptable as bad luck, but when you have characters reaching 6 or 7 attacks a turn and you watch helplessly as they keep missing (potentially all of attack), it's no longer annoying: it's odds defyingly unfun and wasting time in a fight which at any time just might pour more enemies on you as noted above.
When you get through all this however, you reach the support point of the game in which you will travel to a nearby town: new or one you've already visited. A new town is assured to have this happen, but any visit could cause a story-event to occur. These may on occasion push a general narrative for the area you are in, but most likely will be specific to the town in question and opening up a main quest you can take on, but you will likely want to spend a little time here for this is where you can buy items, spend money to potentially get a blessing (stat bonus for a single dungeon) or even once you have enough experience points, go to the training grounds to level up one of your heroes.
Once you are properly geared up, time to go adventuring and back to the map. At this point, you will be given a selection of dungeons you can play: several white and one red. This red mission is the story one you were offered, but if you don't feel up to it, you can do one of the white side missions which (if you haven't unlock it already) will grant you access to another town. Each of these will also have a different lineup of stuff in the market so opening as many as you can could be a good idea in it's own right.
Still, this downtime is the exceptionally small portion of the game, supporting that dugeon play, which as I noted, is more often more fustrating then it's worth due to how quickly a random encounter can completely remove your ability to do anything and how much time you will likely spend watching everyone (friend and foe alike) whiff just about all their attacks and leaving a stalemate on the table.
4/10
Bugs: For all the issues I had with this game, bugs are not one of them. The game ran like a top.
Digital Rights Management: While I played this game on Steam, it has been delisted, so the fact that it needs Steam as it's DRM is a little bit irrelevant now. However the only version still available (on GOG) is DRM free.
Source: PC Gaming Wiki
Score: Unfortunately we have another game I wanted to like but just couldn't. Originally promising something akin to the boardgame HeroQuest, it quickly became less of that and more of a promise for chill gaming, only to drown that possibility too in unbalanced and pure luck dependent gameplay. If you are a fan of bored games, I can't imagine you don't have better choices then this, and RPGs that goes double.
4/10
System Requirements:
- Intel i5 (3rd generation or newer)
- 4 GB RAM
- Nvidia Geforce 200 series or newer
- Windows 7
- 2 GB Hard Drive space
System Specs:
- Ryzen 7 (5700X) 3.4 Ghz
- 32 GB RAM
- AMD Radeon RX 6650 XT (8 GB VRAM)
- Windows 11 (64 Bit)
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