A game that had promise, Warhammer Quest is a classic case of decent gameplay being marred by terrible design. Even though I felt a little tricked by the fact that this is a mobile game (why are these even here in the first place?), I felt that I should give it the benefit of the doubt. After all, it fooled me, and to be fair I did buy it, though the $1.34 asking price and the fact that I'd never heard of it did raise my eyebrows. It's not a good game, but by no means a terrible one. It's simply boring. However, despite this, there were more than a few things that I enjoyed a great deal in this rather uninspired game, a handful things that somewhat irked me, and many that drove me to writing the first of hopefully few rants.
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| The map, best get used to seeing it! |
Of the things I think are done well in this game, first is the equipment system. Any character can have 12 items total equipped, with four items of common, rare, and legendary varieties. You are challenged to decide what's important for your characters to have due to the fact that equipment and consumables count as items to be equipped, and this adds a degree of strategy to the early game. The other plus is the roster of classes. It is unfortunate that I would say that dlc on a mobile game is necessary to further one's enjoyment of it but the truth is that they all are varied, dynamic, and bring valuable tools to the table. There's also a good roster of enemies and a relatively smooth power creep, which helps a feeling of accomplishment. There's nothing better than skeletal militia, the former bane of your party, being reduced to simple trash mobs by a few levels and a couple pieces of gear. In combat there's a feature called 'deathblow', which rewards you for lining enemies up to surround you as well as enhancing characters' accuracy. Gold is also infrequent and you never suffer from too much, level ups are expensive and so is gear. Every time your party enters a town, a different establishing cinematic plays, neat.
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| One of the things done well in this game: the towns are very atmospheric, too bad they play every time you travel... |
Things that I enjoyed less but occasionally liked were pretty rare. My main mixed feeling stems from the layout of the story and missions, more in that there isn't a story, not one that matters anyway. See, all of the main missions are slightly different, NONE of them connect to each other. The Skaven and Ork expansions add more missions and at least a hint of narrative focus but from what I can see right now, it's the same issue. The plus side of this is that there's a very pick up and play quality to this, but at the same time I don't notice any progress outside of the 'Averland Missions Complete' getting closer to 9/9. I mean what's the point? I thought this was 'WARHAMMER QUEST'?
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| Didn't we just clear this? |
Things that really missed the mark abound. First, the art, animations, and a good chunk of the music (though some are great) look incredibly lazy. I assume the intention was to capture a board game feeling, but the result is very wooden and unappealing. The gameplay in the dungeon is also this. It is entirely comprised of turn-based movement and combat, except that also applies to outside of combat as well. Add onto this the fact that each dungeon, no matter the palette, has the same size corridors and rooms, I swear there's only like nine possibilities, and you have gameplay that feels like a chore. On top of this are 'ambushes', which I assume are designed to add a taste of unpredictability to encounters. The result is less of an added challenge and more often 20 minute battles with new enemies every 2 turns, or being ambushed by trash every time you hobble your party down a hall. At least you can get crazy amounts of experience from this. While the additional classes are a bonus, the sheer amount of gear that's exclusive to a single or few classes is insane. 90% of the time you will find either a sellable item or consumable as opposed to a bit of usable gear, I hate it, some of my guys are at level 5 and still are using their basic weapons!
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| Another turn, another ambush...I wonder if my adventurers are just deaf? |
Now I'm going to go on a bit of a tangent here regarding the story, or lack thereof, of Warhammer Quest, and how it handles this. Now as I said before there isn't one, but at the same the game seems to acknowledge that there is (in the achievements). First, pick a lane. Are some quests connected and considered 'canonical' to the story? If so, include them as a narrative, and if not but still story rich, include them as side quests. It makes no sense to put random unrelated quests with no relation or progression to each other besides either being prerequisites for the next quest or too high of a level for your party. Don't get me wrong, for all the bashing I've done here I do feel that this system can work, but I strongly question its implementation in the Warhammer Fantasy setting. There was a lot of rich stories in the setting before Games Workshop shuttered it in 2014, why not take any of those? Hell, there were hack-and-slash stories, and God knows I read a ton of them, it would be a perfect replacement. In retrospect, this is where the uninspired nature of the game really rears its head, and yes, I don't know what I expected coming from a mobile game.
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| The closest you'll get to a story playing this game (story mission). |
All in all, I cannot in good faith recommend this game. I love Warhammer Fantasy, but this, this is just lame. That's its flaw, not that its bugged, or that some of the systems don't really work well, this game is just so tedious to play, and there seems to have been no love or much effort put into it, and that's a shame.
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| Ingo, the very definition of a hard carry. Bring a witch hunter, trust me. |
A final note: Buying the complete collection on Steam, which includes every single DLC, comes with both Skaven and Ork expansions, the necromancer and vampire count enemy packs, all the DLC Classes, and the 5 unique buy-only weapons (which are famous weapons and artifacts cameoing from WHF). Be warned, these weapons are endgame level, and they give it to you as soon as you start the game...and they're endgame weapons...why?
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