Mordheim: City of the Damned Review

Damned if you do?

Mordheim was a favourite little pastime for me as a teenager, with skirmish battles taking less time than a full game of Warhammer. But whilst GW have seemingly forgotten the franchise over the last decade, can Rogue Factor bring back the IP successfully?

Story:

Mordheim is one of my favourite parts of the Warhammer fantasy universe, where the decadence and hubris of the citizenry was brought low when a twin-tailed comet destroyed the town. Rather than heralding the second coming of Sigmar though, the comet contained warpstone, which has made the city uninhabitable, and so warbands from varying factions fight it out on the now deserted streets for control of the precious resources left in the ruins. It’s a perfect premise for a tactical RPG/ strategy game, and Rogue Factor use it well enough with the little bits of fluff that start each mission you send your troops on.

Gameplay:

But before you can even start, you need to create your own war and. It’s quite a daunting intro, even after you go through some of the lengthy tutorials that the game optionally serves up from the main menu. It would certainly have been nice to have the option to select from a couple of pre-generated teams. It’s also a shame that the Witch Hunter faction is paid for DLC, especially as they appear as foes in the campaign, and the console versions are currently priced higher than what you’d normally pay on Steam.

Slight gripes aside, like many turn-based games of this ilk, you’ll immediately notice the difficulty level is pitched pretty high. Even my first assignment was tough, with my leader quickly being taken out of action, before eventually I ground out a win. Thankfully, there was no lasting damage to her, because Mordheim features a detailed set of after-action mechanics. These make every warband unique after just a few games, but cranks the difficulty handle even higher as your team can end up with debilitating injuries or even end up dead, and that’s before you inevitably run out of cash to pay them, and they go on strike, the ungrateful little bastards! But you’ll grow to love and care for your rag-tag group, as you look after them, slowly level them up, and see them morph into an experienced group capable of taking on the toughest foes and winning.

Thankfully, winning is possible, and that’s somewhat down the the fairly average AI, who are more than happy to let you gang up on the, most of the time. If you play it safe and travel in numbers, you’ll almost certainly win more than you lose. The combat itself is really, solid, and there’s plenty of weapons, actions, spells and guns to make it varied. It’s a little odd that Rogue Factor haven’t used the GW ruleset though, and have converted it from a D6 based game to a D100 based one.