Mordheim: City of the Damned Review

If you ever want to feel like you’ve been hit over the head with a rulebook then look no further than Mordheim: City of the Damned. Based on a Warhammer Fantasy Battles tabletop game from 1999, Mordheim is a love-letter to its board game roots and retains multiple features and quirks that can easily be seen to hark back to that original source material.

The game centres on the titular city which, during a period of civil war, becomes a hub of corruption, sin and vice. Ill omens appear in the skies and a great flaming comet predicts the doom of mankind. Instead of flying across the heavens like a celestial warning, however, the comet slams into Mordheim.

The comet’s impact coincides with the appearance of a magical substance called Wyrdstone, coveted by the Skaven rat-men that dwell under the city and by greedy mercenaries. In the game it’s your job to lead a band of these mercenaries into the city and secure cartloads of this precious resource before the whole city is swallowed by daemons, rats and other foul creatures.

Battlefields are suitably grim and dark

Your gametime in Mordheim is split between recruiting, equipping and upgrading a warband of mercenaries and sending them out to do battle in the ruins of the city. Your band can fit up to ten adventurers in its midst and each successful battle gains them experience, loot and stat bonuses. Every battle is also a risk, however: injured troops will be left crippled, dangerously ill or even dead. Mordheim is not a game that pulls punches when it comes to tearing away your carefully-levelled warriors.

The battles can be either skirmishes or story-driven. In most cases, though, you’ll be sending your troops out to kill the other team one by one or force them to retreat. You control your troops through a third-person camera and WASD keyboard controls. The camera positioning and the inability to take back your moves can often mean getting lost, or taking a wrong turn can mean a frustrating end for one of your warband.

The campaign maps break up the slight monotony of the skirmish battles, where even the randomly generated arenas can become stale after a while. They offer specialist objective-based missions like sneaking through a horde of enemies or blowing up bases.

Attacks are played out in real(ish) time

The enemies are not the only thing you should watch out for in Mordheim. The maps, rendered beautifully to look like a ruined fantasy city, can be covered in traps for unwary commanders. Even traversing the map can cause issues, as characters have a chance to fall to their death or take damage checks.

As well as the knitty-gritty of the battles, Mordheim has a surprisingly deep and sometimes-daunting meta game. Consequences from battles can be felt on the tactical screen. Run out of money to pay your mercs? They’ll refuse to fight. Leave a man to be injured in a fight against a horde of Skaven? He’ll come back missing a limb complete with bloody bandages.

Your troops can be equipped with a large array of weapons too – from axes and swords to halberds, bows, pistols and blunderbusses. Magical items can also be added to give certain buffs, debuffs and actions. Armour, too, can be purchased or found and each race playable in the game has its own unique set to really add feel and flavour.

Lads on tour: Warhammer edition

The difficulty of this game is extended to the campaign objectives. Sometimes your paymasters will demand a certain amount or type of Wyrdstone and if you fail to deliver it in time then it’s game over. Whoops. Mordheim offers the same feelings of frustration and misery when a soldier dies that XCOM cultivates and it's a feeling that can make a player return again and again to ensure that their strategy is just that little bit better next time.

The game looks great, too, and does good work in bringing the world of Warhammer Fantasy Battles to life. It seems that in order to capture the setting in great detail, however, the game has suffered in some aspects. Load times are particularly annoying, with some missions leaving me sat there for minutes at a time before finally starting. Considering my machine is packing an overclocked i7 that’s pretty unacceptable.

Fans of the setting (and of the boardgame) will love Mordheim: City of the Damned. So will fans of squad-based tactical games. Whether they’ll be able to stomach the punishing difficulty or long load times is a different question. In the end, the experience of watching your plucky band of mercenaries grow from untrained novices to grim killing machines is a highly enjoyable one, despite how many times you might have to reload a map.