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Sunday 8 April 2012

"Blood for the Blood God!", or "Do you think I could find a purse to go with this mithril plate?"

Warhammer: Mark of Chaos (2/5)

Mark of Chaos is a game which, frankly speaking, would have initiated a meltdown in my computer but for a few brief upgrades ago. It's certainly a very pretty game (judging by the standards of the day) and seemed to have the kind of game mechanics which led on nicely from Warhammer 40000: Dawn of War. Therefore it was with some delight that I pushed my CD drive closed, put on my spiked helmet and summoned a boar's leg and flagon of mead from the nearest wench - the divorce proceedings are still pending.

It had been some time since I could trump up the money to play Warhammer (the table top fantasy game) and so I was looking forward to an opportunity to command an army once again. How delighted I was to discover that there was none of the normal tedious resource collection so common in most RTS titles (Why exactly do I need 1000 sheep to build a small hut?) and that I was simply to be in command of an army with which I would conquer or save the Old World as I so chose. This was to be a revamped version of Dark Omen then, a game with which I had spent many hours. Dark Omen of course, for those of us old enough to remember it, was what is known technically in video gaming circles as "bloody difficult" and a liberal amount of cheating was to be expected. Not with Mark of Chaos however, I would prove myself worthy of the dark gods by not playing around with the console commands.

The single player campaign sees you choosing to either fight for the Emperor of Men or as an aspiring champion of Chaos and being the thorough games reviewer that I am I naturally played both campaigns so that I could give a balanced report. A decision which was completely unrelated with missing a weekend at my in-laws, which naturally I regret (Sarcasm is the lowest form of wit - Ed.). In the empire campaign you play Captain Heinz von Germanmeyer, or something like that anyway, the son of a deposed elector Count proving his worth despite being tainted with facial scarring. A Mark of Chaos you may say. You spend the game hurtling up and down the Old World taking part in sieges and pitched battles, accompanying Elves, to hinder the progress of an aspiring Champion of Chaos. The Chaos campaign is exactly the reverse as you try summon and unite chaos tribes to conquer the world of men. That's it, no great deviations, the unknown plots in either campaign are cleared up by playing the other.

This is where we get to the heart of the game however. The gameplay feels more like a set of scenarios (sieges, pitched battles, capture the flag) which are merely repeated with different armies at different times and it is sometimes difficult to keep track of the smaller story lines. The tension between elf leaders, the Captain's quest for redemption all seem to have been shoehorned in at the last minute as the whole of the game is given over to the simple concept of kill the other guy. Killing the other guy is not particularly difficult provided you incorporate a little tactical sense: horses don't like being up on barricade walls and sending lightly armored archers charging at hordes of heavily plated evil knights will not end well for you. However the real crime is that the game offers the player so much variety for their army but it is variety which is never needed to be taken. Once I had kitted out my cavalry, ranged weapons, and spearmen with the greatest possible upgrades I didn't really need to make use of the more exotic options and the woeful magic system meant that using mages for anything other than squad bonuses was wasted. At this is the real reason that Mark of Chaos gets such a mediocre review. Unlike the tabletop version, this digital rendering simply doesn't capture the spirit of greasy unwashed nerds pitching fake battle as well as it potentially could.

Lance "Horned Rat" Pawman

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