Warhammer Quest Review – PC Version

   Because Making Single-Player Games Out of Multiplayer Ideas Always Works Out So Well…

While board games like Warhammer Quest and Dungeons & Dragons are often considered to be Multiplayer games, back in May 2013 Rodeo Games teamed up with the Games Workshop to release the single player title Warhammer Quest for the iOS, and now it is on PC, courtesy of Steam, through the publisher Chilled Mouse.

In Warhammer Quest, you play as a group of wandering warriors taking odd jobs from various settlements in the game’s (up to) three regions. Along the way, you’ll get caught up in political in-fights, attempt to save a Halfling’s son and remove a curse from a settlement amongst others. Each settlement you visit has its own self-contained stories and, on top of that, you can also take on challenging and pretty entertaining optional dungeons. Completing these optional dungeons can grant you powerful weapons and armor for your characters, as well as unlocking more of the map to further your exploration.

As you can probably tell, you’ll be spending a lot of your time inside these dungeons, and after a while there all going to start blending in together. The reason for this is because, besides a couple of unique title designs for the main quests, most of the dungeons look and feel the same, so it feels like you are exploring the same dungeons over and over again, similar to Dragon Age 2 essentially. 

Much like the board games that Warhammer Quest is based on, nearly everything from the attacks to mana for your mages to even how much your items heal you is left to chance. With so much handled by luck, I wasn’t sure how much of that was due to the way I played, or if it was because the game’s random dice rolls decided that it didn’t want to play nice today whenever my party got wiped out.

While I understand that dice rolls are part and parcel for this type of game, I just wish that I had more control over its combat other than equipping my characters and selecting the enemies they should attempt to hit. You can, however, influence your chances to hit your enemies with certain weapons and buffs, and you’ll have to do so because the creatures will be doing the same, especially the tougher, higher ranked enemies, which come stacked with buffs. It’s a shame too because, when the Random Dice Generator (RDG) isn’t screwing your chances to hit (which happens way too often), exploring the optional dungeons for bonus loot or taking on optional boss fights is good fun. 

While on the topic of combat, I want to bring up the controls. In the iOS version of the game, everything from item selection to party moment is controlled by the Touch Screen, while in the PC version, everything has now been mapped to the Left Mouse click, and it works quite well. 

It really is a shame too that the combat is annoying, purely due to so much of it being based on luck, because the game presents itself really well. While the graphics themselves aren’t amazing (it is after all an iOS port), the dungeons themselves do genuinely feel like dark, monster-infested areas, and the music does help adding that feeling. The game’s models also look quite nice too, and the sound effects mean your weapons sound like they have weight behind them when they (eventually) connect. 

Also, whenever you’re getting a new quest from a new settlement or you’re about to enter an optional dungeon to get a new artifact/kill a boss monster, you are told the events leading up to your enviable invasion of another dungeon in a way that feels like a DM (Dungeon Master) is describing the events. Even the various settlements you’ll visit are presented nicely, with a great cutscene of a book with the settlement’s name being opened and the layout of the town being built with paper right in front of you. It’s just a shame that, every time you enter a settlement, you always see the same screen with the same four options. 

On the plus side, each town’s stores sell unique equipment. For example, in the first region of Stirland, the settlement Worden sells items that increase the amount of spells your mages can cast in a turn, while the settlement of Wurtbad sells expensive masterwork weapons. 

Speaking of buying equipment, Warhammer Quest is filled with Micro-Transactions that can allow you to pay with “real-life” money to help you in the game. Gold in the world of Warhammer Quest makes the world go round, and is needed for everything related to your characters. If you want to buy a Masterwork weapon, it can cost you up to 4 000 Gold, but even more expensive than that is leveling it up for your characters. For example, to level up any class from Level 5 to Level 6, it’ll cost you 5 000 Gold per character, so if you don’t buy more characters, that will cost you 20 000 Gold alone to level up your four characters to Level 6.

Considering the fact that monsters don’t drop nearly enough money to fully level up your full party, this means you’re going to have to either spend hours grinding the game’s optional dungeons, replaying quests for Gold or delve into your wallet by using “real-life” money. Price-wise, 4 000 Gold costs $2.99, 18 000 costs $9.99 and 60 000 Gold costs $29.99, which is almost as much as the Warhammer Quest Deluxe Edition.

DLC-wise, you’ll be able to buy two new regions to explore for $4.99 each, seven new classes for $2.99 each, three new dungeon packs also for $2.99 each, as well as five legendary and powerful weapons for $0.99 each. The problem with all of the DLC and Micro-Transactions is that the game constantly reminds you about them. Until you enter a dungeon, the option of buying Gold will always be on-screen, and during loading screens the game will occasionally remind you that you can buy more characters to try out. Not only that, but the random loot that you can enter optional dungeons with can also be for DLC characters you don’t have yet. It’s not fair on the player that they can get loot through normal gameplay for characters that they may not want to buy. Finally, I must address the game’s price because the PC version costs $14.99, while, at the moment, it is only $4.99 App Store. Not only that, but it was free at one time. 

VERDICT

Warhammer Quest is a game that presents itself extremely well, but is mostly let down by its luck dependent gameplay as well as the amount of gold required to do things. This means that you’ll need to either grind through optional dungeons or pay for extra gold through Micro-Transactions. While I did have fun with the game, its RDG is too unbalanced for the player to give it any significant chance. If you do want to try out Warhammer Quest, I recommend the iOS version, which is essentially the same game with the same DLC, but with some battery hunger.