Deep customisation & flowing battles
Warhammer: Mark of Chaos puts you in command of four playable armies: the Empire, Chaos, Skaven, and the High Elves, with each faction having its own champion or hero. There are also additional controllable races, Orcs and Goblins, Dwarfs and Vampires. The emphasis of this latest strategy title is on war and the battles range from huge-scale epic cinematic battles over extensive landscapes to time restricted sieges on castle strongholds, with a wide range of smaller objective based missions and even quest based puzzle solving assignment thrown in to spice up the action.
The campaign mission begins by choosing which side you wish to fight for; the Empire or Chaos. It’s from this point that the journey across this extremely detailed magical land takes shape as you fight through forests, caves, villages and castles, across grass, mud and ice in a bid to restore peace (if you chose the Empire) to these chaotic lands. Judging by the dazzling trailer and opening movie sequence in the game, you'd think that Epic Games would have instilled more quality in the cut-scenes, but for some reason less attention was paid to this aspect and more to the individual characters and environments. Nevertheless, it's the gameplay that really matters and, despite a rather short campaign, the story is excellent and the gameplay is exciting.
Click for larger imageThe customisation options available in Warhammer: Mark of Chaos are substantial, but newcomers need not be phased, because you can choose a default army. If you wish, however, you can create your army from scratch and customise everything from magical items and upgrades right up to painting your army in your favourite colours using the intuitive and aptly named 'Army Painter'.
Click for larger imageControlling your units on the battlefield is pretty much done using standard real-time strategy controls with a few nice twists that allow you to guide your troops more fluidly and with more direction than many other games in this genre. Each unit has a banner and by clicking on it you’ll immediately select the whole team, whilst moving them is controlled by clicking on an area with the right mouse button. Moving your units in certain formations is a crucial element to the gameplay and by glancing down to the command bar it takes a second to switch into a number of different stances including open, loose or tight formations. The AI react swiftly to your commands (I came across no path finding issues) and these formations are extremely advantageous when moving over certain environments or particular attacking/defending scenarios. For example, switching to a tight formation against a small group of Orc boyz will ensure that a lone member of the group won’t be singled-out; remain in a loose formation and you could lose one of your troops.