Mordheim: City of the Damned Preview

The folks at Rock, Paper, Shotgun have cooked up some impressions of Mordheim: City of the Damned, based on the available Steam Early Access build of the title. Here’s a snippet that should give you an idea of the tone of the full article:

To clarify, the AI itself isn’t underpowered it seems capable enough already but most of the opponents I’ve faced have fewer or less powerful units than I find in my preset selections of human and Skaven. At present, the skirmishes feel like a tutorial AFTER the tutorials, a place to put all that learning into practice.

All of this makes my early impressions of Mordheim much less enthusiastic than they might have been if I’d waited until a few updates were ready. Not because the game is broken those apparently soon-to-be-fixed connection issues aside but because the parts of the game I’m most interested in aren’t there yet. Such is Early Access.

The good news is that the current build plays like a beta rather than a shell. I won’t be revisiting particularly often until I can lead my own warband through a campaign but the meat of the combat and the maps is already nourishing. It’s missing the strategic side of man- and rat-management, but as a tactical skirmish game there’s a great deal to admire.

Lacking a connection to your creatures diminishes the pleasure of victory and the horror of failure, but there’s enough content to gain an appreciation of the inventive approach to turn-based movement and use of abilities. When moving into position, units run around the map as if they’re in an action game, able to explore within the limits that their movement points permit, but passing ‘˜borders’ causes those points to tick down. Using abilities takes points from a different reserve, whether the action is a basic melee attack, a reload or spellcasting, and jumping and climbing take a point from the movement pool immediately.