Release Date: Jan 7, 2015
Available For: PC [reviewed], Mobile [2013]
Developer: Rodeo Games
Publisher: Twisted Mouse
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It’s always hard to review a PC port of a mobile game. What standard should it be held to? Does it simply need to be good by mobile standards, or does it have the obligation of being just as complete and complex a package as any other game? This was the question I attempted to answer to myself as I played through Warhammer Quest, the new PC version of Rodeo Games’ mobile title based on the 1995 board game of the same name.
Designed as a top-down, turn-based dungeon crawler, Warhammer Quest places you in charge of a party of four adventurers: a sword-and-shield wielding warrior, another warrior favoring a two-handed axe instead, an elven archer, and a spellcasting wizard. Its mobile origins are immediately apparent; movement and attack options are few, with characters navigating a series of dungeons through an easy to learn point-and-click interface, and double-clicking foes to attack. There are a few special options to be found, mostly from the wizard’s spellcasting, but for the most part, battling your party’s enemies is about as simple an affair as one would expect from what is ultimately a digital board game.
Battles can get heated fairly quickly.
This simplicity is made somewhat aggravating by how opaque Warhammer Quest insists on being. Despite it being based on a board game, don’t expect visible dice rolls and statistics; that’s all kept safely under the hood to provide a more streamlined experience. The problem is that this gives a player no sense of their own fortunes. Damage numbers are all over the place and misses are frequent, but I had no way of knowing if this was due to poor luck or bad positioning on my part, because I couldn’t see my own hit chances. Eventually, I was able to get a rough sense of what to expect from each member of my squad, but it was still frustrating to not really be able to tell how reliable any of my attacks were.
Still, it’s not all bad. Like any good board game, Quest knows how to keep things moving at a solid clip. Each individual dungeon is fairly short, and there’s usually an entertaining prelude to the next quest in one of the game’s cities. Frequent changes in scenery help break up the repetition, and if I was playing this game on my phone or tablet, I would have been impressed at the landscapes and character models. By PC standards, however, they’re fairly unremarkable.
The short cutscene when you discover a new city is undeniably gorgeous.
Despite these faults, I was initially having at least something resembling a good time, until I smacked face first into the game’s egregious pay walls. I was offered a quest reward of a tantalizing piece of gear for completing an early dungeon, only to find that none of my characters could equip it. Instead, it was for a character who had to be bought from the online store. In fact, it turns out there’s seven of these additional characters! And they’re three dollars apiece! And not only that, but there are unique weapons, armor, enemy types, and even -dungeons- that can also only be purchased with more real money! This decision absolutely baffled me. The PC port of Quest is already triple the price of the mobile version, despite the fact that I found very few, if any changes between the versions. Stacking microtransactions on top of that instead of packaging them into the game is outright exploitative, doubly so considering the existence of gear that can’t be used by the free characters.
Whatever goodwill I had towards Warhammer Quest was effectively ruined by its manipulative pricing model and poorly explained mechanics. Somewhere buried under these problems is a competent board game, but I don’t recommend trying to find it.
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