If you play the Warhammer tabletop games and like RTS games, Black Hole’s Warhammer Mark of Chaos is a definite buy. If you liked Dawn of War or other popular RTS titles, Mark of Chaos is a maybe. The army building, fighting strategy and many other things are well done but quite a bit different than what you may be used to, sticking more to true tabletop gaming style. The graphics, voice acting and general atmosphere of the game are extremely well done. We think this is a solid game that puts a different twist on the RTS genre but it might be a twist you don’t enjoy. The Mark of Chaos demo provides a solid example of the game experience. If you are thinking of buying Mark of Chaos we recommend giving the demo a test and see what you think. More details below.

Graphics

Mark of Chaos brings some impressive graphics to the table. You command groups of soldiers that have several different body part options. This mixes up the army a bit and makes for a cool closeup of your troops. The soldiers themselves are very detailed with interesting animations and high quality textures. The ability to pan and zoom the camera at will lets you select some cool perspectives to watch the slaughter.
You have the ability to customize the colors of your army a la Dawn of War. The fighting animations are pretty awesome, we love to see a bunch of empire soldiers throw a ladder against a castle wall and scramble up for a walltop battle (with many falling to their death). However, we did notice that when two armies clash together the soldiers don’t actually contact each other very well. Many of your troops will be swinging away in mid air, causing random spouts of blood to squirt from nowhere. This is somewhat disappointing if you’ve ever played Dawn of War. Mark of Chaos seems to lack the beautiful “fatality” moves that looked so cool in Dawn of War. The giant armies make for grand battles in the style of Lord of the Rings, however, on a closeup level they aren’t as spectacular as we hoped.
The game features cutscenes that propel the campaign story onward. The storyline is typical but the cutscenes are mediocre.

Sound

The voice talent is awesome. The plot characters themselves are somewhat stereotypical but who cares? The bad guys sound nice and evil. The rest of the game sounds great too.

Gameplay

Warhammer Mark of Chaos is a fairly big departure from standard RTS fare. Don’t expect economy micromanagement and perfecting build orders to have your barracks churning out hoards of troops. There are no barracks. There is no resource collection as you know it. Instead you build up your army between missions. Then, at the beginning of the battle you deploy your troops and begin fighting (staying true to tabletop style). After each battle you collect a certain amount of spoils that allow you to reinforce, upgrade or recruit more troops as well as buy spells and such for your heroes and purchase siege weapons. This is done by entering a local town and spending your blood-bought resources as you please.
The strategy comes into play in a number of ways. First, how do you spend your resources? Upgrade your troops and keep your veteran troops alive for a small but elite army? Or do you buy hoards of low-level troops for a numbers war? Veteran squads have more troops and appear to be more effective in battle.
Once you are in game the strategy is all about troop placement and using your units effectively. Flanking your enemy has a significant effect on the damage you deal, as does morale and other factors. Your troops can walk, run, move into column or line formation and stay tight or spread out. Your formation and speed affect how you deal damage and take damage, especially from ranged attacks and siege weapons. Since you have no barracks to replenish your forces every man counts. You have to combine your forces to wreak havoc while minimizing your own losses.
Warhammer Mark of Chaos features a unique “duel mode” when two heroes go at it. They get locked together in battle and duke it out. If your hero is killed or flees it hammers the morale of the surrounding troops so it can be a strategic boost to build up your dueling skills (especially since it also takes the enemy hero out of combat). When heroes are dueling, they aren’t close enough to actually be hitting each other making the animations somewhat of a letdown. We were hoping for some spectacular eye candy (it was hard not to compare this game to Dawn of War, since that game was one of our favorite RTS games of all time).
The concepts behind tabletop gaming show through in Mark of Chaos everywhere. It brings a fresh style to the genre but has some features that are hard to get used to.

Longevity

The map selection is limited to a few dark landscapes. While you can completely customize your squads and work on building the perfect troop combo, we felt like the format of this game left a lot of gritty strategy and timing out. There will probably be many maps to come but we don’t expect this game to ever have the replayability of games like Dawn of War or Company of Heroes.

Technical

The AI seems to be fairly intelligent. Enemies are aggressive and use positioning and spells at appropriate (read: disastrous!) times. Transferring gear between heroes seems to be buggy at this point. We also noticed that friendly fire was a pretty big problem. Your units are warriors, they are aggressive. Sometimes when you tell them not to attack, they keep attacking. Sometimes when you tell them to attack Bob, they attack Joe because Joe is shooting at them. This really becomes a problem when your melee units rush into the area you’ve targeted with your siege weapons. You blow the enemy apart but you kill your own, zealous troops as well. The game ran very well on our test system with occasional slowdowns when large armies clashed.

Our test system was an Asus motherboard with an Intel Core 2 Duo E6300 chip, an nVidia GeForce 7600GT graphics card and one gig of dual channel ram.