Warhammer: Mark of Chaos Hands-On - Battles, Heroes, and Missions

Since the first screenshots appeared over a year ago, Warhammer and strategy fans have been looking forward to Warhammer: Mark of Chaos. Though there have been previous games based on the popular and long-lived Warhammer fantasy license, Mark of Chaos's beautiful visuals promise to bring the armies of men, orcs, and elves to life like never before. In this real-time strategy game, you'll be able to command Warhammer armies in fevered battle and see the gory results unfold before your eyes. With the game finally near completion, we got our hands on a work-in-progress version to check it out.

Mark of Chaos is set in the northern parts of the Empire, which is basically the kingdom of men and dwarves. Apparently, this is a huge battleground for the four factions in the game. There's the Empire, the high elves, the hordes of chaos, and the skaven, a ratlike race composed of rodents of unusual size. Each of these factions has a huge assortment of units, ranging from the conventional-looking human warriors to twisted demons, hulking orcs, and a variety of powerful siege weapons. The detail on all of these is impressive, as it's comparable to the most carefully painted Warhammer miniature.

The campaign is divided into a turn-based strategic layer and the battles themselves. In the former, you'll move your army along the campaign map, choosing which battles or encounters to participate in. There's none of the traditional real-time strategy resource gathering or base building in Mark of Chaos. Instead, all the army management is handled between the battles, as you'll be able to replace losses and hire new units. This lets you focus mainly on battle tactics. Though Mark of Chaos looks quite a bit like a fantasy-style Total War game, it actually has a much smaller scale than that of Creative Assembly's popular strategy games. Instead of commanding thousands upon thousands of troops in the field, you'll "only" manage a few hundred, at the most. Your troops are divided into regiments consisting of up to a few dozen troops each. This means that armies are approximately equivalent to those seen in the Warhammer miniatures game, where players move intricately painted figurines around a tabletop battlefield. Only, in Mark of Chaos, those figurines come to life on your PC.

Like battles in Total War, the battles in Mark of Chaos won't be won by selecting all of your troops and telling them to attack the nearest enemy. If you do that, you risk disaster, because tactics count. So does the composition of your army. Before the battle, you have a chance to select which troops and heroes that you'll bring into the fight, and you want that nice mix of troops to provide a balanced force to counter whatever the enemy throws at you. Infantry are good against other infantry, but they're not so good against mounted units unless they're equipped with pikes. Archers are great from a distance but are at a disadvantage if they have to engage in hand-to-hand combat.

Missions that we encountered ranged from the familiar kill-everything-in-sight melees to coming to the relief of an ally camp under siege. In one mission, you have to escort a wizard unit to various points on the map so he can cast incantations there. The trick is that while he's doing so, you're attacked on all sides by enemy regiments, so you've got to buy enough time for the wizard to do his thing. In another mission, you must defend a town under attack by barbarians, and that includes saving as many structures as possible, so your troops serve as a fire brigade of sorts, rushing from one hot spot to another.

It's important to keep some kind of tactical order to your troops, as getting them scattered is definitely not good. There's strength in numbers. Almost as important is the concept of morale. Units generally don't fight to the death. Instead, if you can inflict enough losses, they'll lose their will to fight and flee. You can order your troops to chase after them, but that could be risky because your forces will become stretched or divided. Then again, if that's the last group of bad guys on the map, then do go after them.

Regiments will gain experience as they become more bloodied, which makes you want to preserve them rather than simply throw them away in battle. Experienced troops are much more capable than green rookies, after all. You can also attach hero units to regiments to lead them. Heroes are important because these mighty units can take a lot of punishment, deal out quite a bit themselves, and have special powers that can really turn the tide of battle. You'll also need them because heroes are the best counter to enemy hero units. When opposing heroes meet, they can engage in duels, which are special one-on-one engagements where the rest of the army sits back and watches.

As heroes gain experience, you can specialize them to become great fighters, duelists, or army commanders. It all depends on the skills you select. An excellent commander skill, for instance, is the ability to cast a fire shield on friendly troops, protecting them from harm. Most skills can be upgraded five times, so a fifth-level fire shield lasts much longer than a first-level one. If you think you want your hero to be a dueling specialist, you can dump skill points into dueling skills to make them last longer and inflict more damage against enemy hero units. Heroes can also recover weapons and artifacts on the battlefield that make them even more potent and lend the game a role-playing element.

The result is that your armies will grow in size and experience over time, and you'll get more and more attached to them. You're not just commanding a random bunch of units, but an army that you've nurtured over the course of battle after battle. This is certainly an important element of Warhammer, as collecting armies is part of the experience of the miniatures game. And serious fans will like the army customization options, which let you tweak the colors of your units. Mark of Chaos is looking good, and we can expect it to ship next month.