Would have been better as a movie...
Mark Of Chaos is a beautiful game. The movies are brilliant and the detail on the units is fantasic. As someone who plays on tabletop too, I really appreciated the effort that had gone in to making this look so realistic and true to the genre. So far, so good.
However, despite the beauty of this game, the whole thing was ruined by actually playing it. Where as I'm used to the occasional long loading time, this was something completely new. I'm pretty sure I managed to complete most of Call Of Duty 3 whilst waiting for some of the battles to load. The centuries-long loading time isnt the only problem...
1) The units, though detailed, don't really DO anything. One minute, the armies are walking towards each other, then they flail around for a bit, then there's a heap of bodies. There's no real combat, you just point and click.
2) The graphics are laggy. SERIOUSLY laggy. My PC romps through CoH, but here it seemed slow going...
3) The sound is WAY out of sync, and what were they thinking when they hired those voice-over actors?
4) There's no actual tactical choice in the campaign, it's all one big linear bleah. That, and the campaign map's just one big brown blob...
5) The crashes!! Why the crashes?!! WHY, Bandai-Namco, WHY?!?!?!
6) This might just be me, and it might be petty, but after a battle, my cursor seems to disappear. So what? you might ask, but after a while, this gets seriously, SERIOUSLY annoying...
After all is said and done, the game looks good, and the battles look magestic, even if there's no real blood. It just makes you wish that they'd put the same amount of time into the technical and the gameplay as they did the graphics. It would make a better movie than a game. Would be better value too...