If you have never heard of Games Workshop and their tabletop wargames then you better look start now because they rock.
First of all this game is an RTS only without the base building and resource gathering. You choose your regiments and units to take into battle at the beginning and then you have to accomplish your goals using what you took. The controls are ANYTHING but convoluted(except for the feeble minded GS reviewer). They are easy to use and you will have no trouble organizing and dispatching your armies.
You get to form your army out of Hero's, Regiments of various troops, and Seige Weapons. After each battle you will have to heal your regiments back up to full strength, buy equipment for hero's and regiments, and or buy/sell regiements and war machines. Money will be hard to come by at the beginning and if you fight sloppy and make your regiments take lots of damage. More powerful and better quipped regiements cost alot of gold to heal back up to full strength so you have to do the whole quality vs quantity thing.
Hero's have all kinds of special powers. As they level up you get points to spend on skills that improve different aspects of your hero. General Combat, Dueling, and Command are the three catagories in which you will have skills. If you choose to and or sometimes when you dont two hero's will duel to the death at which point you can use special duel skills to try and gain the upper hand. There is also a kind of rock,paper, scissor thing you can do but I didnt duel to much so I dont know how effective it is, i tried using it but i didnt see any big difference. General Combat skills just help your individual hero when he is beating on people outside of duels. Command skills are great because they usually effect your hero but also the regiment you attach them to. So if you have a hero who is good at archery and long range combat you should attach them to an archer regiement but if you have close combat skills or something then you should hook up with soldiers. Your hero's sometimes have offensive skills and magic available to use. Using skills that you have to activate requires magic and also inflicts a cooldown timer on that skill so you cant just use it repeatedly. Most of your skills can be leveled up 5 times with each new level improving how they work slightly.
In most battles you will only lose if you get any of your hero's killed. You get to choose from the humans, the orcs, or chaos forces in battle march. I played the orcs and at certain points you get to switch and play dark elves. I assume the other storylines do similar things.
Organizing your units and fighting is the best part of the game. You can zoom the camera way into the action and see the fighting up close which isnt that exciting but its better than your normal RTS view of the action. However the game does have a couple of things wrong with it that I really didnt like and will keep me from playing it to death.
First of all there is no damn way to save the game when you want to ANYWHERE!!!!!!. It makes an autosave after each battle and thats IT!. You can't save the game after you goto camp and spend your money on healing/buying troops and getting equipment, You can't save on the battlefield after you have organized your troops and set their AI, You cant save on the battlefield after you had a super clean fight and before the next battle on that map. There is just a total lack of save features.
The second problem is very common on 360 games. Tiny ---------text. You cant read crap on the game.
The third and biggest problem of all that I have with this game is the storylines. Each battle isnt just a random skirmish between forces. They have scenarios and very specific goals. Some of them are tedious and mind numbing and easily screwed up making you have to start over which means you have to form up your regiments again and set the AI. I hate it. Its especially bad when you start switching between forces. Usually the secondary race you get to play as has all the really stupid special scenarios. It just bogs down the game and takes all the fun out of it. You end up feeling like all you are doing is placing troops where the game developers want you to place them and do the things THEY want you to do. All you are doing is clicking damn buttons to see the battle unfold how somebody else wants it to. You have absolutely zero input and its like you are a freaking robot.
I will make my own ------------- decisions when i play a video game thank you very much!!!! I dont know how many of the missions are like that but it was more than I was willing to play. Thats why I wouldnt recommend the game.
If I could influence the developers I would get them to DITCH storylines or atleast preset storylines. Thats the ancient way of doing things. When you make a game about one military force taking on another or many others then you basically need to make it matter to the player. You need to make the fights about controlling territory. You can still have cutscenes to tell story or show off inner workings of that army based on whether you gain or lose territory. You can still have special scenarios by having tactical options each turn. Like you randomly get an Ambush Tactic card. When you use that card and you get attacked that turn instead of it being a normal defense scenario it means you get the drop on the enemy and you ambush them and you play out an ambush type scenario. Games like Dynasty Warriors and Star Wars Battlefront are how games like this should be done.
Everytime you play your game it would be a different experience and it would be worth every penny. Now when the hell do we get the 40k and Epic universe versions????