In 2012 it was announced that Rodeo Games would be developing an iOS version of the popular Games Workshop dungeon crawler. Some previews appeared on YouTube and the excitement started to build, quickly followed by some sadness as PC and Android users realised they would be left out. In 2014 the game was finally released to Steam but very overpriced and suddenly riddled with annoying flaws which I will go into later.
In case you didn't know, Warhammer Quest is more-or-less considered the king of tabletop dungeon crawling. It has already warranted plenty of mentions on this site and I haven't even reviewed it yet! This review is specifically for the video game version but comparisons will be made here and there.
Plot Summary
In the gloomy setting of the Warhammer world, adventurers wander the wilds in search of fame and fortune. Hiring themselves as mercenaries or simply by exploring these warriors delve into dark dungeons to slay monsters and retrieve treasures.
Gameplay
Keeping faithful to the original game the iOS version takes place in turns, with each hero moving and attacking, followed by the monsters. Also taken directly from the boardgame is the Winds Of Magic roll at the start of each turn, which determines how much power the wizard can focus and if anything happens to interrupt that process (such as monsters or a chance encounter).
Your party of four adventurers will delve into many dungeons across the land and due to the rather nifty random quest generator you can theoretically delve for infinity gaining treasure and experience as you go.
Playing this is very much like playing a boardgame, the warriors and creatures are even like scale fantasy miniatures. So far so good. Sadly that's where the flattery ends.
Warhammer Quest like any game of this age is riddled with in-app purchases to be made. Now don't get me wrong, I'm not as mad about this as many other gamers are. The original tabletop game came with only four heroes and one set of monsters. You had to fork out some cash if you wanted specialist characters or creature & quest expansions. That is fair enough.
What is not fair is the inclusion of content obviously meant for the purchased characters littering the vanilla game. By this I mean horribly overpowered undead roaming the halls of what was supposed to be a goblin dungeon and treasure rewards that are unusable by the standard characters. Talking of treasure, the quest rewards seem to have got a little lighter since Rodeo slapped you with in-app gold purchasing too.
While we are having a pop at the game I would also like to mention that to the disappointment of many gamers there was absolutely no effort to tailor the Steam version of the game to a PC interface. As the game is much more expensive on PC you really would have expected that.
Graphics and SFX
The visuals of the game are perfectly acceptable for a tablet game. On a large PC screen they are a bit basic. What I said about the gameplay applied to the graphics too - no effort has been made to make bring the resolution or detail up for the PC version. Again this seems very lazy of the developers considering the difference in price.
One thing I do enjoy with this game is the beautiful pop-up book video clip when you enter a town. Little snippets of effort like this show that the original intention of the developers surely was to make a great game.
The sounds aren't really much to get exited about. They do their job but that's about it. The music however is quite impressive and dramatic. The game's opening theme is distinctly epic. The town and wilderness music is mysterious and atmospheric. The dungeon music picks up when monsters appear and so forth. I can't complain about that.
Conclusion
This game certainly had the potential to be fantastic. If they had stuck to the original line-up of monsters and offered a few in-app expansions simply to enhance an already exiting game that would have just fine. But sadly I am disgusted with just how greedy they became with this game. Buying gold? What kind RPG makes you buy your own gold? A broken one!
It may be a semi-faithful recreation of a classic but due to the incredible cheek of the pricing and micro-transactions I'm giving this game a mere 4/10. It could have been so much more...
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