Lorhaven: Cursed War

completed in 3 hours

Lorhaven: Cursed War is a somewhat shallow fantasy themed turn based strategy wargame where you take some medieval soldiers and fight undead and stuff. Decent concept, but the quality of the implementation does not pan out. This feels like it was designed for mobile phones with touch controls rather than PC gaming, and as such it compares poorly to PC centric wargames with considerably better graphics, gameplay and tactical depth. One important note is that even though this is an amateur project, it does seem to be sincerely and genuinely made. I couldn't find any flipped assets, plagiarism or any other kind of insincere actions from the developer, but unfortunately genuine intentions alone are not enough to produce a brilliant PC gaming experience. From a technical perspective, the game doesn't meet basic minimum requirements that most PC gamers expect as standard. While there are options to change the resolution for the game, all this does is scale up the simplistic 2D art assets used to make the game, which makes little or no difference to the graphics quality. Without any other substantial graphics tweaks, it's not possible for gamers to improve the lacklustre 2D visuals. The game features mostly static, barely animated 2D images, the kind of thing you expect to see in browser/flash games. This looks bad when the attacking soldiers just "slide and bump" into the next hex. This was released in 2024, and they couldn't work out how to do animations? While the artwork itself, while mediocre, might be considered passable, the visual presentation here is negligible, it might as well be a slideshow or a Youtube video. Pac-Man, Space Invaders and Asteroids had more advanced animation and visuals going on than this game does. The developers didn't design the game for modern gaming PCs, as such the display resolution caps out at around 1440p, there's no support for the state-of-the-art 4K or higher resolutions. The game simply won't look right on modern gaming displays due to this failure on the part of the developers. This is indistinguishable from a mobile app, but they put this on Steam instead of the app stores by mistake. Was it rejected by Apple and Google (they do have more rigorous quality standards than Valve does for Steam, after all)?. Regardless, for all intents and purposes Lorhaven: Cursed War might as well be a mobile app, it has the same limitations and dumbed down qualities. It's impossible to recommend such a game to PC gamers. We don't spend all this money building gaming rigs so we can pretend they're iPhones. These technical defects push this game below acceptable standards for any modern PC game. The poor quality of this game is reflected by how many people spent time with it. At the time of this review, SteamDB shows the all-time peak player number was only 3 players. This is a remarkably low number, and now, the only player activity occurs once or twice a month, presumably someone loading it up to see what it is then quickly uninstalling it. Considering there's over 120 million gamers on Steam and well over 100,000 games for gamers to choose from, the overwhelming lack of interest in this low quality game is to be expected. So, should you buy this game? Is this one of the best of the 100,000+ games on Steam? Lorhaven: Cursed War has the almost comically optimistic (if it wasn't so sad) price of $10 USD, for which you could easily get any number of older AAA games. Given the defects and quality issues with the game, coupled with the unrealistic price, this is impossible to recommend. For comparison, the $10 asking price for this game could get you games like "Yakuza Kiwami", "Ghostrunner" or "Assassin's Creed: Odyssey". Quality, professionally made games like those are frequently on sale cheaper than this. [quote][b][url=https://partner.steamgames.com/doc/marketing/profile]Profile Features Limited![/url][/b] Valve have marked this game as "Profile Features Limited" at the time of this review. This is usually caused by poor sales figures and low community acceptance for the game (to date). Until this status changes, this game will not give you +1 to your Game Collector badge count, appear in profile achievements or any other Steam meta-accomplishments, nor can it be displayed in some profile showcases. If these factors are important to you, it may be worth holding off before buying this game.[/quote]

Lorhaven Cursed War is addictive and challenging. You have to think carefully about your moves because one wrong decision can cost you. You can make maps with the editor, which may be good for some, although somes elements are missing that would actually make sense to speed up the making processing, the story is Ok, I would like to see the Undead campaign and future units.

It is ideal when looking for a brief distraction, as an adult with no life. Curious about its compatibility with Steam Deck, it would be excellent for such a device.

Hex-based, turn based with hot seat multiplayer, waitfing for future updates it's still a great little strategy game.

Has a nice map editor, for me, its a plus, you can set your own battles, not just the premade scenarios.

Très heureux que de petits développeurs se soucient de la langue française, c'est un jeu au tour par tour idéal pour des sessions rapides si vous n'avez pas beaucoup de temps pour jouer.

The game costs only $10 and provides an enjoyable experience. Although I've played through a few situations, there are many more possibilities to explore in this turn based game.

Been a while since I last played a turn-based combat game. I will not leave it soo long on the basis of what we are presented with here. Had 1 or 2 difficulties in the tutorial**, but since then it has been plain sailing. **Would be happier if you only had to click once to select a unit and was initially confused in that to hire a unit you had to be off the fortress.

tactical depth is very low, UI is pretty dodgy, story is pretty barebones. I admittedly only played like 4 missions, (but admittedly it looks like the game only has 10), but there's absolutely nothing I saw to recommend this over Battle for Wesnoth