Mordheim: City of the Damned

Welcome! To Mordheim... City of the Damned. And, sadly, also the City of Unfulfilled Potential. The gameplay loop is genuinely fun. How quickly you could lose everything to a handful of bad rolls fills the slow inching forward of the matches themselves with a heavy blanket of foreboding. I enjoy every second of it... until I look down at the end of the mission and realize I've spent three hours on about as many experience points. Progression is so slow. That is the one thing I wish hadn't been taken from the tabletop game. You spend so long getting your warband where you want it only for it all to be dashed out by a single, disastrous mistake. And knowing that makes you play even slower, which again, is fun, until you realize how much is ahead of you and how little your effort's built. Mobility is another way Mordheim keeps things dragging. The campaign maps in particular are too large for a regular unit to move from one objective to the next in less than three turns. And this is after you've cleared out the initial warband and are only dealing with the randomly placed reinforcements spawning in every turn. The handful of objectives being placed at all corners of these huge maps could almost fool you into splitting up your warband. But I wouldn't do that unless you'd like to risk a surprise Bloodletter or Demoness and the restart, in worse standing mind you, that will likely result from such a discovery. The video game just does not have the narrative to support this slow play. You likely don't have your mates with you, making up stories along with you, and the game doesn't do enough with character customization or campaign mission introductions to facilitate that even if you did. One of the many missed opportunities was having the stories cross over, having a canon sequence of events that the game shows you after you've seen every mission with every warband. Instead, it's more the like non-campaign missions: the same maps remixed with different enemies and different objectives. Sometimes the names stay the same between different warband's compaigns, this is true, but those too are rearranged in such a way that implies you're learning no more about these people or artifacts. That is the tragic upshot here: with a little bit of polish, a little more care, maybe a few more warbands or models pulled from still fertile lists of the tabletop game, every action taking forever to execute would build that great, nail biting feeling over a particular outcome or what might be hiding around the corner, instead of the mind-numbing task of tiptoeing from one side of the map to the other only to earn the right to do it again later.

Not a very tactically rivetting game but doesnt deserve bad reviews because of the rng of some guy whining he lost a 90% roll. The problem is that the atmosphere is nice but the combat slogs on. And on top of that when 70% of your time is simply just moving the characters between item/warpstone pickups where you have to manually move each character of your massive warband every time singularly, slowly, watch the animations for dropping and climbing, watch the animation for it picking up the warpstone,then you have to watch the ai do the same thing times 20-30 each mission . The tedium of this game is extremely grating.

I went into this hoping for something that captured even a fraction of what makes Mordheim on the tabletop so compelling. Instead, I found a game that misunderstands its own source material at almost every level. Combat has very little depth. Positioning, clever plays, or long term planning barely matter when most encounters boil down to swarming a target in melee and rolling the dice until it collapses. There’s no real sense of tactics just numbers and luck. The AI doesn’t help matters either. Enemies frequently get stuck, charge headlong into danger, and continue fighting as if self-preservation isn’t a concept, even while their allies are being cut down right beside them. Certain mission types actively highlight these problems. Scenarios where your forces begin spread out are widely avoided for a reason they’re poorly designed and expose how brittle the underlying systems are. Visually, the game is deeply underwhelming. The environments and character models look flat and lifeless, as if they were built with mobile hardware in mind. Materials lack depth, lighting feels unfinished, and nothing really pops on screen. This is made worse by an overbearing interface. Menus are awkward to navigate, and the screen is constantly cluttered with text, icons, and UI elements that drown out whatever atmosphere the game might have had. The design decisions are just as baffling. Being forced to maintain multiple leaders, with no option for a capable hero to step in, feels arbitrary and restrictive. Losing a fight is punishing in all the wrong ways you can’t cut your losses early, so defeat snowballs into widespread injuries. On top of that, enemy warbands may as well be disposable. You never develop rivalries, never encounter familiar foes again, and none of the persistent narrative that defines the tabletop experience exists here. Everything moves at a glacial pace, stretching already thin mechanics far beyond their breaking point. By the end, it’s less frustrating to quit than to push through another turn. As a tactics game, it fails. As an adaptation, it misses the heart of what made Mordheim special in the first place. I’d honestly recommend skipping it entirely.

I come back to this game so many times because of the pure enjoyment of having a real tactical game with decisions that have to be made for the good of the squad.Sometimes you have to fire your best character you have built due to an injury that destroys all the work you have put into them. My chief complaint is there are only 6 factions when there should be so many more,how i would love a real sequal to this game and i would buy it in an instant.This is a game that reaches the heights of what i want but sadly was never expanded upon correctly.I have played thousands of games in my 73 years of life but this will always be in my top 5. Highly recomended if you want a true tactical game in the rogue style in the Warhammer sigmar world

The game was fun but cheating A.Is have ruined the game. They always landed at least 7-9 stun-crit hits per battle, while my team only landed 0-2 hits every battle. Same thing happened to dodge chance. My units had 91% chance to hit but still missed 3 hits in a row. I'm ok if it happens sometimes, but this obviously happens too many times that makes so sick of playing this game!

Literally one of the worst games I've ever played. A faithless adaptation of the table top game, the RNG is wild, most of the warbands are missing things from the Table-top that helped with their balance (No warhounds for With Hunters, no slings for Skaven or Sisters, etc). The maps are repetitive, and gathering Wyrdstone as a part of gameplay ends up falling to the wayside because you HAVE to focus on combat. The AI doesn't need to worry about taking risks because their warbands are not consistent; getting regenerated every time that they play. Just to be clear, I tried both MM and Paranoia to see if they helped the balance. I also did a fix where you actually go into the code and turn off the Tyche RNG and replace with Unity's Native RNG, and even THAT didn't make the game playable. I'm also an avid fan of the TT version and was really hoping to see that but in video game format. I cannot understand why the devs didn't just take Mordheim, add a few of the balance fixes from the community, and make it digital. This game would have killed if they did that.

I have now clocked +1000 hours over the past 6 years and have completed the story quest with all 6 warbands, so I feel that I am now ready to comment on the game... First of all, this is difficult, until you learn the mechanics. My first warband was Sisters of Sigmar, and they were torn apparat in must skirmishes. I had to recruit new nuns often, and still then once I fielded were missing arms and legs. If you have ever played the tabletop game, it has a quite similar feel. However, I stuck with it and learned the mechanics. Today, I rarely loos a team member with any of my warbands, and find the game rather easy. Then most common reason for loosing a team member is a spellcaster being taken out by a backlash of their own magic. This game has given me many good hours of past time, and a good deal of gray hairs in the early days, but I can highly recommend it for anyone who enjoys a challenge. The real challenge is to solve the game mechanics, which will make this game very manageable.

They should call this 'Missheim'. As all you do is cycle through your units missing the enemy ones. Every turn takes an age and the AI also cheats in extraordinary ways. It's just a miserable experience and I don't know who this is meant to be fun for.

Behind a misleading exterior, Mordheim is a brilliantly designed game. Normally, when a game designer wants to scale difficulty, they introduce difficulty modes. Difficulty modes are usually unrelated to rewards. There is no risk/reward when deciding between easy or hard mode. Mordheim allows player to dynamically set their difficulty, constantly weighing risk and reward. Initially it appears that the player is under tremendous pressure. But that pressure is an illusion. There is no pressure. As long as the player is cautious and avoids taking chances, the player will always be safe and prosper. That sounds boring, right? If a player can dynamically set their difficulty, why won't they always choose the easy route? Because FOMO. Mordheim dangles tempting rewards, praises daring successes, and offers subtle chastisement for lost opportunities. While there is no technical pressure to live dangerously, there is emotional pressure to do so, and Mordheim excels at that. At first I thought Mordheim was slow and grindy, but once I better understood the game and settled into its flow, I didn't mind the pace because I realized I want this game to last a very long time.