When I first played Mordheim: City of the Damned, I fell in love. After my first session, I wanted to keep going back to it. Unfortunately, when I booted the game up for a second time I found that I may not be able to continue playing my campaign.
Mordheim at first glance seems like a really fun game. I never played the tabletop version, but I did play Necromunda when it was initially released, and this game gives me the same vibes. You build a small warband and battle it out over resources and scraps of land across the city of Mordheim. As you fight, your warband gains experience and equipment, slowly improving over time.
There are several tutorials you can play through before starting the game, which seemed daunting at first. But I found that once I had learned the simple movement and attack systems, I could jump right in and start learning the game by playing it instead.
The core game is RNG-based strategy, similar in style to the newer X-Com titles. Of course, this had me hooked, since the X-Com games are some of my favourites. I found some reviews that got annoyed by the random nature of the game, but I love this kind of randomness in my games. A huge part of it is learning how to mitigate it with clever selections in attributes and skills as your characters grow.
Being set in the fantasy world of Warhammer, the combat is much more focused on melee combat and magic. Still, there are ranged weapons you can use to pick people off from a distance, and this adds a layer of strategy to the game. I found it a satisfying strategy to sneak up on enemy archers and forcing them to fight with weapons they were less experienced with.
If I had one criticism of the game, I would say that the graphics are very dark and murky. The games I played were always set at night, and with the gritty realism style the game goes for, it makes it hard to see the details. Whenever it was my turn I’d find it hard to spot enemies that were right in front of a character without first checking the map. I feel like it would have been a great improvement to have things just a bit brighter or more colourful so you could make movement decisions without having to constantly check the map. Ironically, I feel this would be a benefit to immersion rather than a detriment.
Still, that’s a minor point compared to the big one. The second time I loaded into the game I was unable to load my campaign. The load screen would finish, but clicking to continue wouldn’t work. I managed to get around this bug after restarting it in compatibility mode for Windows 7 and played another game.
I was thankful I had figured it out and thoroughly enjoyed sending my Skaven Warband after a tougher group of human archers. They were tougher than my warriors, and managed to give one a serious head wound, but we still managed to take out their leader and send them fleeing from the battle.
For fighting such tough opponents my Skaven were awarded with extra experience and I was able to upgrade them with new skills. Then I got my first story mission, and the story text made it sound exciting. We would be sneaking through the sewers, stealing explosives and destroying our enemy from beneath by blowing them up with their own bombs.
Then, it failed to load into the mission. I went away for a while to give it time to load, but it was stuck on 88%. I was forced to restart the game. Hopefully just another minor glitch. But then I couldn’t load my campaign. Again.
I decided not to give up so easily, and found a few forum threads with things to try and get around these loading bugs. Unfortunately nothing I tried worked. It was starting to get to a point where I was spending more time trying to get the game to run and less time playing it.
Disappointed, I gave up. I wanted to keep playing this game. I’d had a lot of fun in the short time I played it. I can’t say for sure if it stays that way, and I guess I may never find out. Hopefully they may fix this bug one day, but until then it’s time to move on to the next game in my library.
