Rating of
3.5/5
Of Tabletops and Misspent Youth
Nelson Schneider - wrote on 12/07/16
Ah, “Warhammer Quest” (“WQ”), Games Workshop’s 1995 spiritual successor to “Advanced HeroQuest,” which, itself, was an expansion for Games Workshop’s and Milton Bradley’s 1989 board game collaboration, “HeroQuest” the game that began my death spiral of nerd degeneracy. All in all, 1989 was a very bad year for me, as it marked my introduction to both videogames and RPGs at the tender age of 10, both obsessions to which I have devoted most of my life, with nothing to show for it.
Regardless, without “HeroQuest” to serve as a gateway drug for tabletop RPGs, I don’t know how I would have survived the ‘90s. As a child in the ‘80s, I was desperately, painfully bored ALL the time, yet the nerdist activities of reading licensed Dungeons & Dragons novels, playing “HeroQuest,” and occasionally dinking around with the old NES dulled the pain and provided a blessed distraction to look forward to every evening and weekend, even as the boredom of childhood blossomed into the bullying of teen-dom.
Despite my nostalgia for “HeroQuest,” both advanced and regular, I never actually played “WQ” in its board game incarnation. It released in 1995 and Games Workshop – the British competitor for Gary Gygax’s TSR – had already demonstrated a cycle of releasing over-hyped games only to stop supporting them within a few years. I was gearing up for college and had already switched to Advanced Dungeons & Dragons 2nd Edition, so “WQ” seemed like pointless and redundant purchase… even moreso in hindsight, as Games Workshop discontinued the game in 1998!
However, when I saw that Games Workshop has licensed Chilled Mouse and Rodeo Games to create a cRPG version of “WQ,” which was originally released on mobile phones before being ported to Steam, I jumped at the chance to dive back in, albeit temporarily, to the Games Workshop universe that served as such a large part of my foundational nerd self-discovery.
Presentation
“WQ” looks just like a board game. While I’m not as intimately familiar with the dungeon tiles used in “WQ” as I am with “Advanced HeroQuest’s” tiles, the digital tiles in the PC version of the game look so authentic that I could practically smell the glue and ink used to make the originals. Instead fixed-pose miniatures, the PC version of “WQ” employs fully animated polygon models for both enemies and heroes… well, they’re mostly animated, as I noticed that certain Night Goblins don’t have a walking animation and seem to glide across the floor.
The audio is well done and provides great ambiance that the tabletop version never had. The soundtrack features a number of catchy, thematic tunes that feel right at home in the original grim-dark universe of Warhammer Fantasy. Sound effects are appropriate, and it’s great to hear the visceral grunts and groans of Warhammer Greenskins as they get pummeled in combat.
Technically, “WQ” is a very solid game. In a recent patch, Chilled Mouse even added full controller support, making the game very pleasant to play. Unfortunately, there are a couple of oversights in the controller support that still require the player to touch an icky PC mouse to click on menu options, but the oversight in minor and could be fixed easily in another patch.
Story
Unlike Dungeons & Dragons, “HeroQuest” and “WQ” were never particularly story-deep games, leaning more toward being board games than role-playing games. “WQ” features a three-chapter narrative where a team of generic Warriors (the player’s stable of characters) travels across three regions of the Old World, taking on adventures in the settlements they discover and delving into random dungeons in search of loot that will make them stronger so they can delve into harder random dungeons in search of loot… to make them stronger…-er.
Each of the first two chapters features 9 Settlement Quests, while the third chapter features 13. Settlement Quests form the meat and potatoes of the game’s narrative, revealing snippets of Warhammer Fantasy lore and setting up future dungeon excursions via foreshadowing. Upon completing all of the Settlement Quests in a region, the Warriors will randomly encounter an NPC that reveals the Final Quest in that region, which invariably involves stopping a deadly threat the civilized towns and villages of said region, whether by Greenskins (Orcs & Goblins), the rat-like Skaven, or the Undead.
The bulk of the story material that encourages the Warriors to delve into dungeons is, however, form-letter quality stuff involving either rescuing a ____________ from a dungeon, killing a ___________ in a dungeon, or recovering and keeping a magical ____________ in a dungeon. Some of these form letters even have minor typos in them, such as the oversight of blanking out a reference to an enchanted blade in quest text that can refer to any magical weaponry or armor.
To be fair, nobody ever played a Games Workshop tabletop game for the gripping collaborative storytelling – it was all about the tactical battling and Munchkinism. And “WQ” captures that feeling quite well. Even without a super-compelling narrative, I spent nearly 70 hours maxing out my team of Warriors, which equates to roughly that many dungeon crawls, at 45 minutes to 1.5 hours each.
Gameplay
On the tabletop, “WQ” (and “Advanced HeroQuest”) was a game of tactical dungeon crawling through procedurally-generated maps created by throwing dice and consulting charts to determine both the size and shape of a dungeon as well as the inhabitants (enemies) contained in each room and corridor. These tabletop games could be played like a standard tabletop RPG, with one player acting as a Game Master, but they could also be played without a game master, even making solo play an option for the chronically-friendless RPG nerd.
As a cRPG, “WQ” sticks to its board game roots incredibly well. It randomly generates all of the dungeons, randomly populates all of the rooms, randomly hands out loot after every battle, and randomly springs surprise encounters on the player’s team of Warriors. This faithfulness to the original is both good and bad, as Games Workshop’s tabletop games had their fair share of warts. On top of the inherent flaws in the source material, “WQ” on PC doesn’t show any of its dice rolls, so players might feel that a string of bad ‘rolls’ are actually the computer ‘deciding’ to dump on the player rather than relying on truly random chance.
Every dungeon in “WQ” starts the player’s team of 4 Warriors in a corridor. Upon stepping on the last square in that corridor’s tile, another tile is randomly generated and populated, allowing the Warriors to proceed. Sometimes forked corridors appear, allowing the Warriors to go in one of two directions, only one of which actually leads to the end of the dungeon and the Objective Room.
Every turn the Warriors spend in the dungeon, it is possible for a random encounter to occur. These encounters can range from events with invisible NPCs or obstacles to attacks by groups of random enemies. Perhaps the most annoying thing about random encounters in “WQ” is that they can and DO happen at any time, even in the middle of combat with an extant group of enemies. Nothing can take down a group of novice Warriors faster than the group of giant spiders and bats they’re fighting suddenly receiving backup from a vampire and half a dozen zombies! The worst part of random backup appearing in battle is that longer battles (which indicate that the player is struggling) tend to trigger backup to appear more often.
Each turn, the player is free to move all 4 of their Warriors and use the Warriors’ abilities however they wish at any time, thus it is possible to move, perform attacks, cast spells, and use items within a single turn with no particular order enforced. At the start of each turn, Warrior wizards also roll randomly to see how much magical power they are able to draw from the Winds of Magic. Higher-level wizards also have a built-in Power Store that they can spend from in addition to their Winds of Magic roll, but the Power Store doesn’t regenerate until the end of the dungeon. In general, once a character has attacked, they are no longer free to move for the rest of the turn, and characters that have attacked or have been attacked in melee tend to get the Pinned condition, which prevents them from moving away from the source of the Pinning. In general, it feels like characters in “WQ” get to do a LOT more stuff during a turn than characters in Dungeons & Dragons, as they can just keep doing things until they’re all out of things to do instead of being limited to one move and one action – characters can attack with both melee and ranged weapons in the same turn, and wizards (in addition to attacking) can cast multiple spells until they are out of Wind and Store. However, wizards get heartily screwed over by random encounters, as those – inexplicably – skip the dice roll for drawing Winds of Magic for the turn.
After the player has done all they can do with their Warriors, they end their turn and the computer-controlled enemies get a turn to do all that they can do. Enemy spellcasters are particularly annoying, and both spellcasting and ranged enemies tend to spawn as far away from the Warriors as possible, as ranged attacks and spells are based solely on line of sight and don’t take distance into consideration at all.
Advancing the Warriors is a bit primitive compared to more modern, less board-gamey RPGs. While the original “WQ” just required Warriors to spend gold to level-up, “WQ” on PC requires Warriors to earn experience by killing enemies (and actually dealing the deathblow personally) before paying gold to level-up. This need for both experience AND gold causes “WQ” to become fairly grindy mid-game, as the Warriors won’t be strong enough to tackle subsequent Settlement Quests without spending a lot of time doing random dungeons in pursuit of experience, gold, and better loot.
Loot is divided into three tiers. Each Warrior can have 4 common, 4 rare, and 4 legendary items equipped at once, and each Warrior has further class limitations on which items they can equip (Don’t expect a wizard to swing a two-handed greataxe!). While some items of note can be purchased in settlements for gold, the vast majority of worthwhile loot comes from dungeons which specify a specific piece of loot as a reward (unfortunately, the stats of said piece of loot, while always the same, are kept a secret until the player has earned said loot, which can lead to some disappointments).
“WQ” has received a lot of negative feedback from players due to being a port of a mobile game. We all know what that means: shallow gameplay, microtransactions, pay2win nonsense. Well, “WQ” does have microtransactions, however the PC version allows players to gain access to all of the extra Warriors and legendary loot by purchasing the ‘Deluxe’ version of the game (which I did) instead of buying them piecemeal. Anyone who played Games Workshop games in the ‘90s, however, shouldn’t consider these microtransactions for extra Warriors and items to be out-of-character, as that’s exactly how Games Workshop ran things in the physical world, with fairly expensive miniatures and character cards bundled together to expand the tabletop version of the game. I found the Deluxe version’s content to be very nice, with a number of excellent Warriors and legendary items that remained relevant all the way to the end of the game. The extra Warriors even extended the game for me, as grinding my whole team up to the level cap of 8 took significantly longer with 11 Warriors instead of 4.
Overall
In general, “Warhammer Quest” provides plenty of (somewhat repetitive, somewhat grindy) tactical combat in the dungeons of Games Workshop’s Warhammer Fantasy universe. For those who got their RPG start with a Games Workshop product, the nostalgia runs fairly deep in this game. For those who know nothing of Games Workshop or Warhammer Fantasy, “WQ” is a competent port of an actually good mobile game that won’t win any awards for its writing, but is a good way to dip a toe into an iconic and classic setting.
Presentation: 3.5/5
Story: 3/5
Gameplay: 3.5/5
Overall (not an average): 3.5/5
