The Warhammer universe of Games Workshop has plenty of board games based on it. Recently, a lot of them are being adapted to the digital medium with partial success, since the feel of playing a board game and a video game is quite different. Warhammer Quest is one of these adaptations that was originally made for iOS devices by Rodeo Games and has now been ported to the PC by Twistplay.
At its core, the gameplay of Warhammer Quest is a simple turn based affair with limited movement, limited attacks and a restriction of the magical resource called Winds of Power. The game involves a lot of chance with every minor thing dictated by a Random Number Generator (RNG). Every attack has a chance of missing and if it hits, there’s a range to the amount of damage done. Even healing actions have this type of randomness to them and some spells even have a chance to cause harm instead of healing. This core gameplay has been adapted well to the PC and can make the randomly generated dungeons quite addictive to loot.
The tutorial of Warhammer Quest does a good job of familiarising you with the basics of the game and ends on a tragic note. The game’s map is divided into three regions with multiple settlements in each that you can visit. Each settlement has its own unique quest or quests in addition to the randomly generated item quests that you can reset to play again once you finish. Completing all the unique quests of a region unlocks the hard final quest for that region. Your movement on this map is limited only to your quest destination and to the nearest settlements connected by road. You might also have a random encounter along the way.
Every settlement in Warhammer Quest has a Market, an Adventurers’ Guild, a Training Ground and a Temple. The Market has three types of shops namely one for consumables, one for weapons and one shop unique to each settlement where you can buy items for your party for the ingame currency of Gold. The common Green items are the cheapest, the uncommon Blue items cost more and the rare Orange items are the most expensive. The Adventurers’ Guild is the place where you can recruit new members to your party and retire old ones. When your warriors have gathered enough experience to level up, they can go to the Training Grounds and pay someone to teach them new skills. The cost increases with each level. Your warriors can also visit the temple to seek the favour of the Gods by making a small monetary offering. If the RNG Gods hear your prayers, your warrior might get a boost to a stat for the next Dungeon. There’s also a chance of some event happening while your warrior visits one of these places in a settlement that can usually result in a handicap for the next dungeon or a loss of Gold. Some settlement quests might require you to deposit Gold before you can accept them.
Your party of Warriors shares a common inventory of 24 slots and each warrior can equip up to 12 items of which 4 each must be common, uncommon and rare. There are different types of warriors of which you can recruit one of each class in your party, but can only choose four for each quest. The classes are Dwarf Ironbreaker, Wood Elf Waywatcher, Marauder, Grey Wizard, Shadow Warrior, Witch Hunter, Dwarf Trollslayer, Warrior Priest, Archmage, Bright Wizard and Ogre Irongut. Each class has unique upgrades to its skill tree and some equipment may be shared by more than one class. Every warrior in Warhammer Quest can gather experience to level up till a maximum of Level 8. The game also has achievements for reaching level 6 though. Even levelling up results in a random skill being learned by your warrior, such is the integration of randomness in the game. You will usually want to move your party around as a group, as isolated warriors will find it tough to beat enemies by themselves, especially since they cannot be assured of a hit or a deathblow on every attack. This means that you are restricted in your movement per turn based on your slowest warrior.
In terms of attacks, your warriors are able to melee any unit within one square. They can also perform ranged attacks on other units in their line of sight. Performing either of these attacks robs a warrior of all their movement points, though enemies have a chance to pin them at the start of a turn as well. A warrior can be unpinned if the enemy that pinned it is killed by another. Magical attacks do not restrict movement and only require line of sight, which means your magic users can hit and run. Enemies have some magical attacks that can prevent your warriors from performing any actions and this can be partly remedied by killing that enemy. Your warriors will be downed if they lose all their health, called Wounds in the game. They can be resurrected by healing, but there is a chance of permanent death on higher difficulties.
Warhammer Quest doesn’t seem to have much of a central story and the storytelling is limited to the individual quests themselves. After a few dungeons, you will find that the same few lines are repeated over and over again with just substitutions for item or character names. Even the lines for the random encounters that occur in dungeons are recycled. Oh yes, the game won’t allow you to wait indefinitely in a dungeon till your health is full, as there is a chance of a random encounter taking place or your party being ambushed. When that happens, your magic user is crippled in that he cannot harvest the Winds of Power to cast spells. This does make your progress rather slow and can prove challenging in higher level dungeons.
The rooms of a dungeon are also randomly generated and there are a few types like long corridors, turning corridors, junction rooms, small rooms, large rooms and two-way forks. It is the dungeons that show some of the flaws of the PC port of Warhammer Quest. The art for the rooms is lower resolution and looks rather blurry on higher resolutions like 1080p, 1440p and 4K. This can be an eyesore initially, but can be ignored later on. The warrior models are 3D and are animated well. However, they only react when an enemy lands a hit and there is no animation for the enemy attack missing or being dodged. Even the rooms do not show any different art as is mentioned in the story text, which can be confusing at times.
The music in Warhammer Quest is decent and suits the mood of the game. The sound effects are well done though the walking sound can get annoying after a while. Curiously there is no sound to acknowledge the ending of your turn.
The game has plenty of flaws and rough edges, but the most annoying part is probably the amount of content locked away behind a microtransaction paywall. It would have been better if Warhammer Quest’s PC port were designed to exclude these, given the small amount of content offered by the base game, which is about one third of the total content. This paltry amount is certainly not worth the price, which should have been much lower accordingly. The base game limits you to only one region of three with just 9 unique settlement quests and a roster of 4 hero classes to choose from. You also get only two types of enemies in dungeons. The game doesn’t nag you for purchasing the additional content, which might be the only good thing about its microtransaction implementation.
In addition to the low resolution art, another bug we found in Warhammer Quest was that dragging items from your inventory to your warrior, items would sometimes end up stuck outside a slot and would require switching the selected warrior to fix. Since the game offers no manual save option, it might sometimes load up ghosts of defeated monsters when you start up the game in the middle of a dungeon. The text in the quest story and the journal scrolls down to limited lines, which can sometimes mean that some parts of the text body are never shown to the player. The lack of a scroll bar is also annoying since one can’t easily tell when there is more text in the description. One cannot end a turn without clicking on one of the warriors first and then unselecting them so that the option shows up, which we feel is an oversight.
Warhammer Quest is a decent game when you consider all the content that it offers. It is quite simple, with a small learning curve and has the potential to immerse you in its gameplay. The franchise licence has been used well and the experience strikes a fine balance between the feel of a video game and a board game. The implementation of microtransactions is what really hurts this game due to the sheer amount of content locked away behind a paywall. The porting team should have put a bit more effort into adapting this game from a mobile device to a PC especially when it came to the art and textual lore. The sheer amount of Random Chance used in the game is mindboggling and makes for a relatively unique experience, which doesn’t get boring for quite a few hours.
