It's bizarre.
There's bugs, old bugs, still present in the game. Difficulty is frontloaded with cheap and ultimately uninteresting mechanics (more HP, more damage, more guys) to the degree it would be patently unfair in the hands of a crack, highly competent AI. The AI only gives you a challenging surprise maybe 10% of the time. (The RNG provides the rest.) The game has divided loyalties between SP and MP. Mechanics are on the "inelegant and numbers-heavy" side of things. The UI is a console UI for a game that isn't on consoles yet. The devs have an unfortunate preoccupation with trying to be hardcore while not having the talent to execute that vision in an entertaining way.
And yet, I can't stop fucking playing it.
Maybe I'd put it like this: aesthetically Mordheim is pretty much everything I want short of "that AAA shine." Everything looks right, gives off the right vibe. It's impossible not to get at least a little immersed once you're in the battlescape. I think it's impossible for any Mordheim fan to not appreciate the game on that front. Mechanically though it's cludgy and favors randonmness and percentages over novelty.
If I took all the negatives from my first paragraph in isolation, I'd not be playing the game. And yet there's more to it than that. There's real artistry and love of the game here. And while maybe I'm just a sucker for managing a team of fighters and watching their stats steadily increase, it's kept me playing for over 40 hours.
So in my "final" analysis, this IS a game that scratches that Mordheim itch. When I'm in love with Mordheim, this is the game I'm going to go to, and it's going to satisfy that urge. It may not do it perfectly. It may not help in making me feel like a brilliant player. It may frustrate me with the random hardcoreness of the game, the AI that needs help to provide a competitive game until it careens off the difficulty scale at the upper end, the bugs that I assume will eventually be ironed out.
But every time I'm actually playing I'm dialed in to the experience. I enjoy the tactical and strategic gameplay despite all the shortcomings and I can't help but want to play another match. Maybe I'm just an idiot though and have bad taste.
It's not a game you'll love right out of the box. But I think it's a game you can easily learn to enjoy and appreciate IF you're a fan of the setting and IF you're willing to put the time in to know the game beyond more than a cursory 45 minute glance. It takes significantly more play time than that to appreciate everything the game offers, the way it all eventually blends. The fun is there. It's just not a flawless Mordheim game, and likely never will be. When it's on sale for $10 to $20, I think it's an ok buy and does provide long-term playability (especially if you decide to get into MP.) $40 can be a bit steep for a game I have to give this many qualifiers for.
In the end, I think the devs had a really ambitious goal in making this game and how they were making it. I said a long time back, this seemed like the kind of game that could crush a new dev house. And I definitely believe they bit off more than they could chew. That said, I think they made it through to the other side, albeit looking bruised. If anything Mordheim: City of the Damned showed me that mechanics which look good on paper can be a lot harder to translate into fun in a video game than you might think. They could have plopped Mordheim's table top mechanics directly into the game and I think you'd have had some of the same problems.
In some ways, despite all the reworks to the core game concept for the PC, I think their desire to stay really faithful to Mordheim's design is the reason the game is like it is. They translated the table top experience to a video game to a fault. They expected, I think, gameplay to take the long form, which it still totally can in MP. But in SP the performance the AI needed to really fulfill that was beyond their reach. It was just too challenging to make an AI that:
-Doesn't blob up and zerg rush the player.
-Doesn't get spread out and feed one guy at a time into the meatgrinder.
-Doesn't make the player wait an eternity to find it.
-Gathers warpstone and explores just like a player does.
-Builds fighters in an interesting and balanced way.
-Makes mistakes.
-Doesn't make too many mistakes.
-Uses all the skills and tactics a player would.
And so instead of focusing on making a fun, playable AI that could handle the environment it operated in gracefully, they tried to make a complicated human-like AI that wasn't up to snuff, and resulted in a lot of game-y fixes and band aids to get it playable (adequately to poorly depending on how challenged you need to be.) And so now we have an AI that:
-Makes too many boneheaded decisions/mistakes.
-Doesn't really build interesting or really effective fighters.
-Spreads out THEN zerg rushes the player 1 or 2 guys at a time. The real challenge comes in killing them before they bunch up to the point you're fighting the whole team.
-Doesn't really bother with the appearance of doing anything other than trying to kill the player's fighters.
And instead of long-form play against the AI, which is what I think most players were hoping for, we have these short, brutal, all-in team fight missions with a direct, blunt AI.
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Topic: Mordheim - City of the Damned. Team-based looting and murder simulator. (Read 60919 times)