In addition to the decisions that you make on the battlefield, you’ll need to
manage your forces between battles. You will carry a persistent force pool with
you through the campaign and will need to select which of these units will join
you in the next battle. You can make stops in towns to recruit additional
forces, replace your losses to fill out your ranks, and upgrade the equipment
used by your troops. All of this costs gold which is earned in battle, with
additional bonus gold coming in the form of drops by defeated enemies. The
dropped bonus gold is a bit of a pain to collect, though. Only a hero can
collect drops, which means that in the heat of battle you need to disengage a
hero from the action to send him on a fetch errand. You don’t have the option of
waiting for things to quiet down first because the mission can end before you’ve
grabbed all of the booty still lying on the ground. An even more annoying aspect
of the game’s drops is that sometimes special items such as weapons, armor, or
wands are dropped which can be equipped by your heroes. The problem is that you
don’t know what an item is until you pick it up, and once you do it binds to the
hero who picked it up. It’s frustrating to have a knight with a powerful magical
staff sitting unused in his pack while your mage walks around sporting enhanced
armor.
Part of the allure of the Warhammer war game is that it is usually played
with tabletop miniatures. Players would spend a lot of time hand painting their
troops before facing off against another gamer. That aspect of the game has been
brought into Mark of Chaos. The units in the game are very detailed and unlike a
lot of strategy games they look really good when the camera is zoomed in all of
the way. Furthermore the game provides an excellent unit editor that really lets
you customize the look of your armies.
Mark of Chaos includes support for multiplayer gaming, and in the long run
this is where you’ll spend most of your time with the game as you’ll likely not
have the motivation to play through the campaign a second time. Multiplayer
games let you bring a customized force into battle by providing each player with
a set number of points to be spent on buying units for your force. Powerful
units cost more than weak ones, of course, and you’ll have to find the right
balance between and army of a handful of champions and one made of legions of
cannon fodder. There are several game modes supported, so there’s more to the
multiplayer game than simple annihilation of all opposition. You can take part
in siege/defend battles, or fight to control strategic points that generate
reinforcements for their owners. I wish that I could have spent more time with
the multiplayer game, but I experienced a number of issues attempting to log in
and connect to games. Once these issues are patched over though, I can see this
game becoming a hit with the online strategy gamer crowd.
In The End, This Game Hath Been Rated:
84%. Mark of Chaos is an enjoyable strategy game,
even for those new to the world of Warhammer.
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