"You cut off all of your fingers
Trade them in for dollar bills
[...]
You'll never read what you've written"
Marilyn Manson - Dried Up, Tied and Dead to the World
Apparently Mordheim: City of the Damned came out in 2015. By 2020 I was able to fish it out of the bargain bin for $7 and have been sitting on it since, occasionally favoring it with a wry, accusing glance. Having finally worked my way around to it, my apprehension proved well-founded. Utter failure would be one thing, but there's always something so... perverse... about marred quality, isn't there?
Fundamentally, this is a fairly standard team management TBS with the usual melee and ranged attacks, morale and armor values, buffs and disables, etc. No complaints, Warhammer wrote more than a few chapters into the book on the subject and Mordheim boasts a comprehensive enough stats and mechanics system to satisfy even my demands. Unfortunately some idiot project leader* also decided the game needed to look like an over-the-shoulder WoW-clone (instead of a top-down TBS) and most of the game's problems can be traced back to that development and system resource-sapping demand.
As a basic conceit, your team is one of scavengers fighting over a ruined city against other similar bands, forcing you to split your characters' actions between fighting and combing houses for loot. Problem #1: the combing. Your map view displays loot bags on the x/y plane, but houses come in multiple levels forcing you to run up and down trying to find the correct floor every single time. Aside from a gratuitous timesink, this also routinely trips up the AI mooks' pathfinding, and that's just the tip of the iceberg:
- unduly subtle loot graphics forcing you to pixel-hunt
- movement constantly getting stuck on corners
- unable to check loot encumbrance without looting something
- animations with overextended timesink prep/cleanup phases
- interface locked during animations !
- no minimap
- can't deploy via map, forcing you to arrow-key between deployment spots
- can't save during deployment
- long loads
- inexcusably long enemy moves (seriously, ten seconds for every enemy unit even if it's invisible)
- no tooltip descriptions of most items or skills, keep that wiki handy
- no enemy ambush range display, good luck trying to rangefind your charging
- line of sight impossible to guess at, due to the game lacking tiles even a pixel's difference alters your hit chance, and your view can be blocked even when there's nothing to block it
- compounding the glitchy movement, the lack of tiles to calculate move range forces a system where move points are (potentially) used up one by one, meaning if you want to recalculate you need to run back and pick up your first breadcrumb
- even basic looting has you tiptoeing a pixel this way and that to get the interface to lock on; it can't even detect loot you're standing on top of
(note the lack of highlighting)
Between combats you get some decent mechanics like wound treatment, loot sales, skill training all taking time to complete - but just as in Battletech, one can't entirely praise a TBS based on its managerial side. And compared to Battletech, Mordheim is far more luck-dependent. Your units can get knocked out in four hits or so and have one to at most two attacks each at 50-75% chance to hit on average. On top of this, the morale system features an all-or-nothing rout mechanic by which getting three characters knocked out almost immediately imposes an instant loss. As if that weren't retarded enough, remember you need to loot during missions, meaning that by routing your enemy you're still missing out on loot. Yes, you heard right: the rout mechanic ensures that EVEN IF YOU WIN, YOU STILL LOSE! Your best hope is for the idiot AI to get stuck on terrain so you can run back and forth to stash more loot, round by time-consuming round. Don't even get me started on the very strict level scaling unduly restricting your choices (cf. Battle Brothers.)
Like Darkest Dungeon a year later, Mordheim autosaves constantly to prevent you from cheating by reloading. Except where DD's simple visuals allowed for seamless quicksaves, Mordheim's 3D graphics pad every single animation and command with even more time-wasting pauses, to the point that even if you're willing to stomach the luck-based gameplay and glitchy movement, you'll despair simply at characters dragging their damn feet! Pity, because as a TBS it might've been interesting enough, but Mordheim's only real value now seems as an object lesson in over-reaching for glitz and thereby poisoning each and every one of your actual game mechanics.
(* Or maybe Games Workshop demanded the over-the-shoulder view in licensing.)
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