Altough it crashed to desktop quite a few times while I was playing it, I really enjoyed my time with Warhammer Quest and plan to sink some more as soon as I have the chance. It’s a great little RPG with interesting mechanics and hooks to keep me playing for quite a while
In WQ, you have a party of four, a wizard, a ranger, a berserker and a fighter. You use your heroes to do quests, defeat enemies and clear dungeons, accumulating loot to sell and better gear for your character. You can also buy more heroes for some real world cash, and I wish you could trade gold instead. Not only for heroes, but you can buy quests, gear, gold and even ‘kill everything’ items for real money. I kinda wish there were other choices. But the game is free, and so far not having spent money didn’t cause me any problems. One of the interesting tricks of this game is how you need to flip your iPad’s rotation to switch between the dungeon view and your character sheet. That’s neat (except that I usually lock my orientation, so there should be a button, or the like, to switch)
In towns, you’ll find shops (to sell and buy things), a place to pray (which I didn’t use), a training ground (to raise your level) and from there, you can go adventure in a few places. Usually you’ll have a main quest, but you always have a few choices randomly assigned. Sometimes their reward will be a new piece of gear that you could use to improve one of your characters, and that constant allure of better loot is a big part of why I like WQ, you can do the main quests, but you can also just clear random dungeons. You still need to mind that random bad events can occur while you walk around the map, from losing money to inflicting ailments on your characters, it’s a bit annoying, since you can’t do anything but pay/lose health
Dungeons are pretty fun, you tap your characters to move them around a certain number of squares. When they hit the edge of a room, they reveal the next one, sometimes prompting a battle. I usually get all my party close to a door before going into the next room and that can take some extra time, but each turn you take moving can bring bad events and random encounters, so I get why you can’t just move infinitely outside of battles. I wish that the end turn button was permanently there, because having to find the right spot to tap to end my turn is annoying. The Warhammer system is there in some form with wounds and melee skill and balistic skill and attacks per round and toughness, all very well explained in tutorial pages you get when you unlock new mechanics/skills/effects
The fights are pretty good, you place your characters in choke points, use spells and ranged attacks, kill enemy after enemy in melee and then heal your wounds with your cleric/mage guy. Reinforcements can sometimes pop out of nowhere, even between your fighters, and it gets a bit old, when random encounters start or reinforcements arrive, your strategy needs to shift because half your party won’t be as tough as the other half. At least it keeps the player on their toes. That being said, I’m a bit confused about the ‘free’ mage they give you in your party, it feels like it was designed for you to want to replace it, it uses “winds of magic” which you can get between 0 and 6 per turn at level one, for instance. Your spells cost between 2 and 6 and all power left at the end goes away. It’s a bit annoying, you get greater power after a while and you even get reserves to help you through, but the spells have some drawbacks (friendly fire, random values) and the other mages look better. What irks me the most is the fact that your magic will go down to 0 whenever you get ambushed or reinforcements come in. Why is that?At least when you die, if you’re not playing at the highest difficulty, you don’t lose your character forever, you just forfeit that experience for the dungeon.
Needless to say, I’m having a blast with Warhammer Quest and I really want to see what’s up ahead in term of skills, dungeons, gear and enemies. Maybe it gets unfairly hard after a while, maybe there’s a point in which you can’t win without paying, but for the ten hours I’ve had with it for free so far, it’s a great iPad RPG.
