Warhammer Quest 2 review
:: SLOW STRATEGYPrice: $4.99
Version: 1.004
App Reviewed on: iPad Air 2
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Rodeo Games was an important developer in the history of mobile games because they were responsible for bringing early strategy games to mobile and showing their potential. Releases like the Hunters series and Warhammer Quest set the bar for mobile strategy games when they came out, but they have not aged well, primarily because better strategy games keep hitting the App Store every day. Although Rodeo Games is no more, Perchang has picked up the Warhammer Quest lineage and come out with Warhammer Quest 2: The End Times, a turn-based strategy game that falls well below the bar of current strategy game design and just looks and feels extremely old.
Drop the hammer
In Warhammer Quest 2, you manage a party of up to four adventurers as they go from dungeon to dungeon, clearing them of rats, beastmen, minotaurs, and all kinds of other evil creatures. There’s a story here to tie your adventures together, but it’s all pretty bland text about an evil king and a lot of random townfolk saying some variation of “hey, adventurers, go here and do something about it.”
This is mostly fine though, since Warhammer Quest 2 is more about turn-based strategic combat than story. The game features ten missions in its main story, but also has side quests and random events full of enemies for you to cut down. No matter what mission you’re taking on, you can expect to outfit your group before diving into combat that feels almost exactly like that of the first Warhammer Quest.
Dungeon crawl
When fighting in Warhammer Quest 2, you are in charge of managing the action points of each of your fighters. On your turn, you can choose to move, attack, or use items and abilities, but each of them costs a certain amount of points, which limits what each of your fighters can do before the enemy gets to go.
It’s an effective system, but it’s also one you’ve seen time and time again, whether in old Rodeo games or elsewhere. Seeing it crop up in Warhammer Quest 2 with little to no changes to it is pretty disappointing, particularly since it’s also paired with plastic-y models that animate poorly and move incredibly slowly. This combination of familiar and slow-moving mechanics makes playing Warhammer Quest 2 feel like an almost constant slog.
Bugbears, bugs, and blandness
Not only does Warhammer Quest 2 feel old and slow, but it’s also got some systemic issues that make it even harder to enjoy. On the design end of things, the whole game feels like random systems that are thrown together with some procedural generation, and it leads to the game feeling overwhelmingly dull. Every mission, no matter the setup, feels interchangeable with another, as do the rewards at the end of them. At any given point in the game, nothing feels terribly different from where you started, which makes advancing in the game feel pretty disappointing.
To make matters worse, Warhammer Quest 2 also suffers from a fair share of technical problems. Most of these are relatively harmless visual bugs: The shamelessly Game of Thrones-style overworld occasionally drops tons of animation frames; certain attack animations don’t always trigger; and character models occasionally disappear when choosing your party. These problems can definitely annoy, but not as much as Warhammer Quest 2’s save bug, which can force you to replay large sections of the game despite the fact that the game tells you it’s saving your game every turn.
The bottom line
From top to bottom, Warhammer Quest 2 is a disappointing game. Its combat feels old, its systems unremarkable, its visuals stilted, and its performance unstable. On top of this, the whole game plays extremely slowly, which just adds to the suffering of playing through it. Don’t bother with it.