Warhammer: Mark of Chaos - Battle March

Written by Jason Cisarano  on December 31, 2008

Review: Let loose the dogs... er, orcs... of war!

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To keep things interesting, Battle March includes a variety of mission types, ranging from the usual Уdestroy everything in sightФ battles to escort, protection, and even stealth missions as Dark Elves. Some encounters put you on one side of the castle walls trying to breech them with your cannon or scale them with siege ladders. Others have you inside the castle, raining arrows down on enemies as they approach your stronghold. Another battle has you fending off waves of enemies as one of your heroes undergoes a transformation into a demigod of sorts. And in several levels, your heroes go on dungeon crawls that resemble RPG adventures with individual monsters to fight and loot to gather. Building an adventuring party is an unexpected, fun shift from the large-scale battles that make up the bulk of the game's missions.

The online multiplayer feature offers one-on-one play in on a wide variety of maps and in a selection of game modes, but the most exciting multiplayer item is the brand new World Domination mode. In this system, a central server tracks the results of on-line battles as factions vie for control over the domains that make up the jigsaw-puzzle-like map. If a faction wins enough battles in a domain, control over the area goes to that group, and dominating a domain earns a faction bonuses in areas like morale, spell mastery, and gold mining. On the other hand, factions who own fewer or no domains get bonuses to their accuracy and armor in battle, presumably because they're hungrier for a victory.

My biggest gripe with the game is its load times. There are load screens for everything, and even some load screens have their own load screens! The game has a beautiful campaign screen where you move your army from battle to encampment back into battle. It's a combination of a bird's eye view of the terrain and an ancient map that's just plain cool to look at. Unfortunately, it takes a few minutes to load. Then, when you enter a battle, that takes a few minutes to load. And after a battle, you might get a cutscene, complete with grainy, muddy visuals (at least when played at my monitor's 1650 x 1080 native resolution), which also take a few minutes to load. Since the game is going for a quicker pacing with its short battles, all this loading really throws a monkey wrench into the works. When you fight the duels, which only take two to three minutes at the most, you'll literally spend more time loading than playing. Such is the price of beauty, I guess, since many of the units and landscapes deserve the name Уeye candy.Ф