WARMACHINE: Tactics

 PC
User Score
5.5

Mixed or average reviews- based on 14 Ratings

User score distribution:
  1. Positive: 5 out of 14
  2. Mixed: 3 out of 14
  3. Negative: 6 out of 14

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  1. EmraldArcher
    Jan 23, 2015
    0
    First off, if you are looking for a direct translation of the tabletop game to a virtual medium you are going to be sorely disappointed (although you are probably going to be disappointed anyway). There are several major changes to core elements of the tabletop game that make this a very different experience. Most notable are the complete lack of system damage for warjacks, a transition toFirst off, if you are looking for a direct translation of the tabletop game to a virtual medium you are going to be sorely disappointed (although you are probably going to be disappointed anyway). There are several major changes to core elements of the tabletop game that make this a very different experience. Most notable are the complete lack of system damage for warjacks, a transition to grid based movement, massive changes to the combat system and the elimination of infantry units.

    While some of the changes White Moon Dreams made to the core rules of Warmachine are understandable due to technical limitations (no free form movement for instance), there are also several that seem to have been made due to the limitations on the abilities of the programmers/designers.

    Even if you strip away any expectations you might have due to the licensing of the Warmachine name however, unfortunately this just isn't a very good strategy game. While the people making it are clearly very passionate and dedicated those qualities simply can't overcome their obvious lack of experience and competence.

    The game is currently in some kind of post-beta but pre-release limbo and it's apparent they pushed the game out to the public much sooner then they would have liked for financial reasons. The information they have shared regarding the cost to make new units coupled with the extremely small user base (less then 100 people online at peak hours, the game had nearly 20,000 backers on Kickstarter) does not paint a bright future for the game's expansion.

    There are currently only three multiplayer maps available and the design is fairly uninspired. Two of them are much smaller then they should be and they all offer an advantage or disadvantage depending on which side you get to deploy on. While not having a battlefield that is perfectly symmetrical in the tabletop game it is a huge hindrance here because you are forced to move on a grid (exacerbating this is the fact that you can't choose your movement path by going in steps, you click your destination and the game chooses your path for you, often resulting in you suffering free strikes or AoE effects you could otherwise avoid).

    One of the most important aspects of a tactical game is being able to see what is going on and that is perhaps one of the most frustrating elements of this game, the camera is a complete mess. It does not behave in any expected manner from one moment to the next and will not be familiar to you if you have played other games in the genre. Why WMD tried to reinvent the wheel here is beyond me but they've recently acknowledged how bad it is and asked for input from the community as they redesign it for the third time.

    The developer has also made wholesale changes to the way combat works in an attempt to make the game more "transparent" for people not familiar with the tabletop version but all it has done is created a confusing system that is hard for both new players and Warmachine vets to grasp. For some reason they have chosen to give all units a rating of 1-5 for their stats which grossly limits their ability to balance individual units through small adjustments to their numbers.

    Infantry squads have also been removed in favor of each unit basically being a solo. Instead of a unit of trenches you now take one model. This has led to abilities normally spread across a unit and its attachments being condensed onto a single figure. This results in quite a bit of balance issues as well as redundancy or obsolescence among certain units.

    Army sizes are also severely limited due again to development limitations. The developers have admitted that because of the way the game is programmed, army's bigger then they allow now would result in extreme performance degradation even on very high end machines.

    Unless you are a huge fan of the Warmachine universe I simply cannot recommend this game. There are so many offerings these days in the tactical strategy genre that this just doesn't deserve your time and if you ARE a Warmachine fan and decide to try this game out, please temper your expectations and realize that you are basically playing a game that is Warmachine in name and appearance only.    … Expand
  2. Damascus
    Dec 27, 2015
    3
    TLTR: 3/10. Bad UI. Bad gameplay. Bad board-game port. Bad graphics. Bad sound. Bad skirmish-mode. Bad campaign. Good not one thing I could find. I've been trying to force myself to play this game in the hopes of eventually liking it, but but I cannot find a single redeeming quality.

    28. Des. 2015 - One year after release. UI: Mouse-clicks need to hit the correct pixel to choose units,    TLTR: 3/10. Bad UI. Bad gameplay. Bad board-game port. Bad graphics. Bad sound. Bad skirmish-mode. Bad campaign. Good not one thing I could find. I've been trying to force myself to play this game in the hopes of eventually liking it, but but I cannot find a single redeeming quality.

    28. Des. 2015 - One year after release.
    UI: Mouse-clicks need to hit the correct pixel to choose units, meaning I need to click 3-9 times every time I want to choose a new unit. UI is otherwise very clunky and dependent on on-display buttons to control your units, which slows down gameplay to a crawl. Plenty of UI glitches causing unit-control to fail and causing a turnover for my most powerful units.

    General Gameplay: Developers chose an engine what was unable to handle the board-game. The result is a game uning the Warmashine brand without being Warmachine. Everything in this game is a poor look-alike. The difference in particular doesen't use the PC-medium to improve gameplay, rather being a result of poor development and decisions. The developers also doesen't have a clue, evident in the many many unelegant solutions for gameplay and presentation. They made mistakes I haven't seen in PC-games since the 90s.

    Graphics and Sound: All the lines are too soft, affording the game a generic cartoonish look. The colors are way to vibrant. The music and sounds are very repetitive and I turned them off after playing for about an hour. I was getting a headache.

    Skirmish and Multiplayer: The maps are very small, leaving no real room for manouvering. The game is so poor that the entire worldwide playerbase can be measured in two digits, making finding players for mm a chore.

    Campaign: The missions are drawn-out and have an unappealing design. The dialogue make me cringe, and are partially unskippable. Cutsceenes are ugly, meaningless and unskippable. The mission objectives are very unclear (Example: Protect the train - but the train is 1/4 of the scenario graphics and there is no way of knowing which pixel you need to protect or how fast and under which conditions the enemy can harm it. Example: Move down the gorge - but the gorge have 3 directions and there is no way of knowing which way is "down".)    … Expand
  3. iseeall
    Jan 14, 2016
    3
    You don't need to try anything more than the game's demo on Steam to see how bad the game is. By default the graphics are set to "medium" or something, which means all characters, the terrain and the characters' portraits are extremely blurry which stands in stark contrast with the pixel-crisp GUI. The game was probably optimized for tiny screens, like 640x480 or something, as on myYou don't need to try anything more than the game's demo on Steam to see how bad the game is. By default the graphics are set to "medium" or something, which means all characters, the terrain and the characters' portraits are extremely blurry which stands in stark contrast with the pixel-crisp GUI. The game was probably optimized for tiny screens, like 640x480 or something, as on my 1920x1080 the GUI elements are tiny and are scattered in the edges of the screen. The level minimap, for example, is smaller than a single soldier when viewed from max zoom out.

    Even after I set all graphical settings to maximum and restarted the game, everything was still blurry. There might be something wrong in their shaders code or whatever, but all objects are too glossy and too bright, with large spots of plain white on many objects. The tutorial text is written in huge blurry font. Tutorial messages tell about what on-screen buttons do but at the same time the whole GUI is hidden, so you don't know what they are talking about. You will stop understanding the explained game mechanics about 1/3 into the tutorial. After that you will keep clicking the highlighted areas/buttons with no clue what's going on. Obviously the developers never tested the tutorial on anyone except themselves. The cutscenes are ugly and some of them can't be skipped. E.g. I wanted to exit the game during an endless cutscene, and the dialog to confirm exiting was there, but when you press "Yes" (yes, please exit) it just hangs. This was the last straw for me.

    My guess is that 90% of people who try the demo will exit it and uninstall it right after the tutorial stops showing its messages and lets you finish the first mission by yourself. Or rather, most will exit even before the tutorial shows anything, after seeing the super-blurry font.

    All that said, the combat system seems to be pretty interesting (from what I could understand) and feels like something between XCOM Enemy Unknown and The Banner Saga. It's a pity that this promising system got such an atrocious implementation.    … Expand

Critic Reviews

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No score yet - based on 2 Critic Reviews

Critic score distribution:
  1. Positive: 1 out of 2
  2. Mixed: 1 out of 2
  3. Negative: 0 out of 2
  1. Pelit (Finland)
    Mar 18, 2015
    76
    Warhammer’s competitor makes a nice debut. [Feb 2015]
  2. Riot Pixels
    Jan 25, 2015
    70
    Warmachine: Tactics is a promising game, but I would not advise buying it in its current state. Let the developers fix its numerous flaws first.
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