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Take a nap instead

1 Rating: 1, Useful: 9 / 19
Date: December 30, 2006
Author: Amazon User

I had just finished THQ's Dawn of War series when I bought this. Expecting something of the same experience, I was horribly disappointed on several accounts:

1. First of all, this is NOT a Warhammer 40K game, it is based in the plain-jane warhammer world. It is a Dungeons and Dragons remake with a dash of WH40K plot thrown in. This human, dead people, dwarves, elves, orcs type of world is tired, let it rest people.

2. The graphics, despite what other people have said above, are good but not great. It is relatively useless to have beautifully modeled characters if you spend the entire game in bird's eye view to get a comprehensive view of the battlefield. They are also wasted in the sense that all the units come in geometric arrays of 20, 32, 48 or whatever. It's like playing Risk on a Harry Potter book.

3. Harry Potter books are larger than the maps you play on.

4. This game is so linear I used it to help me hang paintings. Seriously, how stupid is the 'let's just follow the plot along and see what happens' type of game? This is purely laziness on the designer's part, and I feel pretty robbed. Again, if you lose a siege unit early, start over. Lame.

5. Despite what you've heard, the voice acting is ATROCIOUS! I'm sick of Elves sounding like they're 13 year olds on qualudes, and why does every human that wears armor have to have a bad fake European accent? The actors quite obviously read their lines in a half-hour session, never interacted in person, and used the money to buy their next bottle of Mad Dog.

6. Leveling/Items/Unit Management screens are non-intuitive to navigate and ridiculously roundabout to use. I have to wait to be in combat before switching items between heroes? Come on...

7. A little nitpicky, but the art in the load screens (which you will have the opportunity to study IN DETAIL) is undetailed and uninspired. One of the things that makes the warhammer series so cool is the visceral connection you get with the characters through the amazing artwork. Just look at the intro to Dawn of War, that's qual-i-tay. These stills look like watercolors that were left in the rain. And the intro movie sucks donkey.

8. The heroes are one dimensional. No, less than that, they are Half dimensional. 'I have a scar on my face and my daddy was killed so now I have to prove i'm a good guy' (even that struggle was not obvious throughout the game). Boo hoo. 'I'm a big, mean orc and I wanna kill humies'. YAWN.

9. At least with 6 CD's I now have a set of coasters.

To sum up: DO NOT BUY THIS GAME, ever. Don't let your friends buy it, don't even let them know it was made. It is an embarrasment. NAMCO should have their Game Designer's Union membership card torn up for this. I want my money back.

PS the art on the box is cool-ish.

Warhammer: Loadscreens of Chaos

1 Rating: 1, Useful: 6 / 13
Date: December 25, 2006
Author: Amazon User

I have twin 10,000 rpm WD drives set up in a stripe raid, over 2 gigs of RAM and a 4.0 ghz processor. My machine exceeds what the manufacturer suggests on the box is a "really hot setup". Yet load times on this game are unbearable. I've had maps that actually took less time to play than the load screen to get into the map. And the load time is just as long to get from the tactical map to the world map, which has no real moving parts or interactivity other than to click on the next town in line for the story to continue. Once you arrive at the next town, you are treated to another couple minutes of load time while the computer asks if you want to fight or retreat. If you choose to fight (like you have an actual choice), there's another couple minutes of load time. I got almost to the end of chapter two and just stopped playing due to the frustration. It might be acceptable if the game were incredibly detailed or complex, but this game loads slower yet looks and plays far worse than the latest Total War game.

Let's just say that the makers of this game got my $40 this time around, but it will be a long time before I buy anything with the Warhammer name or from these game companies again.

Looks good on outside, but unplayable.

1 Rating: 1, Useful: 7 / 8
Date: March 20, 2007
Author: Amazon User

First, let me say that this game has one good point. That is, you can customize your army by changing the color, design of weapons, and features. All units are customizable and if you are a person that enjoys doing this, then you will be able to keep yourself occupied for a while. Initially the graphic are a little impressive, but the fluidity is lacking. Regardless of this, the game is unplayable due the bugs. First, upon loading the game, you will need a patch just to get it to run. However, getting the patch installed is a major pain as the autoinstaller doesn't work.
And IF you can get the game to run, you will have problems with the mouse pointer disappearing onscreen in the setup screen prior to battles. Howevever, alt+tab out and alt+tab back in resolves this. The point is, why? Why all this labor to just play?
The game play itself has a poor framerate, and the campaign put me to sleep.
Another company should have designed this game. THQ did a great job with Warhammer 40K: Dawn of War, and Creative Assembly's Total War series is quite excellent. If one of those companies designed this game, things might have been different.
Mark of Chaos is crap. Total crap, and a waste of money. If you want to buy a good battle game, I suggest something else. If you want a massive scale battle game, then you will need to stick with the Total War series. If you want a fantasy element in the wargame, then I have no suggestion for you. Maybe another fantasy battle game will come out in the future.

I am very unimpressed with Mark of Chaos. It looks good on the outside, but it's got nothing to offer. This game is the equivent of a car with a nicely painted body, but no engine. More time should have been spent on it, because it really could have been something special, but it was most likely rushed to release. I doubt there will ever be an expansion for this game, due to it's negative publicity.

For the same price, you can buy Company of Heroes AND Titan Quest. Both games have been marked down recently, and are excellent.

One battle lost = game over!

1 Rating: 1, Useful: 4 / 6
Date: December 10, 2006
Author: Amazon User

If you lose too many units in a single battle you might as well give up because you can progress no further in the campaign because there's no way to get additional gold to buy units without continually conquering. Which means if you lose even one or two units near the beginning you are done for. Might as well start over and replay the same scenarios you just played.

Plus this came on six CDs and doesn't even have a DVD version so it took forever to install this monkey. Utterly worthless on all counts, what a waste of $50. I blame the gamespot review that said this game was good.

Rushed development ruined a potentially good game

2 Rating: 2, Useful: 17 / 19
Date: December 03, 2006
Author: Amazon User

"Warhammer Mark of Chaos" is a combat oriented real time strategy game. All elements of base building and resource management have been removed and the game consists of a linear progression from battle to battle, with token plot elements scattered in between. The main strength of the game is its beautifully rendered characters. The user can zoom using the mouse wheel from the "bird's eye" perspective all the way down to the individual character level. Whilst the game provides plenty of eye candy, sadly this is one of the few positives in an otherwise limited repetoire.

The game has drawbacks aplenty. Firstly as mentioned above the game is very linear which severely cripples its replayability in single player mode. The computer AI is horrendous. Given that the combat system is the game's only real selling point, the user would expect the AI to be able to implement at least rudimentary military strategy. Instead, the computer AI sends its units forth one at a time to be invariably crushed when facing the entire weight of the opposing army.

The game has a duelling system which allows opposing heroes to fight. This was rather pathetic. The enemy heroes were so overmatched that I was able to leave my hero alone and he was able to slay the enemy foe without so much as a mouse click from me. The game is also poorly balanced to the extent that I was able to finish the final mission on hardest difficulty without losing even a single troop. The heroes are far too powerful and this saps much of the enjoyability of the game.

Once the novelty wears off, and it quickly does wear off, it becomes very difficult to find anything about the game which can be talked about in a positive light. As such my only recommendation is to stay away.

BEWARE - What a ripoff!!!

2 Rating: 2, Useful: 9 / 13
Date: January 13, 2007
Author: Amazon User

To say this game is a disappointment would be an understatement.
Nothing but technical problems (and no it's not my system, plenty of horsepower - well beyond the system requirements) as witnessed on the Mark Of Chaos Technical Support Forum. Namco released this game with so many bugs that they had to release two patches in the first month totaling nearly 600MB !
My main problem seemed simple enough. I was unable to load previously saved games from the program's Load Game screen. The games were being saved (found them buried 14 folders down in the My Documents folder!) to the hard drive so it's obviously a programming issue. After trying to find a solution with Namco over a month's time, they finally said there was nothing they could do about it. This response came after installing, uninstalling, clearing the registry, installing the 600Megs of patches over 10 times!!

The game actually installs fine and game play is smooth and fun. But like others have posted, the single player campaigns are seriously lacking in scenarios. But not being able to load previously saved games means you need to have about 24 hours of time to finish a campaign straight through. And even when you finish the campaigns simply end with your character on a map. No theatrics, not even a message saying the game is over. What's next? Going to heaven and finding out it's just a bunch of clouds and nothing else?

Beware to all those who are interested in purchasing this game. If you need any further warnings just browse the 25+ pages of technical support problems posted on the Mark of Chaos Forum.

What a waste of money! Do not give in to the temptation to give Namco your money to be a guinea pig for their poor quality of work and customer support.

Might be okay, if it worked.

2 Rating: 2, Useful: 6 / 7
Date: December 12, 2006
Author: Amazon User

nvidia 6800gt
2gb ram
4ghz amd64
win xp fully updated

Graphics are nice. But sound stutters on occasion. My biggest problem is random game crashes when loading new maps. I find its not a graphical issue, its database related. For some reason if I buy certain items for my characters, do certain things to my army ect - I can't load the next mission. I have to go back to a previous save, and buy something different, or arrange my army differently then the game will proceed.

Even after patching, reinstall/deleting saves, ect. Game still not stable.

Plus its incredibly short and linear with horrible constant loading. No you can't out manuever the enemy, since the map forces you to go a certain way. Want to attack from behind? Nope, invisible map lines keep you from doing that.

If I could get through the entire single player campaign without crashing it might be a nice short romp which was fun. I'm not interested in the multiplay part of this game. Maybe it is good? But don't buy this for the single player portion.

Wow, are you kidding me?

2 Rating: 2, Useful: 5 / 14
Date: November 17, 2006
Author: Amazon User

I am a big fan of RTS's and MMO's. I heard that there was an MMO of Warhammer being released in the future so I decided to pick this game up to get hyped up for it. This was a mistake & I want my money back. I don't think I will ever play an RTS ever again. The gameplay is absolutely horrific, with nothing fun and surprising coming up at you. It's limits brings you back to Age of Empires II. I think the creators focused way too much on putting in mini cintematics at every turn of the game. The only good thing is the character customization which is not worth buying the game for. Do yourselves a favor and don't get this game. Pick up AOEIII or anything else really. Just don't make the same mistake I made.

Not a finished product...

2 Rating: 2, Useful: 3 / 5
Date: July 08, 2007
Author: Amazon User

I bought this game because I love warhammer and warhammer 40K. I thought THQ did a suburb job with the dawn of war series for warhammer 40K. I was excited to see warhammer universe get a (second) chance with Mark of chaos.

The game has good graphics and sound and is playable but I for example:
1) The multiplayer mode for me is unplayable because there are no multiplayer maps.
2) Game periodically crashed during campaign mode.
3)AI units get lost or cannot move from point A to B unless it is a stright line and clear terrain.
4)AI units forget to defend.

Issues 1-2 could be fixed with a patch but were not. I feel this game could be good if they would have released it has a finished product or just supported it.

Fun for 2 to 3 hours.

2 Rating: 2, Useful: 1 / 2
Date: September 12, 2007
Author: Amazon User

This game was pretty fun for 2 or 3 hours and hten it really went down hill. There are no where near enough modes and the single player campaign is really uninspired and way too easy. Multiplayer was pretty lame as their is really no difference between each game, if you do A and B And C you always win.
I would not recommend this game

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