Warhammer Quest 2: The End Times

Review

The Armies of Chaos, lead by the Three-Eyed King, launched a devastating assault on the Empire capital of Altdorf. The Oldword is about to be doomed unless the different races of the land put their quarrels aside and become allies in the hope of defeating The Three-eyed King and his armies. It’s time to rally new warriors in Warhammer Quest 2: The End Times.

Warhammer Quest 2: The End Times is a turned-based strategy game developed and published by Perchang, where you take control of a party of four throughout a stack of dungeons to find the Mace of Helstrum artefact which will help your party to defeat the armies of Chaos. 

The first dungeon you’ll enter is a mini tutorial to familiarise yourself with the interface. You only have two main characters; an Empire Captain and a Dark Elf Sorceress. However, you’ll be rewarded with a third character straight after that.

The game is divided into three regions with a lot of quests to do. As I am writing this review, and with 15 hours playing time, I am still making my way through the first territory. Boy, this is a big game, let me tell you.

After the tutorial, you have the option to either travel to the city of Altdorf or start your main quest by moving the bright white pin which represents your party on the map. You can’t miss them, as they have a number in front of the location. As you arrive at your destination, you’ll be able to choose from a few actions: activate a quest by clicking on the shield icon – recruit new heroes at the tavern by clicking on the beer icon – buy or sell items at the market (hammer icon), or train one of your heroes by clicking on the cross icon. Bear in mind, the heroes must reach a certain number of experience points to be trained to their next level (it won’t happen automatically), and you must find and remember where these training grounds are located within each region. And on top of that, it will cost a few gold coins for your trouble.

Upon activating a main quest, a red rook piece with a red light on top will appear on the map. Click on it, and you’ll enter the dungeon. As you only have three characters at this stage, there will be no need to select other characters. However, as you progress throughout the game, you’ll liberate or buy new heroes and therefore will have to choose four of them before entering any dungeons. When you successfully defeat all enemies within the dungeons, you’ll be rewarded with three items, which can include gold coins, weapons, armour, heroes, and/or plenty of other items. It will also show you statistics of all heroes who have participated in the battle, including experience points.

I quickly realised that it would take my heroes several dungeons to accumulate enough experience points to level up and to have a decent chance of completing another main quest successfully. To do  that, travel to the white rook pieces that appear on the map. Not only will they help you to gain more experience, but they will also have specific items to gain if you beat the dungeon; you’ll do this quite a bit.     

The gameplay is what you would expect in terms of turn-based strategy game. Each of your characters has a red semi-circle around them, which represents their health, and white dots on the other side, which represent their action points. Each movement or attack will consume a certain number of action points.  After using all your character’s point, you’ll be able to press the next turn button.  Dungeons are made of several chambers and you can zoom in and out, and move the camera to the left or right. Regardless, you’ll have to dispatch of all enemies within each chamber in order to move to the next one. The other interesting thing that might happen if you stagnate in one room a bit too long trying to heal one of your character, is that new enemies will appear out of the blue to spice up the fight.

To complete a level, you must find the room which has the cross and circle symbols on four tiles. Move your four characters onto them and you’ll complete the level.

This is an absolute beauty of a game! Not only do you have stacks of dungeons to go through, but there is so much to discover and acquire in terms of items in this game.

Great graphics and soundtrack. The thing I personally didn’t like is that you still have to use the turn-based mechanisms even if there are no more enemies to kill in a room. It’s a bit pointless and annoying, in my opinion.