Xbox 360 Game News, Reviews, and Columns - XboxFocus

Let me preface this by saying that if the thought of me comparing D&D and Warhammer just made your blood boil, you may actually enjoy this game. The rest of us will struggle to get past the main menu first. There's lag just navigating it and the mugshots of each unit are so bad it's laughable. But it's all about the game, right? Surely if I get past this...

You know those goofy commercials with the college students who "make video games for a living!"? If you attended said colleges and turned in Warhammer: Battle March as your final, you'd get C-. Without exaggeration I tell you that the front of the box is an amazing representation of the color palette. In a world of newspaper colored Gears and Fallouts this could be excused, but unfortunately, the equally as poor graphics do not make up for weak colors. The sound is merely adequate, not stepping below or above the expected line.

But the technical issues aren't even the major flaws at work here. Battle March takes a different looks at the strategy genre not by making you build your army from the ground-up, but instead just giving you the army and putting the strategy in the actual battles and implementing rest time in between skirmishes. This would be all fine and dandy if the small nuances didn't make the player want to kill someone. If an item is picked up on the battlefield, only that unit (a special, more powerful Hero unit) can use it, even though the whole army shares gold. Battle March is a port of a PC expansion pack of the same name, and Namco-Bandai did not adjust the controls at all to make it actually work on a 360 controller. Commands will use a combination of the L3 and R3 buttons, both triggers, all four face buttons, plus the d-pad, and in a game that pushes on-your-feet thinking it's nerve wracking not to be able to so something exactly when you want to do it.

On the plus side the game is huge. The only thing is that it gets repetitive fast. The mission objectives are largely uninteresting and the backdrops are uninspired. The appeal comes in finding the right way sequence of using your magic, using your items, fighting the enemy, and resting, but even that becomes old hat after a good number of missions. There is a great deal of unit customization that I believe other RTS games should look up to. The most fun I had in my entire sessions were when I was choosing what my army was to go to battle in. I had difficulty finding an online match, but when I did it ran surprisingly lag free. Online multiplayer plays exactly like the campaign however, so I'm not sure if it's even worth the effort.

With stuff like the Command & Conquer games on the market, Warhammer: Battle March is not even worth a look unless you know who the hell Stefan von Kessel is, and even if you do I would not recommend a purchase. If you're intent and have an able PC I'd suggest picking up Mark of Chaos with the accompanying Battle March expansion, as it's obvious the control scheme was designed for a mouse and keyboard and the graphics have taken a critical hit. Or you could just go back to the tabletop game. I hear the polygon count on that is amazing.