What’s this? Another Warhammer game? Ah, but this one’s different from the last dozen or so. With an open beta for Warhammer Age of Sigmar: Realms of Ruin kicking off this weekend, Games Workshop’s renewed fantasy universe is being thrown into the spotlight. We’ve had an early hands-on, throwing our Stormcast Eternals and Orruk Kruleboyz into the fray.
One of the biggest hurdles for Realms of Ruin is simply telling people what the heck Warhammer Age of Sigmar actually is. Games Workshop completely rebooted their fantasy wargame back in 2015, and while some at the time might have hoped this was a momentary blip that would soon be reset like, I dunno, that time that Doctor Octopus became Spider-Man for 18 months, the company stuck with it. We’re eight years into this era, and onto the second edition of the tabletop game, but to me it still feels that this new setting will be largely unfamiliar to people. Realms of Ruin gets to be a grand video game introduction to this new world order.
As complete an overhaul of the Warhammer mythos as Age of Sigmar is, it’s immediately clear how it takes inspiration from Norse and Greek mythology and shifts towards the style of Warhammer 40,000. Sigmar has been elevated to the position of God-King through the downfall of the World-That-Was, creating a pantheon of gods around himself and bringing back mortal civilisations that initially dwelled across eight distinct realms. Of course, Chaos still existed, and repeated incursions forced the Pantheon of Order back into their shell and predominantly the Realm of Azyr.
But there’s still hope, thanks to the Stormcast Eternals, an army of the resurrected souls of fallen heroes, reforged into… well, they’re fantasy Space Marines. As they venture into Ghur, seeking to reclaim the Realm of Beasts, they go up against some of the Warhammer world’s classic foes, the Orruk Kruleboyz (Orcs with even less of a chance at an elementary school spelling bee).
We got to go hands-on with these factions, which will make up two of the four in the game, checking out an opening single-player mission before diving into multiplayer battles that will be the centrepiece of this week’s open beta test.
On the spectrum of Games Workshop video games, Realms of Ruin is far closer to Dawn of War 2 than it is to Total War: Warhammer. A big part of that is in the changes to the tabletop game setting, with smaller units and a focus on speedier matches with looser positioning, instead of lining up rank-and-file regiments.
The single player mission gave a good introduction to the basic mechanics, putting us in charge of a handful of Stormcast units, showing how to use abilities, take control over the battlefield and preserve your forces. It really is very Dawn of War in these aspects, as you look to capture and hold key points on the battlefield and build up structures on top of them to help control the space. Fights are largely hand-to-hand, but if and when things start to go south, you can very quickly issue a retreat order that makes a unit invulnerable as they sprint back to base, ready to reinforce.
There’s two resources to accumulate and spend – Command for the territory held and RealmStone which is harvested from control points – going toward buying more units, defensively strengthening or more heavily exploiting capture points for resources, and upgrading you base camp (which is just a single structure) to allow for recruiting more and more advanced units, and also for unit upgrades.
What I didn’t quite gel with the game during my preview time was how these resources are also used for abilities. The basic Stormcast Liberators can strengthen their resolve and become tougher in a fight for a short period, but that uses up a lot of RealmStone relative to what is required for strengthening control points and buying higher tiered units, rather than using a separate resource used specifically for abilities or simply having them on a cooldown. Similarly, you can replenish units back at base, but that costs enough Command that you should only do so when you’ve got at least three units stood within range, instead of a unit-by-unit fee.
Having abilities require resources does provide more depth to the quite direct strategic gameplay and its traditional triangle of strengths and weaknesses. It forces you to decide if spending to win a particular skirmish is worthwhile, or if you’d be better off saving to jump up a unit tier, but I’m not yet sure of the cost balance that Frontier has settled on at this point, as it feels a little like ability use stunts your progress in a match.
What’s just as crucial to getting that balance right is how the game controls, with release across PC, PS5 and Xbox Series X|S. Keyboard & mouse controls are naturally the go-to for PC gaming, but we tried out the gamepad controls and the new DirectStep scheme that Frontier has concocted.
DirectStep is a really interesting new approach to RTS controls on console, based around locking the camera to a particular unit and then issuing moves by creating a chain of quick-fire waypoints. You can quickly jump between units, and considering the generally low unit count it’s an intriguing option.
The one weakness I feel is when you want to send units all the way across the map, and that’s what pushed me back toward the more traditional console RTS control scheme with the cursor locked to the middle of the screen. There will also be mouse & keyboard support on console, and everyone will coexist online, which has me a little worried about the balance of any competitive scene, but then that’s what this week’s beta is trying to find out.
With Warhammer: Age of Sigmar still be finding its way into the collective consciousness, Realms of Ruin is sure to be many gamers’ first exposure to this rebooted fantasy setting. It’s a good thing that the RTS foundations that it builds upon are tried and true examples of the genre, allowing the rest of the universe to flourish, and the more individual touches and innovations to take the spotlight.
