I like card games. I like Warhammer. A newWarhammercard game should be right up my street, especially if it’s digital. While I love a piece of cardboard to hold in my hand, to watch the light glint off a foil for those precious seconds it’s outside of its binder or deck box, I’m on the digital train these days. I’ve got nowhere to store a card collection that I’ll never look at and I can’t be bothered rallying my vaguely-interested friends into buying decks. Ihavegot space on my phone for another app, and finding strangers to battle online is far easier than shouting into the abyss of my local game shop. They, like all my colleagues at TheGamer, are all obsessed withLorcana, a game I couldn’t care less about.
Firing off an attack with a large Tinker Bell or overeager dalmatian? No thanks, I’ll eat my opponent’s face with a swarm of alien bugs or launch a grenade into their ranks from a shoddily assembled launcher. After a brief tutorial saddled with boring old Space Marines – Ultramarines to be specific, the most boringest of Space Marines – I was able to get stuck into Warpforge with choppas and talons.
There are five playable factions in the game, Space Marines (Ultramarines), Chaos (Space Marines, not Daemons, because everything is Space Marines, apparently), Necrons, Eldar, Orks, and Tyranids. That’s plenty of variety, even if it does lack some of the more interesting species in the universe, likethe Nicassar, but you’ll be best off picking one and sticking with it for a while due to the nature of acquiring cards and building decks.
After completing the tutorial, you pick a faction to begin a ‘campaign’ of sorts (read: battle pass). Each faction has its own currency, and the more you play, the more of that currency you earn to progress along a branching timeline. At each stage, you can choose rewards from booster packs and unique cards, to other currencies.
On top of your faction-specific currency, used purely to progress through the campaign, there is an earnable currency of pink crystal – unnamed anywhere in the beta – which can be used to purchase or upgrade individual cards. A third currency of grey crystals, obtained by completing an arbitrary number of daily challenges, allows access to a version of draft mode with premium rewards.
Finally, there is Gold, the game’s premium currency. You can use this to buy boosters or cosmetics, but they’re pretty expensive. Card backs for your deck will set you back $50, and avatars anywhere from $15-$30. Perhaps this is all intended to make you think that the $1.50 booster packs are a great deal.
Booster packs are hard to come by by other means. Battle rewards are stingy, and you miss out on other rare items on the battle pass if you take boosters. Upgrading to the premium track helps a little, but that costs $20 itself. If you wanted to opt for the premium track for multiple races, you guessed it, 20 bucks each please.
Matches are fairly quick (unless your opponent AFKs and you’re left waiting for half an hour before the game kicks you out), and simple to learn. You have two options for attacks with each card, ranged and close combat, and you take the appropriate damage back. You’ve got the standard gradually-increasing mana pool a-la Hearthstone or Legends of Runeterra, a range of stratagems (think spells to buff your cards or impede your opponent’s), with the grim darkness of the Warhammer aesthetic plastered over it all.
Some of the art, especially for the card backs, is really nice. Tyranids have access to some really Giger-esque stuff if you grind it out, but that’s not enough motivation to clock in and do hours of battles a day. Warhammer 40,000: Warpforge is available now in Steam early access, but it feels like the mobile launch in early November is where developer Everguild will seek to garner most of its players. After all, this sort of monetisation model is normalised in the mobile market, but that doesn’t make it any less egregious.
Warpforge is a fine game. It’s simple, but engaging, and I was figuring out nice synergies between my cards quickly. It’s a game for Warhammer fans, as the battles themselves aren’t complex enough to hold their own without any knowledge of the IP, but if you can build a fun deck for free, then it’s worth a whirl. I’m just not sure that’ll be possible.
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