I am on a journey to beat 360 random Xbox 360 games. Here's my next adventure.

Game number 23 was Warhammer: Battle March. This is a real time strategy game, where you get to command hordes of people in order to complete different missions. There are actually 3 campaigns: the imperial campaign, the chaos campaign, and the orc campaign. This game is actually a port of a PC game called Warhammer: Mark of Chaos. The “Battle March” subtitle comes from the third campaign (the orc campaign), which was originally DLC for March of Chaos.

I decided to play through the campaign as the Imperials for my playthrough. The story is actually pretty decent and it kept me engaged enough to want to see what was coming. The main character here is Stefan Von Kessel, a disgraced son of a count. They say that his family had committed heresy and were siding with the chaos monsters. (Please forgive me if this isn’t exactly correct. I am not a Warhammer lore expert). You need to get Stefan to show his worth to the empire through commanding armies through a bunch of battles. Along the way, you will meet up with the Elvish empire and will need to ally with them to further stop the forces of Chaos.

I feel like the main ideas in this game are pretty good. You can select units and send them to attack different units, stay back and defend, or perform other actions. Furthermore, there are heroes which are individual monsters on the battlefield. These heroes have special abilities (like shooting fireballs or providing defense to a unit) and are pretty cool to utilize.

All these ideas are great and all… but the controls are not optimized for a controller. It was hard and awkward to select multiple, specific troops at once and I would often find myself sending troops that I didn’t want to send attacking. I can’t overstate how bad this game feels to control… but I don’t really think this is the fault of the developers. I don’t think this game should have ever been put onto the Xbox 360. Its controller just doesn’t have the capabilities needed to maneuver a battlefield in the way that an RTS game demands.

Also… WHY WAS I NOT ALLOWED TO TRANSFER ITEMS BETWEEN MY HEROES???????? Who let that pass qa? I actually watched videos of people playing Mark of Chaos on the PC and those players were allowed to transfer items between characters. Why was that not something I was able to do here? If my wizard got a good sword during the course of a mission, then I would have to sell it to the shop and buy it for my knight. This ended up costing me a significant amount of money.

Overall, I had a decent time playing the game in simple situations where all my enemies were attacking me from simple attack patterns. The issue was that the game felt like it was fighting me when things got complicated. The story isn’t bad and the gameplay feels decently deep and fun. I think it may be worth it to go and play this game on PC… but skip the Xbox 360 version. I just don’t think that RTS is a good genre for console gaming. (4/10)

I spent 8 hours, 46 minutes, and 52 seconds playing Warhammer Battle March.

I have spent a total of 237 hours and 52 minutes on the Road to 360 challenge so far.

Next game: Ratatouille