Welcome! To Mordheim... City of the Damned. And, sadly, also the City of Unfulfilled Potential.

The gameplay loop is genuinely fun. How quickly you could lose everything to a handful of bad rolls fills the slow inching forward of the matches themselves with a heavy blanket of foreboding. I enjoy every second of it... until I look down at the end of the mission and realize I've spent three hours on about as many experience points.

Progression is so slow. That is the one thing I wish hadn't been taken from the tabletop game. You spend so long getting your warband where you want it only for it all to be dashed out by a single, disastrous mistake. And knowing that makes you play even slower, which again, is fun, until you realize how much is ahead of you and how little your effort's built.

Mobility is another way Mordheim keeps things dragging. The campaign maps in particular are too large for a regular unit to move from one objective to the next in less than three turns. And this is after you've cleared out the initial warband and are only dealing with the randomly placed reinforcements spawning in every turn. The handful of objectives being placed at all corners of these huge maps could almost fool you into splitting up your warband. But I wouldn't do that unless you'd like to risk a surprise Bloodletter or Demoness and the restart, in worse standing mind you, that will likely result from such a discovery.

The video game just does not have the narrative to support this slow play. You likely don't have your mates with you, making up stories along with you, and the game doesn't do enough with character customization or campaign mission introductions to facilitate that even if you did.

One of the many missed opportunities was having the stories cross over, having a canon sequence of events that the game shows you after you've seen every mission with every warband. Instead, it's more the like non-campaign missions: the same maps remixed with different enemies and different objectives. Sometimes the names stay the same between different warband's compaigns, this is true, but those too are rearranged in such a way that implies you're learning no more about these people or artifacts.

That is the tragic upshot here: with a little bit of polish, a little more care, maybe a few more warbands or models pulled from still fertile lists of the tabletop game, every action taking forever to execute would build that great, nail biting feeling over a particular outcome or what might be hiding around the corner, instead of the mind-numbing task of tiptoeing from one side of the map to the other only to earn the right to do it again later.