Age of Sigmar: Realms of Ruin Review - A Warhammer RTS with a MOBA Twist
Nov. 14, 2023Age of Sigmar: Realms of Ruin Review – A Warhammer RTS with a MOBA Twist
In thisWarhammer Age of Sigmar Realms of Ruin Review, I want to talk about my first impressions of the game. I’ve been playing it on and off for the last week or so. I want to tell you what I like about the game, what I don’t like about the game, and whether I think you should spend money to buy this game or wait for a sale. If you’re a Warhammer fan, this is probably a game that you’ve been keeping an eye on.
So first, let’s talk a bit about what Warhammer Age of Sigmar: Realms of Ruin is. This is a Warhammer RTS and it plays a bit like an RTS but it plays a bit like a MOBA. When I first thought of Age of Sigmar Realms of Ruin, when I first saw the gameplay and I heard of a Warhammer RTS, immediately my thoughts went to Dawn of War. Now obviously, Dawn of War is in the 40K Universe, it’s a bit different, but in terms of tactical real-time strategy, that’s sort of what I was expecting from this game.
I love the Dawn of War series. Obviously, Dawn of War 1 is my favorite. Dawn of War 2 was not quite as good, while Dawn of War 3 we don’t talk about. I will say for the faults that I find with Age of Sigmar Realms of Ruin, I really like the tactical nature of combat. Characters move slowly, they have abilities that you can use, and fights aren’t over immediately so there is room for maneuvering. Elevation plays a big role, the direction your troops are facing plays a big role, and the way they’re positioned is important. So there is a big tactical nature to combat.
So first, let’s talk about one of the things that I really loved about the tactical nature of Warhammer Age of Sigmar: Realms of Ruin. The abilities of units are tied to two resources in the game that you use to generate units with. You have to decide, do you want to spend your currency to win this fight that’s in front of you, or do you want to spend your currency to create more units? So maybe you spend your currency and you win that fight, but then you can’t create any more units and then you lose the next fight. If you don’t spend the currency and your units die, but then you generate new units to replace them you’d really win.
Making tough decisions in combat about when to spend your currency to gamble it on winning that fight, is it better than creating new units or upgrading the units that you have? I think it’s a really, really cool concept and I really enjoyed how that played out throughout the game.
I also really, really enjoy the sound effects of the game. The voice acting is top-notch, and the sound effects of the game are top-notch. It really immerses you into that Warhammer Age of Sigmar Universe where you feel like you’re inside the game and you’re part of the campaign. I wouldn’t go out all the way to say that this is a triple-A production because it really doesn’t feel like a AAA production, but it’s somewhere between AA and AAA when it comes to the sound quality of the game.
Let’s talk about some of the things that I think players should be concerned with if they are RTS fans, Dawn of War fans. This might not be an issue for some of those players, but the game plays more like a MOBA than it does a real-time strategy. What I mean by that is there’s no real base-building element in Warhammer Age of Sigmar: Realms of Ruin.
Unlike Dawn of War where you would create your buildings and create your units from those buildings and create defenses, etc., and build resource generators, there is not a lot of building in this game. You generally have a headquarters that populates on a map at a certain point and then you can create towers on top of certain areas of the map that are either defensive or generate resources. Forces are coming at you and you’re sending forces out and it’s kind of this seesaw tug-of-war battle pretty much through any map you’re doing.
Even campaigns feel like they are dictated by this mechanic and it seems like they built the campaign around MOBA mechanics rather than created a separate mode of game mode for multiplayer and created the campaign separately. They’re sort of weaved together in the Warhammer Age of Sigmar: Realms of Ruin campaign. I’m not a huge fan of MOBAs in general and if you played Dawn of War 3 then you know that that’s kind of the direction Dawn of War 3 went.
This game doesn’t feel exactly like Dawn of War I in my opinion, but it does kind of have that MOBA concept mixed into it that I’m not really a fan of. I prefer the base building, I prefer that sort of element of the game. But if you’re someone who doesn’t mind not having base building and your sole focus is tactical combat, then that won’t be an issue for you.
Another issue that I found that I had problems with was that there’s only four factions available in this game at launch and there is not a ton of units per faction. I found myself, you know, six seven missions into the campaign like already starting to feel like, ‘Is this it? Like, when are the cool things going to happen?’ and it felt like I’d already unlocked most of the stuff that I would be using throughout the campaign.
I just thought Warhammer Age of Sigmar: Realms of Ruin doesn’t feel like it was fully done. It feels like it needs another four factions or so, or three, you know, somewhere to have a good seven or eight factions, especially since there’s a huge multiplayer element of this game where they’re really encouraging people to play one-on-one or 2v2 in terms of multiplayer modes to have more selection of units and more variety of gameplay.
I know they are planning to add more factions to this game in the future and I don’t know whether those will be paid or not. I highly suspect they will if you’re familiar with any of Warhammer business models. They typically have factions added as an expansion of some kind that then cost you money. I’d expect that to be the case here as well, so it’ll probably cost you more money than the $54 or whatever it is right now on Steam for this game. Probably what should have been charged $54. I don’t think that playing, paying $54 or $59.99 or whatever it is locally for you is a good value for what you’re getting from this game unless you plan to play multiplayer a lot.
I would personally recommend waiting for those factions to get added to the game and then buying like a Gold Edition or sort of bundle that comes at a similar price it is now to really get that value out of it. And again, that’s only if you’re probably going to play a lot of multiplayer and you like MOBA gameplay. If you’re someone who really likes Dawn of War or you like RTSs in general and you like that sort of base building and then fighting mix, this doesn’t really have that in this game.
One thing that I will add is that Warhammer Age of Sigmar: Realms of Ruin is quite challenging, even on like normal game mode. There’s four difficulties, even on like normal I was getting my butt whooped pretty good at the beginning. Admittedly, I’m a little bit rusty at RTSs. You know, there are not a lot of RTSs out these days, there’s not a lot to choose from and that’s one of the reasons I was very interested in this game.
I love, love RTSs. They’ve kind of gone by the wayside in the last decade or two and every time a new RTS comes out I get excited because I’m like, ‘Oo, I love Starcraft, I love Warcraft, I love some of these games, Age of Empires.’ I love these sort of real-time strategy games and I really wanted to see how this one was. I’m a huge fan of Warhammer and frankly, it’s fun but it’s just not quite right up my alley.
I definitely finished the campaign of this game because I like Warhammer so much but I don’t think if I had to buy this game, which I got the code for free, I don’t think I would have paid full price for it and would have been happy with the price for one playthrough because I probably won’t play multiplayer. But if you plan to play multiplayer and you’re like a big PVP Warhammer person, you might really appreciate this game a lot more.
So that kind of wraps up my first impressions of the game. What do you guys think so far? For those of you who played, there was like a demo or a beta I think back in July of this year. For those of you who played it then or who played the game, what do you guys think? Let me know in the comments.
Castielle
Senior Editor at Fextralife. I enjoy gaming, playing and watching sports, cooking yummy food, watching a good movie and hanging out with Fex.
