How many warhammer games are there

The main character — the titular Gregor Eisenhorn as voiced by the impeccable Mark Strong — will use guns, swords and psychic powers and the obligatory-for-the-genre quick time events in God of War-style combo-based combat. The game is also expected to be somewhat cinematic, following Eisenhorn and the story of the novel trilogy. A follow-up to the moderately-popular Blood Bowl, which itself is based on the MS-DOS game of the same name, which itself is based on the original miniature-based board game version of the game, Blood Bowl is basically Warhammer meets American Football except less violent.

The game will feature a campaign mode in which the player guides the formerly-great Reikland Reavers back to glory, and a persistent online mode that tasks players to form their team of players from the eight Warhammer races Humans, Orcs, Dwarfs, Skaven, High Elves, Dark Elves, Chaos, and Bretonnia which become more experienced and skilled players over time.

You know, unless they die. The game is currently in early access with keys available at their store. No release date has been revealed but early estimates put an official launch of the game in Eternal Crusade is an upcoming massively multiplayer third-person shooter.

The game will thrust the player into the shoes of a soldier that is just one member of a larger army fighting for supremacy on huge maps. Each race will have access to a number of classes to choose from and even some hero classes, which will require in-game resources to use. Total Warhammer will feature massive real-time battles and turn-based sandbox campaigns of statecraft, politics, and empire building, all things that fans of the Total War series come to expect. It should be interesting to see the Total War campaign mechanics introduced into the Warhammer universe, as most of the games to date have focused solely on combat.

Four playable factions are expected at launch: the Empire, the Greenskins, the Dwarves and the Vampire Counts.

So, what do you think? The Stormcast Eternals are holy lightning warriors who usually come back after death. Each reforging steals some of their memories and personality, however, leaving them metal shells of their former selves. They're ideal protagonists for a roguelike—imagine Hades with hammers. Instead, Storm Ground takes roguelike progression and adds it to turn-based tactics.

The other playable factions are well-chosen, the undead Nighthaunts and daemonic Maggotkin both just as likely to return from death. The Maggotkin in particular are fun to play, vomiting corruption across the map that heals them and hurts others, and from which more of their units can spawn.

The undead have executioners who carry combat-gallows, and the Stormcast specialize in knockback attacks that can set up chains of damaging collision.

When you get to grips with it, Storm Ground is thoroughly decent. It's hard to get to that point unfortunately, because it's determined to be opaque. No tooltips, no rules reference or manual, and a lot of things have to be learned by trial and error. The same is true of units: you expect banshees to have a scream ability, but the fact they explode on death, damaging and pushing back anyone around them, is a bit of a shock.

In roguelikes trial and error is punishing, but it's worth learning to play Storm Ground in spite of itself. Cyanide's first take at Blood Bowl was actually their second, as they'd previously made a game called Chaos League that was so close to it that Games Workshop's lawyers came around for a quiet word.

One out-of-court settlement later and Cyanide somehow managed to score the rights to develop an actual Blood Bowl game, which they did a competent job of. Then they released two more versions of the same game—the Legendary and Chaos editions—each slightly expanding on the last. While their eventual sequel has a better UI and nicer looks, one thing I missed from this version was the truly demented variety of weird cheerleaders, especially the skeletons with pom-poms.

Mindscape GOG. This first attempt at a real-time Warhammer wargame gives you command of a mercenary company known as the Grudgebringers. From this initial command of two units, one Imperial cavalry and one infantry, you branch out unit-by-unit to eventually field everything from wood elf archers to dwarf gyrocopters, fighting against greenskins and skaven.

These units are represented by basic sprites in a battle view limited to a corner of the screen, but what Shadow of the Horned Rat lacks in finesse it makes up for in personality, with a cast full of Monty Python-esque accents delivering mission briefings, cutscenes, and battle cries. You'll have to tweak compatibility settings to get it running today Windows XP Service Pack 2 mode works for me , but it's worth it.

What's that? You can play it today on community-run servers , and though there are some bugs and player numbers aren't always what they could be you can still have a good time? Hell, put that drink back in the bottle and go check it out. WAR may have squeezed itself into a World of Warcraft-shaped mold to its detriment, but it also did great stuff with realm-versus-realm combat, public quests, and a set of classes that were all cool in different ways. Like City of Heroes, it deserves a second chance.

It takes a minute to wrap your head around the combination of over-the-shoulder camera and turn-based tactics in Mordheim: City of the Damned it's a bit like Valkyria Chronicles only with overwatch rather than enemies just constantly firing infinite bullets on everyone's turn.

By "it takes a minute", what I really mean is "it takes your entire first campaign, which you will lose. Your bosses demand payments on tight deadlines, story missions are brutal, and warriors lose limbs about as often as I misplace my phone. Mordheim gets away with this harshness because the playstyle it encourages—cautious, paying attention to the enemy's abilities, learning the 3D maps in a way your ground-level view facilitates—becomes gripping once you're carefully shepherding a band of warriors with missing arms and concussion through its ruined city.

Fatshark Steam. Once Valve stopped releasing Left 4 Dead games it fell to others to give us what we needed, which is the sense of being outnumbered but unwilling to fall, backed by our closest friends who may or may not be internet strangers. Vermintide did that well, with heroes who have enjoyably outsized personas up against skaven with no sense of self-preservation.

Though its melee weapons didn't have quite the punchiness of those in the sequel, the original Vermintide relied less on leveling up and opening boxes of slightly better gear. If that slow gear accrual turns you off Vermintide 2, this first game remains a blast today.

Halfway between the roll-and-move simplicity of HeroQuest and the this-box-actually-contains-a-universe complexity of Gloomhaven is Warhammer Quest, a dungeon crawler with just the right amount of downtime friction between dungeons.

Boxes of text present simple decisions, like "do you loot the tapestries or save the villagers' donkey from being eaten. It's basic in presentation, perfect for an old laptop, and because it started as a mobile game and horror of horrors has DLC, it's been underrated. Ignore that Steam user score of "mixed," Warhammer Quest is actually quite good indeed. On the one hand Blood Bowl 2 is a game that does a terrible job teaching you how to play it. The singleplayer campaign tries to be a tutorial, but introduces core ideas too slowly and only lets you play as one team.

What's included: Every Warhammer 40, game on PC, including those in the Horus Heresy setting, which rewinds the clock 10, years to depict the downfall of the Imperium and how it got so messed up. Standalone expansions like Dawn of War: Dark Crusade and Inquisitor—Prophecy are considered part of the original game, like regular expansions.

Carnage was a sidescrolling autorunner, Canabalt with a thunder hammer and a heavy metal soundtrack. At some point the server was taken offline and now this game—this entirely singleplayer game, I should note—no longer runs whether you got the free-to-play mobile version or paid actual money for the now-delisted Steam version.

This, obviously, sucks. No relation to the tabletop game called Kill Team that lets you play 40K on a budget , this is a twin-stick shooter made with repackaged assets courtesy of Relic's Dawn of War 2 and Space Marine.

The co-op is local only, which is a shame, and checkpoints before boss introductions are always annoying, but what really sinks it is the camera consistently swinging into the worst positions. You'll be staring at some pipes and a gantry while 15 orks shout the same recycled "Waaagh! It was a race-to-the-centre board game, half of which you spent finding a talisman to let you access the middle of the board, and the other half not letting someone else steal it from you. Even if the other players didn't drag you down, the luck of the cards and dice would.

This videogame reskins it with The Horus Heresy, a prequel setting 10, years in 40K's past that's been the basis for a huge amount of novels, some of which are actually good.

It's an even more desperate and serious version of Warhammer 40,, completely at odds with a chaotic beer-and-pretzels game about chucking dice and laughing at your latest misfortune.

In the original board game players got turned into toads on the regular. This was the second attempt at adapting the board game Space Hulk, and the worst. It's a first-person shooter where you get to control a squad, except the first six missions of the campaign don't actually let you. The big problem with Vengeance of the Blood Angels is that it came out when 3D graphics and CD audio were new and experimental and rarely any good. Everything's stuttery and enemies awkwardly pop into rendered CG when they're close enough for a melee animation.

The marines are chatty, but their dialogue is stitched together from samples. It's entirely charmless, and not worth setting up the virtual machine you'll need to get it running today. HeroCraft PC Steam. Games that attempt the same have been a mixed bag. Space Wolf looks the part, even zooming in on dramatic attacks just like XCOM does, but it doesn't play the part as well.

The levels are tiny, which makes weapon ranges weird—a boltgun is only able to shoot four squares—and when new enemies spawn they're immediately next to you.

Plus, every character has a deck of cards and the only way to attack is to play one of the weapon cards you've randomly drawn.

Your marine can shoot a plasma gun when he's got the card for it, and then just forget it exists until you draw another plasma gun card. Depending on the luck of the draw, in the meantime he might suddenly have three different heavy weapons, somehow pulling them out of nowhere like they're in a bag of holding.

Storm of Vengeance is a lane defense game, sort of like Plants vs. Zombies only instead of spending sunshine to grow plants you're spending redemption points to make Dark Angels pop out of their drop pods.

Storm of Vengeance is the same game, only with a progression tree so you can unlock frag grenades, a multiplayer mode, and 3D models of orks and space marines where the ninja cats and samurai dogs used to be.

The first VR-exclusive 40K game is a disappointment. Impressive as it is to have that sense of presence, whether you're poking around a starship or looking up at a space marine, it's a rudimentary corridor shooter.

Plus, the physical controls for everything from throwing grenades to holstering weapons are unreliable, and when that gets you killed in one of the levels with a savepoint on the wrong side of a tutorial or an elevator ride? That's unforgivable. If you like the kind of RTS where you manufacture a huge amount of troops then drag them together in a glorious blob, the first Dawn of War is for you.

If you prefer a handful of units and heroes with their own special abilities to carefully manage, that is Dawn of War 2's whole deal. Dawn of War 3 tries to split the difference, and it's an awkward compromise. Elites all have different things they can do and some of your units have an ability or two, but there are long stretches where it feels like you should be using them yet there's nothing for you to do.

In the story campaign you alternate between marines, orks, and eldar one mission at a time, never playing any one group for long enough to get comfortable with them—almost every level feeling like a reintroduction of abilities and tech it expects you to have forgotten, as if the tutorial never ends. While the first two games are divisive and there are plenty of passionate defenders of each, Dawn of War 3 didn't end up appealing to anyone.

There are surprisingly few 40K first-person shooters, and not many games where you get to be the T'au, the mech-loving weebs of the setting. Fire Warrior isn't about mechs, however. It's a corridor shooter ported over from the PlayStation 2, a fine console that didn't have a single decent FPS to its name. Red Faction fans, you're kidding yourselves. You'll have to turn auto-aim on to fix the busted mouse controls in Fire Warrior, but nothing will fix the boring guns or unreactive enemies.

Two things elevate it, however. One is that the first time you have to fight a space marine he seems borderline unstoppable in a way that feels right, and the second is that Tom Baker recorded some glorious narration for the intro. The Eisenhorn novels are some of the better 40K books, hard-boiled Raymond Chandler detective stories about an inquisitor who finds himself making trade-offs with his principles while he hunts heretics and slowly comes to grips with the Inquisition's corruption.

This adaptation of the first book did one thing right by casting Mark Strong as Eisenhorn. He's perfect, but the voice direction is weak and every cutscene is full of characters at wildly different levels of intensity.

Between the story bits is a mish-mash of third-person combat, collectible hunts, hacking minigames, that thing where you spin clues around to examine them—a bundle of features lifted from other games and artlessly glued together to fill the gaps. It feels like the kind of budget movie tie-in game that used to be commonplace, only this time it's a book tie-in. Steel Wool Studios Steam. There are plenty of turn-based 40K games about squads of space marines jogging from hex to hex, but what makes Betrayal at Calth different is its viewpoint.

You command from the perspective of a servo-skull, a camera that swoops around the battlefield and lets you appreciate the architecture of the Horus Heresy-era up close. You can even play in VR. It's a cool idea. Unfortunately, you can feel where the money ran out. A limited number of unit barks repeat often from a different direction to the acting unit , some weapons have animations while others don't, and the mission objectives occasionally leave out details you need to know.

It started in Early Access and clearly didn't make enough money to keep it there until it was done. It's out now with a version number on it, but it doesn't feel finished. In Games Workshop released collectible cards with photos of Warhammer miniatures that had stats so you could play a rudimentary Top Trumps kind of game with them. It went through several iterations, and the version became a free-to-play videogame with painted 40K miniatures on the cards.

Don't expect Magic: The Gathering. You build a deck of one warlord and a bundle of bodyguards, keeping three of them in play, replacing bodyguards as they die. Each turn you choose whether to make a ranged, melee, or psychic attack and the relevant numbers get added up and damage exchanged. Tactical choice comes via buffs to the attacks you don't choose which can pay off in later turns , and deciding when to play your warlord a powerful card whose death means you lose.

Oddly, the only PvP is within your clan and mostly you play against AI that uses other players' decks. Not that Warhammer Combat Cards tells you this, or much of anything else. Good luck trying to join a clan even after you've leveled-up the appropriate amount, thanks to a designed-for-mobile interface. NeocoreGames Steam Microsoft Store. Inquisitor—Martyr is pulling in three directions at once. It's a game about being an Inquisitor, investigating the mysteries of the Caligari Sector, chief among them a ghost ship called the Martyr.

It's also an action-RPG, which means if it goes for more than five minutes without a fight something's wrong, and among the most important qualities your heretic-hunting space detective genius possesses are their bonus to crit damage and the quality of their loot.

Finally, it's a live-service game with shifting seasonal content, global events, limited-duration vendors, daily quests, heroic deeds, no offline mode, and the expectation you'll replay samey missions for hundreds of hours every time there's a content update. Why would an Inquisitor spend so much time crafting new gear? Why do I need to collect a different color of shards every time there's a new "Void Crusade"? Warhammer 40, Darktide is a co-op shooter from the makers of the popular Vermintide games, and of course there's Creative Assembly's Total War: Warhammer 3.

Both of those should be out by the end of There might also be some potential in 's Warhammer 40, Chaos Gate - Daemonhunters , but that's a sequel to a strategy title, and there isn't any gameplay footage to speak of yet.

There's presumably a business case for so many Warhammer titles if Games Workshop is going down this path. It still seems, however, that it would be smarter to more thoroughly vet developers before handing over the license - quality control is the same reason there are only so many products with the James Bond name on it.