Fantasy RTS game Warhammer Age of Sigmar: Realms of Ruin is on sale for $11.99 as part of the Humble Summer Spectacular sale, an 80% discount from its regular price. Released less than a year ago, the steep discount is a sad reflection on how badly the game has performed. But it’s good news for Warhammer fans because it is, frankly, a banger.
Realms of Ruin is only the second major release set in the Age of Sigmar universe. Its narrative follows a band of Stormcast Eternals as they plunge into the heart of the Realm of Beasts to secure protect a Dawnbringer Crusade from marauding Orruks, vengeful Nighthaunt ghosts, and scheming Acolytes of T’zeentch.
As well as the campaign there’s a roguelike single-player mode that adds challenge modifiers to missions, and then of course there’s competitive multiplayer.
Wargamer’s Realms of Ruin review was positively glowing, but the general reception to the game – and particularly the sentiment from the RTS game fandom – was generally cooler. The gap was so extreme that we wrote a follow-up article giving an even deeper analysis of the systems we found so compelling.
Perhaps its our love of miniature wargames that makes Realms of Ruin so compelling. Though it’s a real-time game, with resources to harvest, units to recruit, and stripped back base building, the real challenge is anticipating your opponent’s choices and deploying your troops effectively in response. Though it’s not happening in turns, the push and pull will feel familiar to anyone who has played a Games Workshop wargame.
It simplifies some elements of RTS design in ways that will feel sensible to miniature gamers. Units get locked in combat until they or their opponents die, or you choose to trigger a retreat which sends them back to base – so there’s no need to micro-manage their movement.
Rather than a colossal tech tree to memorise, there are a few upgrade decisions for your forces which subtly change your strategies, just like picking unit enhancements. The most important information about enemy units is visible at a glance, as easy as asking your opponent for a unit’s save characteristic.
In other words, this Warhammer fantasy game’s audience might just be miniature wargamers who want to easily play a game online with friends, or want to mess around with an Age of Sigmar army without having to paint it.
And if you prefer Warhammer 40k games, there’s plenty for you in the sale: this guide picks out every Warhammer 40k title in the Humble Summer sale.
Source: Wargamer
