Parents' Guide to Warhammer: Chaos & Conquest

While most games tend to put players in the role of the heroes, sometimes it just feels good to be the bad guys. But if Warhammer: Chaos & Conquest is any indication, being bad isn't necessarily all it's cracked up to be. The game looks fantastic, though building up your base quickly becomes a highly detailed, but extremely cluttered, mess. Whether you try to zoom in tight on the action or out to try and take everything in, it's difficult to make out much of what's happening onscreen. It doesn't help that everything the Chaos touches seems to have inherited a look that blends together into a hellscape ripped from a '80s heavy metal album cover.

While you might think being an agent of Chaos would be a job full of carnage and destruction, the truth is, most of the time Chaos & Conquest winds up being a bureaucratic and logistic nightmare instead. You'll spend more time in menus, building structures and recruiting or training units than you will on the battlefield. It's frustrating because the tutorial doesn't do a great job of explaining how the mechanics of the game operate. It directs players to Point A and B, but never explains why you're doing any of the things there. Then, after you're left to fumble around on your own, the game turns into more of a slog of wait times between orders and/or a constant trickle of money spent on microtransactions to either move things along or to buy new units powerful enough to survive against those that have been playing longer (or spent more money). In time, once you get into the swing of things and choose to commit to the investment of time and/or money, the game offers a decent glimpse into the darker side of Warhammer Fantasy. It's just not too inviting for newcomers to the franchise and definitely not an entry level game.