Warhammer: Dark Omen

by Air Hendrix
January 01, 2000 00:00 AM PST

{Unless you're a huge fan of the Warhammer franchise, avoid this bleak title at all cost. Major dental work would be preferable to playing Dark Omen.}

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Dark Omen is a translation of the paper-and-dice warfare strategy game Warhammer, which was unsuccessfully translated first by SSI in Shadow of the Horned Rat for the PlayStation. If the Warhammer franchise is still bleeding from that wound, Dark Omen's enough to end its misery.

This game is a debacle; it looks like it was thrown together during a four-day weekend. The graphics, with the exception of an occasional surprisingly nice polygonal landscape, aren't worthy of a 16-bit title, let alone the PlayStation. Your armies are small rendered blocks, and you can barely see how many soldiers you have. Even the atrocious cut scenes use cut-out faces of talking heads rather than actual environments. For sound, DO offers bare-bones music and dialogue bites that are repeated more often than "Score!" during a basketball game.

A real-time strategy game without the strategy, DO neither displays or requires you to have any intelligence. The story is thrown together with empty characters, and every mission positions your army on one side and your enemy's army on the other so you can march into one another. Your choice of personnel, armament, or economy never comes into play because positive results come only from overwhelming numbers.

Unless you're a huge fan of the Warhammer franchise, avoid this bleak title at all cost. Major dental work would be preferable to playing Dark Omen.