I’ve mentioned some of the positive aspects of Warlords Battlecry 3 and I think it’s time to address the some of the negatives.
First and foremost, the game is poorly documented. The manual does a fine job in introducing you to the main concepts but it doesn’t help you get well-versed with the nitty-gritty aspects of the game.
There are bits and pieces in PDF documents on the official site, various online FAQs and forum posts. (There were also some useful posts sticky-ed on the publisher’s forums but these were wiped out when the forums were upgraded.)
However, it’s exasperating to have to sift through all of them to get a particular snippet of information. F’rinstance, if you look up a Doom Knight’s abilities in the Units PDF document, you’ll discover they sow Chaos but that naturally raises the question of what Chaos does. Where do you begin to look for that information? The manual? Another PDF document? In-game? The forums? The readme.txt file? (Answer: manual.) I would have loved a single comprehensive document (or alternatively, a bunch of hyperlinked HTML files) that’s updated to reflect game balance changes made in the patches.
The game manual also promises:
Further information, including FAQs, extra scenarios, battle reports and other extra material can be found on either the Enlight website: http://www.warlordsbattlecry3.com or the Infinite Interactive website:http://www.infinite-interactive.com
Or not.
http://www.warlordsbattlecry3.com redirects to the publisher’s web site and unfortunately, there’s little there aside from a single FAQ, the patches, one desktop wallpaper and a few dozen screenshots. There’s no sign of the promised bonus scenarios, battle reports and other extra material.
Infinite Interactive, the developers, are in the midsts of switching ISPs and their site is currently unavailable as of writing.
Despite all that, this is an enjoyable game and this equally enjoyable battle report by game reviewers Tom Chick and Bruce Geryk serves to highlight that fact.
