WARHAMMER AOS: REALMS OF RUIN

Understanding the spirit of Frontier's new RTS

- Robin Valentine

In Shyish, the Realm of Death, Nagash the Great Necromancer moulds the souls of the deceased into his personal army. Cursed with new forms that reflect their mortal sins, he creates endless hosts of wailing, suffering spirits known as the Nighthaunt. And then he sends them all to capture my bloody control points.

When this real-time strategy game set in the mythic fantasy world of Warhammer Age of Sigmar was announced, only two of the game's four factions were revealed: the shining warriors of the Stormcast Eternals, and the vicious, swamp-dwelling Orruk Kruleboyz. As I play through two of the game's campaign missions, I get to meet a third- and it's not a friendly introduction. As I attempt to hold three objectives - the bases of spectral chains I need to break to retrieve a powerful artefact - the Nighthaunt throw themselves at my heroic Stormcast in relentless waves.

This seems to be what, at its core, Realms of Ruin is all about: objective control. Though the two campaign missions I play are quite different conceptually-one, pushing into Orruk-controlled territory, the other holding out against the aforementioned barrage of ghosts - they both essentially come down to seizing and holding ground against repeated enemy attacks. With little in the way of base-building or economy management, beyond being able to plop one of a limited set of  structures on points you control, the focus isn't on how you make your armies, it's on how you use them to dominate.