I’ve been nerding out over Warhammer Fantasy and 40K since before I could drive, but my relationship with Age of Sigmar, Games Workshop’s most recent plane-hopping, epic fantasy spinoff has been mostly at arm’s length. Realms of Ruin is an upcoming RTS that reached out a gleaming, armored fist to pull me in a bit closer. And the fact that it looks a lot like Dawn of War, aka one of my favorite RTS series of all time, made me all the more eager to reach out and grab it.
If you’re not up to speed on what exactly Age of Sigmar is, I’ll do my best to break it down for you quickly. The world of Warhammer Fantasy, the one we see in the Total War: Warhammer games, was completely destroyed when the ravening forces of Chaos finally won in a divisive story arc called The End Times. But not all was lost, as many key characters survived and the setting was reborn as it is in Realms of Ruin: humans, dwarfs, and orcs, mostly renamed to something Games Workshop can legally copyright but still recognizable in style and attitude, battle across a large variety of themed fantasy realms connected by giant portals called Realmgates.
The centerpieces of this new setting are the Stormcast Eternals. If they look oddly like fantasy space marines, that’s because that is precisely what they are. The chosen warriors of the big Lawful Good god, Sigmar – the very same one worshiped in the Empire in Warhammer Fantasy, except he’s a manifested character you can meet and interact with now – these fallen mortals are reforged by holy magic over and over, giving them incredible abilities, but slowly winnowing away their humanity each time they are resurrected from the battlefield. If you’re one of the Free People trying to make a living in the Mortal Realms, these are the heavy-hitters for your team. I mean, generally. There are some groups of them who might kill you for getting a tattoo, but that’s beyond the scope of this story so far.
Hacking to the Gate
The single campaign mission I got to play had me leading a small vanguard group of Eternals to the plane of Ghur, Realm of Beasts, a savage and untamed land where even the geography itself seems poised to pounce and devour you. It’s currently under threat from a gang of orcs – sorry, they want us to call them “orruks” now, but they’re basically the same old fighty, green football hooligans with axes from Warhammer Fantasy. When these scouts were overrun, I took control of the main force of the warhost – including a dragon-riding knight of the Stormdrake Guard – and set out to find what happened to them.
I wasn’t able to capture any footage from this mission, but the multiplayer match you’ve been watching here features the same two factions, the Stormcast Eternals and Orruk Kruleboyz, on a map very similar to the one in the campaign. The developers at Frontier are promising two more factions at launch, but I couldn’t coax them into giving up any details. Given that Age of Sigmar’s huge list of armies is divided into the broad alignments of Chaos, Destruction, Order, and Death, and we already have two of those covered, I’d expect to see one from the Chaos alignment and one from the Death alignment joining the fun. Some demons and some undead, to put it simply.
In terms of how it actually plays as an RTS, the closest comparison is probably Relic’s Dawn of War series, though the lack of cover and focus on melee combat perhaps places it closest to Dawn of War 3. You control squads, rather than individual units, and there is no Starcraft-style base building. You can upgrade your main hub to increase your unit cap and unlock higher-tier units, as well as build utility structures and defenses on the various capture points that will serve as your main source of ticking resources.
Planar Mayhem
When two squads get into a scrap, it actually lasts a decently long time, allowing room to maneuver and make more decisions before one side evaporates, which I really liked. Every unit has at least one active ability, like this Orruk net gun that can lock down a large formation of troops, and squads under attack can retreat to base to heal up, which is generally much cheaper than building a new squad. There’s also a unit triangle where assault troops beat heavies, heavies beat ranged, and ranged beat assault. Monsters and heroes can break those rules, though. The Stormcast Eternals obviously focus on heftier, more expensive units, while the Kruleboyz prefer swarm tactics and relentless aggression.
I feel like I’ve barely scratched the surface of Realms of Ruin at this point, but the fundamentals are there. I’m down for a new Dawn of War-like, even if I don’t have as much built-in affection for the setting yet. And you can’t deny these Eternals look pretty damn cool.
