The background maps themselves are good too, there’s the right kind of gritty battlefield atmosphere to the various locations. The only problem is that heavy battles can really drag the framerate down as excellent spell animations and effects fly left right and centre coupled with the flying bodies from the shots from a Hellcannon.

So the price you pay for these great graphics is in a laggy framerate, something that you don’t want when you’re dealing with large armies clashing in a brutal fight. This brings us onto the actual clash, the unit animations in battle aren’t really all that impressive, not when you look at the other games and if Relic can pull off some of the most vibrant combat animations in a RTS, the developers of Mark of Chaos should have made some kind of effort in that direction as well.

You can get extremely close with the camera and there are some nice touches in the gameplay, there’s no resource management and the battles play a lot like the Total War series, regiments and unit formations are all in. Various types of orders can be given to your troops and the game has some comprehensive tutorials to help you get the basics you’ll need to survive.

It introduces a duel mode where two heroes face off in one on one combat, a nice little touch that spruces up the normal battles. You can upgrade your units in the singleplayer and purchase more from towns, you can even upgrade the hero and add various items just like in the good old days of Warcraft 3 and it’s nice to see the customisation of your main heroes is fairly in-depth.

I haven’t experienced any XP loss bug for my units but I have spoken to numerous gamers that have, so it’s wise to mention it here so that if you do get the game and you lose XP for your units, it’s a bug not a feature.

The AI isn’t too bad; it has a grasp of tactics and will perform a couple of unit rushes before it begins to look for alternatives. The higher the difficulty setting the more of a challenge you will face, where it starts to use advanced tactics and techniques.

There is a sparse multiplayer component and the retail game mentions something about a dynamic MP campaign, the review copy we have didn’t seem to have this feature – or we couldn’t track it down. We did have a chance to test several of the MP modes out like Castle Siege, and were disappointed to find it only had one map.

The level of army customisation in the MP game is the same as the SP side, so you can spend quite a bit of time tweaking your chosen army to perfection before you take it on the field to battle AI or human players, the MP really needed more maps, again developers should take a leaf out of Relic’s book, these guys know how to pack a game with MP maps and decent sized ones too.

All in all Mark of Chaos is a mixed bag of good and bad, it falls short thanks to some glaring bugs and some atmosphere issues that drag you out of the game with a bang. The voice acting and music is good but nothing stands out, the sound effects are a little tinny at times and they really needed to spruce up the game in a few places.

It’s a good solid RTS without resource management that attempts to bring Warhammer Fantasy Battles to life, but just doesn’t quite manage it for me.