Here’s a stealth drop that was more than appreciated: SNEG and Games Workshop partnered up to bring 20 classic Warhammer and Warhammer 40K games to Steam. Many of these are games that had already been released on the platform but, for one reason or another, had been delisted. However, many others have landed on Steam for the first time. Including Warhammer: Shadow of the Horned Rat. The greatest Warhammer game of all.
I have written about my love of this game in the past, but really, it boils down to it capturing, perfectly, the appeal of the Warhammer miniatures game and then adding the perfect structure for a campaign behind it. In Shadow of the Horned Rat, you recruit and manage a small mercenary army of units from across the gamut of the Warhammer range. These units level up with battle experience (but you need to be careful because unit members that die need to be replaced; if they can’t, the unit can dwindle away to nothing).
But no two plays of Shadow of the Horned Rat need to be the same because you do have some choice in terms of which missions you tackle, and the path you take through the game results in you being able to recruit different units and fight in different battles against different enemies.
Basically, for a guy who was hardcore into collecting Warhammer miniatures back in those days, this game was the perfect representation of what it was like to piece together an army and send it into battle. Combined with the colourful presentation, it has a quality and vibe that even the mighty Total War games have not quite achieved.
This is just one of the games that SNEG has brought to Steam. Shadow of the Horned Rat’s sequel, Dark Omen, is also finally on Steam. As is Warhammer 40K Chaos Gate, a turn-based tactics game in that dark franchise. As is Final Liberation, which is an adaptation of the short-lived mass battles Epic 40,000 line. And the FPS Fire Warrior. And Mark of Chaos, which sat somewhere between Shadow of the Horned Rat and the Total War Warhammer titles, for bringing the fantasy game into real-time action.
Those are all new to Steam. Returning titles include the excellent Warhammer Quest duo, the Space Hulk board game adaptations, Slitherine’s recently de-listed and now returned 4X Warhammer 40K Armageddon, Tin Man Games’ excellent gamebook Herald of Oblivion, and more.
Many of these games had been preserved elsewhere, so were not entirely “lost” – I actually just started a replay of Shadow of the Horned Rat thanks to the GOG version, for example, but Steam is such a ubiquitous platform that it’s still important that games are preserved by being made available on it.
And it is important that these games are preserved. Games Workshop and Warhammer have a very long history in video games. It’s often been a less-than-great history, and personally, I feel like the franchise has too few tabletop-style strategy games and too many action games given what Warhammer and its sci-fi counterpart are meant to offer.
But it is a long history, and like with any art form, the heritage and history of it matter for understanding the medium itself. The last few years have been really good for developers and publishers “rescuing” games that, through licensing rights, have been challenging to otherwise make available. I personally believe that the rise of emulation consoles and the like has essentially forced the industry to take preservation seriously, and I’m glad they have. Now, with both all of classic Warhammer and all of classic Dungeons & Dragons fully available on Steam, I’ve got 90% of my gaming childhood back.
(The one real piece of the puzzle missing is Civilization 2. Given how bad Civilization VII bombed, perhaps 2K Games could see the money on the table and dust of Civ 1 and 2 for Steam re-releases too. EA did it with The Sims. There’s no excuse not to).
