

Shadow of the Horned Rat was an ambitious real-time tactical wargaming title, and at that time the ambition didn't entirely pay off.


Dark Omen is the second PC game from the original Warhammer world, and its battles are fought with fantasy armies that might be more at home in Tolkien's " Lord of the Rings ." The Dead Shall Walk the Earth Once Moreĭark Omen is the successor to Shadow of the Horned Rat, which made its way onto the gaming scene roughly during the time that a Pentium 90 was considered a pretty good system (see our SOTHR review from 1996). Three of these games (the most recent being the turn-based Final Liberation) are based on the Warhammer "40k" world I experienced that night in the attic - a world that blends in some of sci-fi themes one might expect to find in the year 40,000. Warhammer: Dark Omen is the fifth computer game I know of that takes on the somewhat formidable challenge involved in translating a Warhammerworld to the PC. Though I enjoyed miniatures as a kid and found the whole game system kind of appealing, I can remember thinking two things at the time: "I'm not sure how seriously I can take this whole 'Orcs in Space' thing" and "Wouldn't some of these rules be better handled by a computer?" We followed him up into a dimly-lit space where dusty shelves were lined with leaden armies of the far-flung future, and a wooden door-sized battlefield braced itself for an imminent cataclysm of imaginary blood and bone.Īs a newbie, I was given command of a small regiment of "Blood Marines" or some such thing, which were matter-of-factly obliterated the first time they poked their tiny heads out from behind a smallish spray-painted bush. Our host led us into the kitchen, climbed a ladder on the wall next to the refrigerator, and promptly disappeared into a small hole in the ceiling. Orcs in the AtticĪ few years ago, a friend of mine took me to a house on the outskirts of town to get a taste of the Wonderful World of " Warhammer ", a nifty miniatures-based game system developed by an English company named Games Workshop. You will find help to run the game on this site too. Everything you need to know about Dark Omen is here.
