To certain members of the legions of Warhammer table-top strategy fans out there, there's an itch that an MMO like Warhammer Online or RTS like the Dawn of War series simply can't scratch. It's the desire to see Games Workshops' venerable game of toy soldier combat brought intact -- complex rules and all -- to the videogame world. In 2006 Namco Bandai made a decent attempt to feed that need with Warhammer: Mark of Chaos, a "real-time tactics" game of strategic combat that did a passable job of bringing much (though not all) of the table-top feel to the PC screen. Now in 2008 comes Battle March, a solid expansion pack that adds a few nice touches but doesn't take the opportunity to improve a good but unremarkable strategy game.

The premise of Battle March is about as shallow and cookie-cutter as it gets, even for Warhammer, which has always been more about excuses for bloodshed than deep character studies. The chaos unleashed by the original Empire/Chaos conflict in the first game has fired up Gorbash, one in a long line of Greenskin "Warbosses" who sees an opportunity for the orcs to get in some "mighty big fights." Into the mix come the Dark Elves, who plan on using the march of the Orcs to further a deep and complex plan designed to bring them enormous power -- maybe. The muddled presentation of the storyline in the single-player campaign is not one of the game's high points, barely performing its solitary duty of providing connective tissue for the campaign.


Much of the game's graphic personality is simply a virtue of its strong license and some excellent cut-scenes. It's very difficult to go wrong with the Warhammer universe. Warhammer Orcs speak with mumbled Cockney accents, enjoy simple philosophies ("Bigga iz betta!", "I iz da strongest!", "Kill, kill, kill!") and are always fun to play with. Warhammer Dark Elves have a gleefully unrepentant evil attitude that's a blast and just over-the-top enough to not be truly disturbing. The problem is, just like the Empire and Chaos units of the original game, the Orc and Dark Elf animations in Battle March are crude and rudimentary. Indeed, while individual soldiers have an impressive variety of appearances (created with a powerful user-controllable army customizer), it's tough to escape the impression while watching them move and fight that these really are lead figures clobbering each other.

The game's single-player component does little to dispel the feeling of mediocrity. Battle March's linear single-player campaign adds the story of Gorbash and his Dark Elf patrons to the original's Empire and Chaos missions. The levels that make up this campaign are the sort of standard-issue puzzle-map scenarios that designers fall back on to mask poor AI. This isn't quite as bad for the Dark Elf maps. As a race, the Dark Elf personality and abilities lend themselves to stealth and trickery. Their problem-solving adventures are fun and would have made a nice change of pace from the Orc missions had those missions themselves not been puzzle maps.

The Orc scenarios, though, channel the player into obvious columns moving from one overwhelming set-piece battle to another. For a game that takes so much of its inspiration from the Total War series, Battle March's single-player game is missing one of its greatest joys: vast open-field formation maneuvering. Worse still, the sole strategic variation between "Easy" and "Hard" difficulty modes is the number of enemies. The computer AI is slightly improved from the original game (it seems to have learned what flanking is), but it's still wearing the little beanie with the propeller when compared with even a mediocre player.