Talisman: The Horus Heresy

With the recent releases of games like Tharsis and Retaliation: Enemy Mine, it's not surprising that one of the more popular board games on Steam would make take another go. Talisman: The Horus Heresy is the pseudo-sequel to Talisman. This time however, Nomad Games has used the Warhammer universe to create the board game. Disappointingly, this sequel is nothing more than a visual overhaul of the original game.

As stated earlier, Talisman: The Horus Heresy is a board game. So you will experience the usual things -- dice rolls, and adventure cards -- but first you will need to select a character. All the different characters have specific abilities, so pick wisely. For example, my personal favorite -- Praetor -- adds his intelligence points onto both his melee attack and ranged attack.

Speaking of stats, each different character has different stat points, these points include your basic things like your ability to fight in ranged battles, or melee, to more advance things like Fate points. Fate points are ways that you the player can change dice rolls so they land more in your favor. Each character has a different amount of them, so use them sparingly. You can earn more of these points by doing various things on the board. If you want to level up your melee damage, for example, you need to kill a certain amount of baddies that are lying around on the board. You will need these extra points in damage in order to complete the game.

In order to complete a full game of Talisman, you will need to collect a talisman through a quest, and battle your way into the middle circle. Just be sure to have leveled-up your character, otherwise you will find yourself having to start all over. If your character runs out of lives, all of their stats will be reset. However, in my experience, this was never a problem. In fact, this game has a very weird difficulty spike, and this is due to the randomness of the game. In the beginning of the game, it feels as if your character can do much of anything, and almost every battle is a struggle, then out of nowhere you can land on a card that will give you plus one to your melee combat, and then the battle is in your favor.

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Really this is more of a problem with board games in general, and not this game specifically. However something that is wrong with this game specifically is how anti-climactic the ending boss battle is. As you can see in the footage, there is no dynamics to him and my character was so much stronger than him, that he literally doesn't have a chance to kill me. It would have gone a long way for there to be multiple stages to the boss fight or some original mechanics.

Another thing that didn't really hit the mark is the Warhammer aspect to the game. What I mean by that is that this game is basically Talisman: The Digital Edition, but with a Warhammer skin on it. Now, admittedly, the visuals in Talisman: Horus Hersey are much better and more aesthetically pleasing than the original, it doesn't quite make up for the price tag that is coming in at 10 dollars more expensive. The only thing different in this version of Talisman, is the fact that when you kill something you can eventually level up certain skills. In the original, it was all based on luck and where you landed.

In the end, Talisman: The Horus Hersey is a fun game, however so was the original game that this was based off of. While the visual update is nice, this sequel fails to really bring anything new to the table.