Warhammer: Dark Omen - Available from GOG
I originally bought Warhammer: Dark Omen in the summer of 1998. I played a demo copy via a magazine cover disc, which was a common means of promotion and marketing back then. Although I was at that point, unfamiliar with the Warhammer Universe, I found this game to be an excellent point of entry. The story did an excellent job of introducing players to “The Old World”, the political and power structure and major characters. I instantly liked both the aesthetic and the lore. Warhammer: Dark Omen was also the first real-time tactical wargame that I played and I spent numerous hours playing through the campaign. Overall, the game was a critical success, particularly on PC, but it struggled commercially upon its initial release and didn’t quite find the audience that it deserved. However, it has achieved status as a “cult classic” among gamers, leading to a recent re-release on GOG in late 2025.
I originally bought Warhammer: Dark Omen in the summer of 1998. I played a demo copy via a magazine cover disc, which was a common means of promotion and marketing back then. Although I was at that point, unfamiliar with the Warhammer Universe, I found this game to be an excellent point of entry. The story did an excellent job of introducing players to “The Old World”, the political and power structure and major characters. I instantly liked both the aesthetic and the lore. Warhammer: Dark Omen was also the first real-time tactical wargame that I played and I spent numerous hours playing through the campaign. Overall, the game was a critical success, particularly on PC, but it struggled commercially upon its initial release and didn’t quite find the audience that it deserved. However, it has achieved status as a “cult classic” among gamers, leading to a recent re-release on GOG in late 2025.
Technically, Warhammer: Dark Omen is a sequel to Warhammer: Shadow of the Horned Rat, although it is not at all necessary to have played the first game. Warhammer: Dark Omen provides a variety of battles that are played in real time. The Warhammer fantasy setting affords players a mixture of medieval warfare with fantasy elements. Hence players deploy units prior to a battle based upon what enemy units they can see and the anticipation of reinforcements. To win you must kill or rout all enemy units. If your forces are similarly routed or destroyed the battle is lost. while losing if all their units are killed/routed from the battlefield. Units include infantry, archers, cavalry and cannon along with more exotic forces such as Dwarf Warriors, Mercenary Ogres and various Wizards. Losses can be replaced (purchased) between battles and units can use magic items to use to help them in battle.
The game maps are 3D with units depicted via animated sprites. The player can issue various commands to units throughout battles, instructing them to move, engage specific enemies or use a magical item. It is important to move the in-game camera around the map and examine the terrain from multiple angles both prior and during the battles. Line of sight is extremely important especially for archers and cannon. The enemy attacks in waves and can sometimes set ambushes. Therefore it is important to zoom the view out from time to time and take stock of the battlefield. If a friendly unit is completely wiped out in a battle it is absent from the rest of the campaign. Therefore, battles need to be fought strategically and not rushed and it is prudent to ensure that your core units are not lost. However, throughout the main story, additional guest units may join you for a while and subsequently leave.
The main story that drives the campaign in Warhammer: Dark Omen is fairly straightforward. Due to an alignment of planets, a powerful supernatural entity, The Dread King, has returned to the world and raised an undead army. Morgan Bernhardt, commander of the “Grudgebringer” mercenaries is tasked by Emperor Karl Franz in investigating and eliminating this threat to The Empire. As the “Grudgebringer” mercenaries journey south they fight various battles in key locations, often with local allies. There are a handful of cutscenes during the course of the story with the majority of the dialogue being delivered by animated talking heads in portraits frames, set against a background reflecting the current location. It is all relatively low key, as you’d expect from a game of this age but the voice acting is solid. There is also a very atmospheric soundtrack by Mark Knight. It should also be noted that this game is hard. You cannot vary the difficulty which is taxing at times.
Last year, Warhammer: Dark Omen received over 15,000 votes on the GOG Dreamlist, leading to an official re-release with 4K and widescreen support in December 2025. It should be noted that the game may require some fine tuning to run how you like it on your PC. There is an excellent guide to this process over at Dark Omen Fansite Portal. All things considered this 28 year old game runs well thanks to GOG and I for one am very pleased to see it make a return. It is not just a case of nostalgia, although that is a factor. Warhammer: Dark Omen is a good real-time tactical wargame that is accessible and compelling. Unlike modern games it is not cluttered with an excess of systems and mechanics, instead focusing on providing straightforward battle scenarios where the player succeeds through thinking and measured action, rather than bluffing their way through. Sometimes less is indeed more.
The Perils of Installing Old PC Games
This is a big subject with thousands of PC games from over a decade ago that could be referenced. However, for the sake of brevity, I am just going to mention three in this post. So to begin with let’s just bypass the entire “nostalgia versus current” debate. Simply put, I feel there is value and enjoyment to be found in older PC games. Graphics and game mechanics naturally date, but often the technical limitations that existed at the time made the game developers both innovative and creative. Therefore you will often find that there are older titles that still have merit and something to offer. I recently bought Mafia which is the first instalment of a franchise currently owned by 2K Games. I have only played the latter two iterations of the game, namely Mafia II released 2010 and Mafia III released 2016. I was aware that the original released back in 2002, had a good reputation for its story driven gameplay and that it is still considered both challenging and creative.
This is a big subject with thousands of PC games from over a decade ago that could be referenced. However, for the sake of brevity, I am just going to mention three in this post. So to begin with let’s just bypass the entire “nostalgia versus current” debate. Simply put, I feel there is value and enjoyment to be found in older PC games. Graphics and game mechanics naturally date, but often the technical limitations that existed at the time made the game developers both innovative and creative. Therefore you will often find that there are older titles that still have merit and something to offer. I recently bought Mafia which is the first instalment of a franchise currently owned by 2K Games. I have only played the latter two iterations of the game, namely Mafia II released 2010 and Mafia III released 2016. I was aware that the original released back in 2002, had a good reputation for its story driven gameplay and that it is still considered both challenging and creative.
So I purchased the game from Good Old Games and installed it via their Galaxy gaming client and installer. One of the major selling points of GOG as a game provider is the way they retrofit old titles to run on current operating systems. I could easily have picked up a copy of Mafia on physical media but installing and running the game from such a source is often problematic. Setting aside driver issues, compatibility mode and the like, many installation disks from this era use obsolete copy protection software. SafeDisc being one example. Thus playing Mafia from a CD installation is dependent upon removing a very specific Windows Update that disabled SafeDisc support. If you have a more recent build of Windows 10, you may find that it is integral to your operating system and cannot be uninstalled. I encountered this same issue with Hidden and Dangerous 2 recently which I installed from the original media. Without the necessary copy protection support the game’s main executable would not work.
However, despite GOG doing their best to resolve such technical issues with the older titles that sell, other problems can arise. For example Mafia has a soundtrack consisting of period Jazz music from such artists as The Mills Brothers, Louis Armstrong and Django Reinhardt. However, due to licensing complications the music is absent in the GOG release. Now some players may not think this relevant to their enjoyment of the game, but I feel that it is integral to the overall game experience. Hence, I spent an hour reading the GOG forums as to how to restore the game score. There is a way to do so and someone has posted a link to the “removed” files which they’ve sourced from the original installation CDs. Needless to say I have followed this process and all has gone well, but it does require you to put your trust in your fellow gamers and that is not something one does lightly.
Another problem arising from installing Mafia is that this is a game that hales from a time when screen resolutions were a lot lower and aspect ratios other than 4:3 were not commonplace. Thus, elements of the onscreen UI are distorted or broken when running the game at 1920 x 1200, which is my default screen setting. Again a search online will yield a list of workarounds and I found a suitable “mod” over at Nexus Mods, along with another to update the draw distance for modern PCs. Nexus Mods is a long-established site whose community ensures that bogus mods are eliminated, making their content more reliable than other third-party sites. Hence, I was finally able to play Mafia with the original score and at a contemporary screen resolution without and distortion. My initial impressions of the game are good. The story is indeed well written and the missions are quite taxing, although the vehicle handling is appalling.
Another favourite game of mine from the late nineties is the real-time tactical fantasy wargame, Warhammer: Dark Omen. This game was released in 1998 and used 3D generated terrains in which 2D sprites subsequently battled. The game was one of the first to include support for the first-generation Voodoo 3dfx 3D accelerator cards. Getting such a game, which was also designed to run on Windows 98 to function on a modern PC is a challenge. Unlike Mafia, if you want to play Warhammer: Dark Omen, then you have to do more than apply a few mods. There is an entire forum dedicated to this game with a very complex set of instructions to get the game working. Going to such lengths to play a game one feels nostalgic about may not viable option for everyone. Therefore, the casual gamer would be wise to bear in mind that purchasing a much beloved title from GOG does not guarantee an exact duplicate experience to what you may have had previously. Nor does trying to install and play a game using the original media. Unless you have access to older hardware with the appropriate operating system of the time, you’ll probably have to do some tweaking to get things running either way. Therefore, caveat emptor.
