That's a little distracting, but it doesn't compare to the downright obnoxious sounds during actual gameplay; your men blurt out annoying snippets like "yes, m'lord" every time you select a unit, every time you tell them where to go, and pretty much every time anything else happens to them. The musical score is suitably inspiring and noble-sounding, however.

By the time you drink all this in, the difficulty ratchets up noticeably, and stage three begins. Here, the complete uselessness of the D-pad comes into play, and all the quirks that frustrated you in stage one come roaring back. Clicking the right joystick is supposed to select all your forces at once, but it works inconsistently. There's a "deployment" stage at the beginning of each fight, but usually the space in which you're allowed to position your fighters is so small it doesn't matter. As the number of units you command grows, battles become increasingly hectic; it's nearly impossible to retain a concept of what's going on in the various skirmishes. The enemies can appear out of thin air, too.

Worse, say you lose. What went wrong? If you died quickly, it might be obvious (say, you didn't bring your swordsmen to the front to cover for your handgunners, who got slaughtered), but otherwise, it's baffling. Sometimes it looks like things were going fine, and boom, dead.

Maybe you weren't paying close enough attention when the game introduced the battle, and didn't catch that your job is to protect a different army, not to defeat the enemy while maintaining yours. Maybe you're not doing a good enough job matching your units to enemy units they can easily defeat. Who knows? The game provides little help, save the occasional notice that this or that is happening. And those precious voice clips telling you you're under attack, gee, thanks.

In addition to the lack of hand-holding, it's the problem of remaining faithful to a PC game that drags down Warhammer: Battle March. Designing a title from the ground up for the 360, a developer would almost certainly have simplified things, or at least allowed the player to simplify things by choice.

For example, players could have the game automatically perform some of the complicated tasks, much like how in racing games, players can have the game shift for them. At the very least, the story mode could start that way, and slowly introduce new features as needed.

Warhammer: Battle March doesn't have any of that, so only the most experienced real-time strategy players will be able to make sense of it, much less enjoy it.

By Robert VerBruggen
CCC Freelance Writer