Warhammer Age of Sigmar VR Tempestfall Review

A beautiful action adventure game that suffers from a few control and AI issues

 Amanda BlainPosted:November 18, 2021
Updated: June 3, 2022

Let’s get started on this Warhammer Age of Sigmar VR Review.

What is Warhammer Age of Sigmar Tempestfall?

Warhammer Age of Sigmar VR Tempestfall is an action-adventure VR game set in well….  the time of Warhammer Age of Sigmar. Warhammer is a huge franchise with tons of lore, and games.

You play as Lord-Arcanum Castor Stormscryer of the Hammers of Sigmar – a type of remade superhuman knight. You move into the city of Dread Held in the Realm of Death to meet your comrades. Investigate the mysterious and deadly Necroquakes, vanquish the undead enemies, and rescue your colleagues who have had their souls stolen.

Who Makes Warhammer Age of Sigmar VR?

Warhammer Age of Sigmar VR is developed by Carbon Studio. They are a polish developer who has created several other games and VR experiences including The Wizards series, Alice VR and Dreamo.

Which VR Headsets is Warhammer Age of Sigmar VR On?

You can play Warhammer Age of Sigmar VR on Steam VR, Viveport, and  Oculus Rift.

Warhammer Age of Sigmar VR Lore

If you are new to the Warhammer franchise can you still enjoy this game? Yup! The general concept of you are a knight fighting bad guy should be enough. There really is so much lore and story in Warhammer though, so I’ll go over a few basic elements here so you can get a bit of a better idea.

Sigmar is the leader god of the humans. He takes the best soldiers and wizards from his various battles and reforges them into Stormcast Eternals. These new superhuman warriors now have supernatural abilities like lightning spells and are basically immortal. If they die they can be reforged again and again. You play as one of these Stormcast Eternals.

Nagash is the god of Death who once worked with Sigmar, but betrayed him. He wanted to be the top boss and was tired of Sigmar stealing all those souls to make Stormcast.

So in the Land of Shyish, he started a ritual to become more powerful, but it was interrupted.  It instead released a shockwave of death magic called a Necroquake. You will hear this mentioned many times in the game. The dead rose up and started attacking the living. The most notable of these dead are called Nighthaunts. These are the wraith-like creatures you will fight many of in this game.

In the game itself, you will come across various books that continue to explain this lore in more detail via the Instruction menu if you are interested in this Epic fantasy story.

Warhammer Age of Sigmar VR Gameplay

The game starts with setting your movement preferences. After that, the entire first level walks you through learning how to use your weapons and spells, how to climb, opening doors, and picking up various collectible items. It moves at a good pace while still being the first level of the game so it doesn’t really feel like a boring tutorial.

Warhammer VR gives a new take on several very common VR elements that have issues in other games.

You have a selection of a few different melee weapons. These same weapons when moved in various ways like thrusting forward or raising above your head while holding the trigger will cause a spell to be cast.

Spellcasting is tons of fun. The developer makes The Wizards VR games so they have lots of practice with spell casting in VR and it shows here. There are several fun lightning spells that you can cast using various methods. It is all very fluid and really makes you feel like a knight with lightning powers.

Opening doors (which can be problematic in VR games, but not so much here) use two hands gripping handles and pushing or pulling. It makes you feel like the huge door you are pushing really is heavy as it slowly creeps open.

Items are highlighted with a pillar of light that you can see pretty far away. They also make a slight humming noise.

Climbing is similar to what you see in other games by using the grab button. But if you hate the climbing experience Warhammer VR offers a convenient skip button at each location.

Another really great touch here is the ability to rip the simple skeletons apart. These very common enemies can be taken out quite easily in any number of ways, but it is the most fun to be ripping an evil undead skeleton’s head off.

The upgrade weapons menu is really quite fun. You have to place your weapon on an anvil and then after selecting your possible upgrade with the various items you have collected, you will need to hammer the weapon on the anvil in various spots. Just a nice fun touch.

Overall there is a really great atmosphere and the combat especially spellcasting makes you feel like a true Stormcaster knight.

Now for some bad parts…

There is a menu for selecting the various weapons using the a/x keys. Each hand can hold a weapon or torch but the radial dial menu does make it easy to select the “wrong” weapon you were going for because the circles are very close together. It really is not the best. Trying to pick the spirit bomb at the bottom is also quite difficult. Doing this in battle is even more so. I frequently found I stuck to using the same weapon over and over because I just didn’t want to be bothered with this menu.

There are only a few different types of enemies you will encounter. The same skeletons and wraiths over and over again. They are all basically the same with similar attacks, and they use the same animations. After a while, it gets pretty boring. You basically just need to flail your arms around and you will both block and hit/ kill the guys eventually.

I initially thought that this game would be very similar to Until You Fall. Unfortunately, it does not match the very detailed mechanics or the epic very real sword fighting found in Until You Fall very much at all.

As mentioned, you don’t need to really block in Warhammer Age of Sigmar, you just kind of wave your weapon in front of you and it will block. You will also frequently miss attacks when the bad guy is doing his attack animation. Your weapon will just kind of float right through the bad guy when this happens like you are hitting air. It is just not quite polished enough.

There is no self hitpoint indicator anywhere on the screen until you are really dying and then everything turns slightly red. I found you could get hit many many times as long as you occasionally took a few steps back and allowed your health to regenerate. Combat was very easy, even with swarms of guys attacking you.

Several times the AI intelligence in the enemies would be a tad off. Bad guys getting caught in very basic doors or behind an obstacle of some kind. Or they would patiently wait off to the side, sometimes not spawning until you kill the 3 guys on your screen, or while you dealt with an enemy in front of you.  These are not very intelligent ghosties.

There is no physics located in the weapons so when you clang the two of them together in your hands, they just float through each other.

There is also a fair amount of backtracking moments. When you return to the previous location where you already killed the dead, they once again respawn with the exact same fight for you to kill them. There is no leveling in this game, no XP, no gold or other materials to be collecting from the dead. So this grind is definitely tedious. Especially because I already did it once.

Spellcasting is great and fun, but for some reason pretty much none of the enemies use spells. They just run towards you with their swords while you are shooting lightning at them. It can make you feel pretty overpowered at times.

Some of the NPC’s animations are pretty low-key. Most characters are wearing masks so there are no facial movements when talking. You will see some pretty basic arm-raising movements but not much else going on. They tend to look kind of stiff and forced.

Can you work out with Warhammer Age of Sigmar VR? Is Warhammer Age of Sigmar VR a Fitness Game?

You will be blocking and slashing in this game and that may get your heart rate up while playing it, but I do not consider it to be a fitness game. You will not return to this every day to play as it is one storyline that you play through. During that playthrough, if you use the many climbing options and hack and slashing of enemies, you can probably skip your cardio for the day.

Does Warhammer Age of Sigmar VR cause motion sickness?

Warhammer Age of Sigmar VR has in-game movement. Because the developers have created many VR games there are many options for you to adjust including teleportation, snap or head-turning, and vinaigrette settings.

Warhammer Age of Sigmar VR should not cause any motion sickness issues if you adjust the in-game settings.

Final Thoughts On Warhammer Age of Sigmar VR Review. Is Warhammer Age of Sigmar VR Worth It?