Warhammer Odyssey by publisher Virtual Dreams awkwardly trots the line between “classic” and “old-fashioned”, dipping its toes in the latter more often than its developers might have intended. Still, there’s something refreshing about the confidence with which Odyssey bucks modern mobile MMORPG trends, and if you’re a fan of the games of the genre from before the smartphone era, this might be the closest thing to a true old school MMO experience as you’ll find for your phone.

Ironically, Warhammer Odyssey's novelty is derived from mechanics that have fallen out of fashion. It's just that we haven't really seen them on mobile before. In a genre dominated by auto-questing idle battlers masquerading as MMORPGs, Odyssey forces you to manually navigate its virtual world, press all the buttons, and choose your own quests.

The complex interfaces and inventory systems of old school RPGs would be unwieldy on touch devices, so the combat in Odyssey is necessarily simplistic for this reason. You won't find yourself juggling dozens of skills and items during a fight like you might in classic World of Warcraft. There is, however, an aggro mechanic in place with certain classes equipped with skills entirely dedicated to manipulating this mechanic. In the game's current state, the aggro mechanic is mostly underutilized, though it's sure to play a key role when raid content is introduced.

Odyssey's dedication to old school MMO ideology doesn't mean its developers have done away with modern mechanics completely. On the whole, the game makes fair compromises between the old and the new, though traditionalists might look down on the hand holding.

The game may not have an auto-questing feature, but there's an indicator beneath your character that always points them to their next destination. It's impossible to get lost (especially with the fast travel system), but the maps are large enough that it can take quite a bit of time to get to where you're going.

When leveling up, you must also remember to assign the level points you've earned into your character's various stats and abilities. If you're unsure of how to build your character, there's the option to auto-assign points based on your class. Your character's initial skill tree is linear, but once you've unlocked your class' specialty branch, you're given access to several branches of skills, allowing for a surprising complexity and variation in builds.

One thing that I haven't missed from old school MMOs is competing with other players for mob kills. Few things are more frustrating than whittling a monster's life down only for it to be cleaned up by someone else. Unfortunately, that's in Odyssey as well. I had to fight one quest's monster four times before the game finally counted the mission as complete.

Odyssey also brings back real, classic grinding. There's no way to purchase levels or new equipment with premium currency; the only way to become more powerful is to kill monsters. In fact, the game doesn't even wait before forcing you to grind -- you'll have to do a bit of level farming early on to complete a few quests. MMO purists will love that Odyssey forces you to grind, though more casual players (like myself) will eventually find themselves missing the auto-battle feature.

It’s unfortunate that Warhammer Odyssey makes such a horrible first impression. Tutorial quests are an unavoidable necessity in any video game, but the one in Odyssey isn’t just painfully boring, it also misrepresents the gameplay experience entirely. It’s a purely on-the-rails, A-to-B trudge within a tiny, confined zone.

The quest design in this tutorial area is terrible, as well. In one quest, you're tasked with delivering goods to a character. After picking up the items, you realize the person receiving them is literally a few steps away. If only there was an in-game facepalm animation, then I'd really be roleplaying.

Thankfully, things open up shortly after arriving in the game’s first major town (around 15 minutes in), but if I wasn’t reviewing it, Odyssey would have lost me at the first quest.

Once the player is given a bit of freedom to explore, it really does feel like an entirely different game from its tutorial. You're open to go wherever you want (with soft barriers in the form of

high-level mobs, of course, though some of those can be avoided with stealth skills). Still, there's one issue many mobile MMOs have that Odyssey has failed to avoid, and that's the strange sense of scale. Cities are disproportionately large compared to the rest of the world; it often feels like the Old World in Odyssey is just a single, massive city with the occasional beach, forest, or dungeon.

Visually, Warhammer Odyssey is impressive, if not groundbreaking in the way a game like Black Desert Mobile is. Its grim dark, medieval fantasy aesthetic is befitting of a title touting the Warhammer name. There's also an impressive amount of customizability within its menus - you can tweak the game's graphics and audio for optimal performance on your smart device. It runs beautifully with the graphics turned all the way up on my ASUS ROG 2, and my Xiaomi Redmi Note 8 plays the game just fine, albeit with more modest settings.

Monetisation Model of the "Warhammer Odyssey"

Surprisingly, Even the monetisation model in Odyssey is old school.

No, it's not subscription-based, but it's solely based on IAPs, and even those are fairly barebones. The only thing you can buy with real money in Odyssey is its premium currency, Sovereigns. Sovereigns can be spent to buy inventory slots, experience boosters, or tomes for resetting your skill points or stat points.

You can't buy equipment with Sovereigns (there are currently so few gear options that it wouldn't be worth your money, anyway) or directly purchase levels either. In fact, there's nothing in Odyssey to facilitate grinding other than experience boosters, and those are limited in their usefulness beyond a certain level.

The Final Word

Warhammer Odyssey is a mobile MMORPG inspired by pre-smartphone genre classics with modern sensibilities. Overall, it nails that balance between old and new, though there are some "classic" features like the long manual grinding and the rampant mob stealing that feel like added tedium for tediousness' sake.

Currently, there isn't much to do in Odyssey beyond questing and farming levels, and key features like trading and an auction house are either barebones or non-existent. Still, it's early days yet, and the developers have promised new content is upcoming.

There's nothing in the mobile gaming space that matches the feel and experience of classic MMOs from the genre's heyday, but Warhammer Odyssey is about the closest you're going to get. Its combat is fun (if simplistic), the progression and skill trees allow for plenty of unique builds and setups, and there's a distinct lack of auto-anything -- no auto-running, auto-battling, or auto-questing.