RuneQuest: Warlords

RuneQuest: Warlords takes Chaosium's decades-old tabletop setting of Glorantha and turns it into a battle-scale, turn-based tactics game, built by Virtuos on the same engine that powered Warhammer 40,000: Battlesector and published by Slitherine on 9 December 2025 as a full, non-Early-Access release. It asks players to become a warlord, mastering rune magic and fielding armies of heroes and creatures to defend their tribe against the forces of Chaos. Steam's audience calls it Mostly Positive at 74% of a modest 95 reviews, and reading across that corpus turns up a game whose tactical bones draw real, specific praise from genre veterans, running up hard against a launch state that a detailed and independently repeated share of the same audience says simply wasn't ready.

Battlesector's systems, transplanted successfully into Glorantha

The most consistent throughline in the positive review corpus is a direct comparison: reviewers who played Warhammer 40,000: Battlesector describe RuneQuest: Warlords as recognisably the same underlying tactical system, and largely praise the transplant. Formation-based squads built around heroes supported by rank-and-file troops, rune-based magic abilities, and mission objectives that reward careful positioning over raw attrition all draw specific, detailed approval from reviewers with a strategy-game background. Longtime RuneQuest and Glorantha tabletop fans -- several describing decades of history with the setting going back to the 1980s -- separately praise the game's faithfulness to established lore, factions and characters, several noting real satisfaction in seeing a setting they consider under-served in video games (alongside titles like King of Dragon Pass and Six Ages) finally get a large-scale tactical adaptation. Army customisation and the underlying rune-and-hero build systems draw their own specific praise as genuinely engaging decision-making layered on top of the combat itself. One reviewer, writing after having reached the campaign's midpoint, half-jokingly suggests the game might have been better titled "Glorantha: Warlords" rather than leaning on the RuneQuest name specifically, arguing the tactical layer stands on its own well enough that prior knowledge of the tabletop system isn't a prerequisite to enjoy it -- a sentiment echoed by more than one reviewer who came in with no Glorantha background at all and still found the combat loop compelling on its own terms.

A launch several reviewers call broken, starting with sound

The single most substantial, recurring complaint in this review corpus concerns audio. Multiple independent negative reviews describe combat sound design as badly broken at launch -- effects overlapping into indistinct noise, certain unit types producing no sound at all, and a general sense that the audio mix simply wasn't finished before release. More than one reviewer explicitly states the issue alone is the deciding factor keeping an otherwise-recommendable game from a positive review, and one reviewer says plainly that if the sound issues were fixed, they'd recommend the game without hesitation. Layered on top of the audio complaints are more general bug reports: several detailed reviews describe disappearing ground effects, units changing position or health after loading a save, missions and side content becoming inaccessible due to progression bugs, and hard lockups during later campaign missions specifically.

A campaign several reviewers call linear once the lore wears off

A second, related thread of criticism concerns the campaign's structure rather than its technical state. Several detailed reviews -- including from reviewers who are lifelong RuneQuest fans and therefore predisposed to enjoy the setting -- describe the mission structure as linear with little sense of meaningful branching choice, and mission-to-mission difficulty pacing that swings unevenly between too easy and unexpectedly punishing rather than building steadily. Voice acting and dialogue draw specific, recurring criticism as well, with more than one reviewer recommending players mute the game entirely and play their own music instead, a complaint distinct from and in addition to the broader sound-mix issues described above. None of these complaints individually sink the game for most of its positive reviewers, but they recur often enough, independently, to read as a genuine gap between the tactical combat's quality and the surrounding campaign presentation's polish.

PvP that the achievement data suggests almost nobody plays

Global achievement data offers a useful window into how players are actually engaging with the game beyond the review text. The earliest campaign milestone sits at 61.7% of all owners, a reasonable start rate, declining steadily through named campaign-specific achievements down into single digits for the game's hardest late-campaign goals -- a gradual rather than cliff-edge drop consistent with players setting the linear campaign aside gradually rather than bouncing off immediately. What stands out more starkly is the PvP and multiplayer-specific achievement set, which sits uniformly below 2% across every tracked milestone, several at effectively 0%. Combined with a review corpus that almost never mentions multiplayer at all despite the mode's presence, that data suggests the vast majority of owners are engaging with Warlords purely as a single-player campaign experience, whatever its designers' broader multiplayer ambitions may have been.

Final verdict

RuneQuest: Warlords succeeds at the thing it borrows most directly -- Battlesector's tactical combat systems translate convincingly into Glorantha's setting, and longtime fans of both the tabletop lore and the underlying engine find real, specific things to praise here. What holds it back from a stronger recommendation is almost entirely execution at launch: a genuinely broken sound mix that multiple reviewers say is the single deciding factor against recommending the game, real bugs including lockups and progression-blocking glitches, and a campaign structure several of even its most sympathetic reviewers call too linear and unevenly paced to fully justify its asking price. Worth watching for patches if the setting or the Battlesector-derived combat appeals to you, rather than an easy buy at full price today.