A steel fist tosses a frag grenade and the first domino falls: bodies disfigured by plagues and unholy mutations fly through the air like crash-test dummies and land directly in front of the ready-to-fire muzzles of bolters and psycannons, which immediately hurl explosive rounds at Grandfather Nurgle’s brood. This takes out half of the enemy nest and leaves the rest without cover. A good start. Gotta love it when a plan comes together.
Burn the heretic. Kill the mutant. Purge the unclean. In the grimdark world of the 41st millennium, this is a mantra that simply describes the order of the day – especially if you’re a commander of the Grey Knights, the 666th Chapter of Space Marines. The Knights are special even among the genetically created super-soldiers of the Imperium of Mankind, because all members of the Chapter are Psykers, courtesy of the genome provided by the God-Emperor himself. This means that they can tap into the chaotic power of the Warp – basically, all of them have magic abilities. Their existence is secret and their primary mission is to hunt down and destroy any daemons of the Warp. They are the hammer of the Inquisition. The most effective tool against the deadliest servants of the Chaos Gods.
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In the turn-based tactical role-playing game Warhammer 40k: Chaos Gate – Daemonhunters from developer Complex Games, you’ll take command of a battleship of the Grey Knights. Your mission: investigate a more than disturbing plague, which Chaos God Nurgle – god of decay, disease and pestilence, but affectionately known as Grandfather by his followers – may be behind. First and foremost, Daemonhunters is based on two inspirations, namely the original Warhammer 40k: Chaos Gate from 1998 and the popular XCOM series.
Your battleship, Baleful Edict, serves as the campaign’s hub: inside this vehicle, reminiscent of a flying Gothic cathedral, you’ll travel the galaxy to clean up outbreaks of plague and, in the meantime, get to the bottom of Nurgle’s plans. Here you’ll have conversations with the game’s well-crafted NPCs and research additional stratagems and other advantages to turn the tide of battle in your favor. You’ll also constantly upgrade the ship – for example, to be able to take on more Space Marines and treat wounded comrades more quickly – and gather information about your next objectives to perfectly adapt your Space Marines’ equipment to them. This part of the game is very reminiscent of the StarCraft 2 trilogy, whose campaigns also feature large capital ships as hubs for activities between missions.
Again and again, as a commander, you’ll have to mediate between the quarreling NPCs and make other important decisions, some of which will have important consequences. Do you alienate the Inquisition to please your Grand Master, which would result in a penalty for research speed but a bonus to your troops’ experience gain? Do you want to risk the lives of your men with risky medical procedures, or would you rather risk your overcrowded hospital going completely belly up, resulting in no healing at all until a repair is possible? Such political dilemmas confront you constantly as you travel through the stars, and the wisdom of your decisions has a significant impact on the main part of the game – the turn-based battles.
In Warhammer 40k it’s not uncommon for entire worlds to be wiped out by orbital bombardments after an Exterminatus decree to prevent the spread of mutations, heresy and xenos invasions, but your mission requires a bit more subtlety. Once you have discovered the traces of Nurgle, you send a small team of usually four Grey Knights to the surface to do cleanups and collect clues.
The order’s name is fitting: their armor looks like a medieval knight’s, and they favor psychic energy-powered melee weapons that make them look like crusaders or templars. Speaking of looks: You get to customize each Knight to your liking, for which an editor with numerous options is available. This crusader vibe is reinforced by the game’s soundtrack, which makes abundant use of organs and monk choirs, which give the military music a religious and epic undertone, successfully contributing to the atmosphere.
In combat, these knightly-looking behemoths feel suitably weighty – especially in their heavy Terminator armor: Knights make the ground tremble when they charge, break through armored gates as if they were tinfoil, and even knock over mighty pillars whose debris buries enemies. Small obstacles they simply leap over skillfully or run through. This not only makes it easier to navigate the maps, which feature numerous interactive objects and points of interest, but also feels incredibly satisfying.
Similar to XCOM and other turn-based games, your characters have a limited number of action points (AP) per turn, with which you’ll have to make do. Besides this, you’ll have to manage a second resource in willpower (WP). WP is used to unlock the Knights’ psychic powers. Each of the four standard Space Marine classes (in addition, there’s one advanced class for each of these for a total of eight) – Apothecaries (Healers), Justicars (Tanks), Purgators (Ranged Damage Dealers), and Interceptors (Melee Damage Dealers) – has a unique ability tree whose nodes you’ll continue to unlock as you gain experience. Together with a massive selection of armor, melee and ranged weapons, grenades, servo skulls, and other gadgets that you’ll earn as rewards for missions, this results in innumerable powerful combinations. This not only ensures that you’ll be able to adapt the squad to your favorite playstyle, but likewise that you’ll be able to adapt to all sorts of enemies and situations.
However, those who are familiar with Warhammer 40k will know that the Warp’s powers can’t be used without risk. Using the psychic skills of your Marines not only consumes WP, but also speeds up the filling of the Warp meter. When it reaches 100 percent, Nurgle may reach into his bag of tricks and complicate your missions with additional reinforcements, dangerous plague zones, mutations of his servants and other nastiness. So tapping into this chaotic power comes at a price. Careful management of both resources is necessary to survive the battles, in which you’ll always be hopelessly outnumbered. In addition, there are the aforementioned terrain features including a cover system and the freely usable stratagems you can research and customize. These are additional abilities that are available once per mission and may save you in a critical moment.
Now this all sounds more complicated than it is in practice, because the game does a good job of transparently presenting this deep combat system with its countless options. You can access info about a character’s status and abilities at any time. Besides, frustrating random aspects are kept low – you’ll always know exactly how much damage you’ll do at a minimum. Critical hits and some skills are still probability-based, but there is no chance of missed shots, for example. This RNG approach surprises much more often in a positive way than negatively, but leaves enough room for chaotic situations when plans just don’t go smoothly. A solid compromise that minimizes player frustration.
The battles are tactically demanding and sometimes downright nerve-wracking as Nurgle’s hordes come at you from all sides. Unfortunately, it takes a bit for the enemies you encounter to become more diverse. On the other hand, each new type of enemy drastically changes the dynamics of battles, forcing you to adapt again and again. The same goes for the mission types, which hardly differ from each other for a long time and thus run the risk of feeling repetitive. Some spice is added here by the optional side missions. These require you to carry out a mission without grenades, for example, or to eliminate a certain number of enemies with a specific type of weapon. If you accept such a deed, you’ll have to adjust your game style and may get additional rewards out of it – or risk the Grand Master’s ire should you fail.
Visually, there is hardly anything to complain about – executions of stunned enemies that provide additional AP or mutilations that allow you to take out certain weapons or abilities of enemies, for example, are brutal as it should be for Warhammer 40k, but the chosen graphic style defuses such scenes significantly. But in a game such as this, readability is key, and the chosen art style makes it very clear what’s going on on the screen. At times, it all even looks unintentionally comical, as enemies fly through the air like crash-test dummies and then try to straighten up again like rubber dolls. Some enemies look like they’re straight out of a cartoon with silly smiles on their faces, which is odd at first, but perfectly in line with the lore. Grandfather Nurgle bathes his followers in an endless stream of endorphins as their bodies mutate and become putrid husks of disease, making them immune to pain and unsettlingly happy.
The entire experience was already polished during the test phase, though a few bugs or missing assets such as tooltips marred the fun a bit.
It’s just pure fun to plan tactical scenarios and then watch those plans come to fruition in practice – or, in turn, to thwart your opponent’s strategy. The setting is eminently suitable for a game like this – and not just because it strongly recalls the origins of Warhammer 40k as a turn-based miniatures game. The power fantasy of heavily armored Space Marines teleporting through demonic hordes with whirling energy blades and unleashing psionic storms while pledging allegiance to the God-Emperor in the voice of Bane from Batman is simply very well realized.
You also can’t help but feel a lot of satisfaction about the game’s story in the context of a years-long pandemic, lashing out at the spreaders of a plague with an arsenal of overpowered weapons – somehow it just feels liberating to do something about that directly. If the synthesis between XCOM and Warhammer 40k is considered heresy, Warhammer 40k: Chaos Gate – Daemonhunters is certainly worth the punishment.
Written by Marco Wutz on behalf of GLHF.
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