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Warhammer Warhammer 40,000: Chaos Gate - Daemonhunters - Grey Knights turn-based tactical RPG

Galdred

Studio Draconis
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Middle Empire
Steve gets a Kidney but I don't even get a tag.
Is it normal in 40k not to have hit chance?

It probably makes more sense here, with Grey Knights being hyper elite units and all. I would like to see enemies having miss chance but not your own units. At these distances, it would be super embarrassing for a GK to miss something.
It really depends on whether this also extends to opponents.
Cultists having a 100% chance to hit Grey Knights would be bad, and them having a 100% chance to cause damage even worse...

Btw, the game looks relatively solid to me, and Chaos Gate OG is one of the games I liked the most, but exclusive Pre-order exclusive bonus (including a character locked beyond deluxe edition and items requiring you to watch their twitch stream to unlockà + Denuvo, made by developers who worked on a 40K F2P mobile game that is the equivalent of Boom Beach 40K doesn't inspire much confidence on their ethics...
 
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PanDupa

Educated
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Apr 5, 2021
Messages
70
Warhammer themed mod for xcom, with warcraft/fortnight art style, made by tranny. Can't wait for this amazing RPG
 

randir14

Augur
Joined
Mar 15, 2012
Messages
641
Warhammer themed mod for xcom, with warcraft/fortnight art style, made by tranny. Can't wait for this amazing RPG
Don't forget Denuvo, Twitch drops and gameplay content only available in the most expensive version. Also the total lack of any community interaction, at least on the Steam forum. This company hasn't made a game before or a name for themselves, you'd think they'd try to ingratiate themselves to customers.

Also the performance looks terrible in all the recent videos and streams.
 
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Galdred

Studio Draconis
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Developer
Joined
May 6, 2011
Messages
4,346
Location
Middle Empire
Steve gets a Kidney but I don't even get a tag.
Warhammer themed mod for xcom, with warcraft/fortnight art style, made by tranny. Can't wait for this amazing RPG
Don't forget Denuvo, Twitch drops and gameplay content only available in the most expensive version. Also the total lack of any community interaction, at least on the Steam forum. This company hasn't made a game before or a name for themselves, you'd think they'd try to ingratiate themselves to customers.

Also the performance looks terrible in all the recent videos and streams.
I think your statement about them not having made any game before is incorrect.
http://dropassault.com/
Now whether that is better than not having making any prior game or not is unclear :D
Drop Assault is a mobile F2P game inspired by Boom Beach, Clash of Clans, and similar games that try to make you come back to them every 5 minutes, before trying to extort your money.
 

Hobo Elf

Arcane
Joined
Feb 17, 2009
Messages
13,999
Location
Platypus Planet
Making mobile games to build capital and fund your real game is a valid business strategy. Much better than begging for money on crowd funding platforms. It also shows that you can ship product if you're not well known / a literal who.
 

Infinitron

I post news
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Messages
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Codex Year of the Donut Serpent in the Staglands Dead State Divinity: Original Sin Project: Eternity Torment: Tides of Numenera Wasteland 2 Shadorwun: Hong Kong Divinity: Original Sin 2 A Beautifully Desolate Campaign Pillars of Eternity 2: Deadfire Pathfinder: Kingmaker Pathfinder: Wrath I'm very into cock and ball torture I helped put crap in Monomyth
https://www.eurogamer.net/warhammer...ers-review-rich-raucous-space-marine-strategy

Warhammer 40,000: Chaos Gate - Daemonhunters review - rich, raucous Space Marine strategy
A grim lark.


eurogamer-net-4.png


A brutal but graceful and comprehensible mix of ideas from Warhammer, XCOM and Gears Tactics.

In the grim darkness of the far future, there is only satisfying turn-based squad battling let down just a touch by a sluggish resource-gathering midgame. It feels blasphemous to call a Warhammer 40k adaptation slick, let alone subtle. This is the universe of endless grot, rancid liturgy and heavy-duty cybernetics, its warriors held together by rivets and fanaticism, its starships ancient Gothic ironclads recovered from asteroid fields.

It helps that the specific Warhammer 40k Space Marine chapter you control in Daemonhunters might have been custom-designed for an XCOM-style game - the Grey Knights, a secretive order who fight in small groups against overwhelming numbers, surgically uprooting Chaos infestations as an extension of the Imperial Inquisition. As the story begins, the good ship Baleful Edict is on its way home to Titan after an especially bloody campaign, having lost its previous Commander during the final (tutorial) battle. As his disembodied mute replacement, you have only moments to get to know your lieutenant Ectar and Tech Priest (or chief engineer) Lunete before the Edict is commandeered by the inquisitor Vakir, who has detected a mysterious Nurgle "Bloom" on nearby planets.

Nurgle is the Chaos god of disease, decay and rebirth, and something of a New Weird folk hero in these posthuman, chthulucentric times, but Space Marines have no patience for hippy environmentalist sci-fi, so off you go to stomp all over the Fly Lord's glorious mouldy designs. Infected planets work like cities in XCOM: outbreaks pop up in threes on your holographic star map, and you usually only have the time to reach one before the infection levels up, which makes subsequent battles on that planet more dangerous, with additional, tougher species of Chaos demon and more frequent "Warp Surges" debuffing your Marines while empowering their foes.


When not purging planets, slowly improving the Edict's research and construction facilities - a small but gorgeous selection of menu tabs with individual theme tunes - and tending to your squads of bellowing robo-exterminators, you'll be playing office diplomat. Daemonhunters is broadly a cosmic witchhunt, but it functions more often like a theocratic workplace comedy. All your colleagues have it in for the others. Vakir is a snotty outside consultant who treats the whole thing like her personal science project, always insisting that you dig deeper into the Bloom's origins than seems devout, or safe. Ectar is pleasant enough when you chat alone, but he's also a grizzly curmudgeon who likes to do things by a very short book titled "kill on sight". Lunete is C3PO after a thousand years working for Jabba the Hutt's IT department; she regards the others as misbehaving ship systems with obsolete fleshy bits, and isn't shy about telling you this.

Squabbles are routine, whether in the shape of major plot developments or pop-up story events that ask you to pick a side. Problematically, your underlings are also avatars for Daemonhunters' upgrade, research and base construction elements - tell Ectar off for "tidying up" Vakir's reports and he'll sulk for 30 days, setting back your mission XP earnings by 50%. You're also periodically interrupted by messages from Grey Knight grandmaster Vardan Kai, aka Andy Serkis playing a sort of cyborg John Bercow: fall out with him and he'll cut off your supply of new/fancier Space Marine recruits, weapons and gear, which are bought with requisition points from each successful mission.



Whatever happens you can expect passive-aggressive references to Imperial scripture and many rounds of "my devotion to the Emperor is bigger than yours". It's a lot of fun, with some dense but pacey writing from Black Library author Aaron Dembski-Bowden - and it needs to be, because the thrust of the campaign is mildly tedious trucking between planets while waiting for construction projects to complete and sponging up research materials so as to gradually advance the story. The sense of drudgery increases past the 15 hour mark, when the arrival of new customisation options and enemy types is offset by the addition of four new flavours of Bloom, from which you'll need to gather individual samples. The Edict's domestic flare-ups are a welcome relief, though I missed the more choreographed cinematic structure and momentum of Gears Tactics. Each character also has an engaging origin story you can dip into while visiting their management tabs.

The campaign's slower stretches are amply compensated by the cut and thrust - or more accurately, gouge and bludgeon - of combat itself. The core ingredients of XCOM are all here, brought to life by a jargon-drenched but readable UI that, above all, never leaves you in doubt about who can be shot from where: grid-based, multiple-elevation layouts divided into half or full cover; the ability to set overwatch viewcones and cancel attackers during the enemy turn; map exploration which consists of tentatively peeling back the fog of war, trying not to trigger too many skirmishes at once. The difference is that, when things do go loud, Daemonhunters wants you to go louder. While (a little surprisingly) not quite as rampage-prone as Gear Tactics, it's heavily skewed towards aggression.





One of my favourite memories of XCOM was when a single soldier's panicked reaction fire somehow plunged my entire squad into cowering hysteria, costing me a whole turn and ultimately, the battle. Losing is fun, right? Well, Space Marines think losing is a sin, and they are genetically incapable of being afraid: half the battle dialogue consists of variations on "was that supposed to hurt?" Nurgle's forces are a tasty bunch, ranging from squealing, timebomb-firing Mad Max extras through clanking, bile-spreading Plague Marines to vast, blobby archdemons that duplicate themselves when hit, but only a handful are as imposing or deadly as the overclocked Stormtroopers you pitch against them. Just look at your men posing on the Teleportarium pad during mission setup - the Hottest New Boyband of the 41st millennium with their skull-plated shinguards, crackling blue halberds and flamethrowers with names like Vengeance and Harbinger. It's almost enough to make you forget that, when they're moving around, they look a little like Buzz Lightyear.

Space Marines aren't just immune to fear. Helpfully, they're also immune to death. If a Space Marine is cut down they can self-revive after three turns at half health; lose them again, and they'll be teleported back to the Edict for some TLC. Most Space Marines have limited revives, but some can be resurrected indefinitely, and as long as injured troops don't have Critical Wounds, they can be redeployed while healing with reduced maximum health. I almost started the campaign afresh after losing a whole squad in the opening five hours, but the impact of a team wipe on Standard difficulty is borderline negligible.

Space Marines also don't miss. Rather than asking you to gamble on an accuracy percentage, ranged damage points are added or taken away according to distance, angle and whether the target is in cover. In one of many grace notes, the UI shows how much hurt you'll deal to enemies from any grid square while you're selecting waypoints, adding confidence to flanking strategies that, in XCOM, always feel like tempting fate. Should your enemies manage to flank you in turn, locking you down with overwatch cones, there's a Get Out of Jail Free card in the shape of the Aegis shield system, which lets you trade action points for temporary bonus health to soak up the worst of the reaction fire. Tougher Space Marine classes like the Paladin can be upgraded to basically sprout a second health bar, letting you swagger through killzones rather than, as in XCOM, fleeing to the rooftops and throwing all your grenades at once.

You're encouraged to go on the offensive by the will point system, which fuels Space Marine psychic abilities such as healing or teleportation, and lets you amplify regular attacks with debuffs or AOE blasts. Will points are restored by killing things, which turns every encounter into an exercise in refuelling: in particular, you'll want to ensure your Apothecaries (medics) get a few scalps early on. If restoring will points is the carrot, each map's periodic Warp Surges are the stick: the longer you hang back, the more Nurgle's plague will sabotage your efforts, enhancing enemies with juicy mutations, sealing off your Space Marine abilities or adding to the stock of summoned reinforcements when you assault objectives like giant seedpods. You can counter the effects of Warp Surges with Stratagems, single-use map-wide power-ups that, say, teleport your whole squad or immobilise every enemy for a turn.

Daemonhunters also borrows Gears Tactics' nifty, momentum-building idea of restoring action points when you capital-E Execute a foe, albeit with more restrictions. You only get to perform executions when you roll a critical and unlock Precision Targeting for body parts - if you can't outright kill a Chaos wizard, hacking off the arm he casts spells with is an acceptable consolation prize. The execution system accompanies individual class skills that let you sneak a few extra moves into your turn. The Justicar can beam AP to allies, while the Interceptor has unlocks that confer a chance of regaining AP when they perform teleport assassinations - the basis for some extremely ostentatious killstreaks.


Units also have context-specific abilities that let them act outside their turn - the Interceptor can reaction-fire on any foe targeted by a friendly, while the Purgator can be configured to retaliate when shot at. Tricks like these are probably my favourite aspects of turn-based XCOM-style games - it's not just about picking the optimal combination of moves, but finding ways to extend your go 'unfairly', as though talking over your opponent. Daemonhunters doesn't push this to the same, fiendish heights as Othercide, but it also punishes you much less when you get carried away.

I have a few closing complaints. One is that enemies can be a little eccentric in their overwatching - sometimes, they'll properly tie you up, all but forcing you to sacrifice a unit. Other times, they'll point themselves around almost randomly. I could also have done with some weirder demons early on: the rank-and-file Nurglers are just guys with guns, at least before they're transformed by Warp Surges, which lessens the impact of maps that range from fungal trainyards to slaughtered Eldar craftworlds.

But these are the kinds of dents in the armour a Space Marine sneers at. Some lacklustre enemy types? A smidge too much busywork on the campaign screen? A title that sounds like something you recite to the police to prove you haven't been drinking? Pshaw, warriors of the Adeptus Astartes do not fret over such trifles. Onward, comrades, and sink your teeth into one of the grandest and, yes, slickest XCOM homages in years.
 

Infinitron

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Codex Year of the Donut Serpent in the Staglands Dead State Divinity: Original Sin Project: Eternity Torment: Tides of Numenera Wasteland 2 Shadorwun: Hong Kong Divinity: Original Sin 2 A Beautifully Desolate Campaign Pillars of Eternity 2: Deadfire Pathfinder: Kingmaker Pathfinder: Wrath I'm very into cock and ball torture I helped put crap in Monomyth
https://www.rockpapershotgun.com/warhammer-40k-chaos-gate-daemonhunters-review

Warhammer 40K: Chaos Gate - Daemonhunters review: the best kind of tactical mayhem
Bloomin' marvellous



I've never been one for playing aggressively in turn-based tactics games. I will hug and skulk between half and full height walls like nobody's business, creeping up the map inch by inch lest one of my precious party members accidentally sets off an entire warren of alien nasties by blundering too far ahead or, heaven forbid, one of them gets nicked by a stray bit of shrapnel. To say I'm overprotective is an understatement.

Thankfully, the Grey Knights in Warhammer 40K: Chaos Gate - Daemonhunters are made of sterner stuff. I mean, just look at these brutes. They're enormous. Even the Gears Of War lads would be jealous of the kind of muscle these big robo boys are packing, I'm telling you now. They're by no means invincible, of course, but they can hold their own out of cover, and pick themselves back up again when your best laid plans inevitably start going down the drain. It may not be my most natural style of tactical manoeuvring, but man alive is it liberating.

It's a good thing, too, as the foes in this corner of the Warhammer 40Kverse are anything but a walk in the park. After encountering a strange plague unleashed by everyone's favourite chaos god Nurgle, you and your fellow knights (aboard the wonderfully ornate Baleful Edict) must patrol the depths of space and purge the plague from existence. You'll do this by fighting Nurgle's diseased agents of chaos down on the ground in isometric turn-based battles, and by researching the seeds of this demonic plague back on your ship as you attempt to track this deadly 'Bloom' to its source and be rid of it once and for all.

Now, I'm no Warhammerer, so much of its lore and character references have gone right over my head. Still, regardless of where you stand with either Warhammer or the dark, futuristic warfare of 40K, Chaos Gate - Daemonhunters is a compelling tactics game in its own right - and those early preview takeaways of "XCOM in space" do hit pretty close to the mark now that we've been let loose with final game. But Complex Games haven't just put Firaxis' colossal strategy epic up on a fancy gothic pedestal here. Instead, they've added their own thrilling adornments to it, encouraging players to not only attack enemies head on with their tough as nails Knights, but also to get up close and personal with their misshapen quarry, thanks to its combat system that puts just as much weight on devastating melee attacks as it does on ranged potshots from afar.

Patient zero
The number of potential infection points in this ill-fated galaxy increases over time, but even early on there's still no way to stamp out the Bloom completely.

Indeed, Chaos Gate - Daemonhunters leans hard on that first word of its subtitle. With missions spread out all across your doomed star system, you simply cannot be everywhere at once. As time moves on, planets will inevitably start slipping through the cracks, and you'll need to choose where best to deploy your efforts. Completing a mission will halt the Bloom on that planet for a time, but the more you let somewhere fester, the harder those missions inevitably become.



Combined with a progression system that prevents manual save reloading in the event of a mission going south, this really is a game that's all about embracing the consequences of your actions and just rolling with it. You can restart missions from scratch if you're really not pleased with how things are progressing, but that's more or less it. There's no going back to redo a turn, and definitely no going back in time to do a mission over if you fail it completely. I'm not gonna lie, part of me curses not being able to cheese my way to absolute perfection all the time, but if the likes of Deathloop and the wider roguelite genre have taught me anything in the last couple of years, it's that being wedded to the quick load key isn't always the best or most interesting way to play a game. Enter Chaos Gate with that mindset, and there's plenty to admire here.


The Precision Targeting menu lets you attack specific enemy weak points for additional effects. The Execute takedowns are always a gory delight.

It helps that the Grey Knights are so goddamn robust. If they fall in battle, they'll recover in another three turns with half their original HP intact - or sooner, if you have an apothecary in tow. They each have their own level of Resilience, too, which dictates how many of these 'critical wounds' they can sustain before it's well and truly curtains. As a result, I've yet to lose an entire knight so far, although I'm getting perilously close on a couple of my favourites. After battle, those with critical and light wounds will need some time to recover before they're 'battle ready' again (you can send them back out if you want, albeit with less health than if they were fully rested), but as in XCOM, there are various replenish your ranks if you're low on fit and healthy battle mates. Requisition points can be earned to recruit more knights to your ranks from high command, and you can bolster your barracks to make room for more of them by putting resources into your tech priest's construction tree - although with so many other parts of The Baleful Edict in need of repair, you'll need to prioritise exactly what you need with the time available to you.


Built to last
Admittedly, Chaos Gate's construction element isn't quite as in-depth as its XCOM counterpart, opting for a simpler, more streamlined upgrade path rather than getting bogged down in proximity bonuses and whatnot, but it's still an engaging, surface-level strategy layer that you'll always need to have ticking over in the background.

Still, it's that knightly endurance that makes battles so much more exciting than those I remember from XCOM. Instead of bracing myself for the pain to come, I'm raring to see the next gory takedown, whether that's a regular blaster gun round searing a poor bloke in two, or chopping off entire limbs with one of my knight's special precision attacks when landing a critical hit. For the first time in goodness knows how long, the word 'critical' actually means something here, as performing one successfully will take you into its Precision Targeting menu. Making the most of these is hugely important in Chaos Gate - Daemonhunters. Not only are critical hits one of the only ways of extracting those all-important seeds to further your research (and the wider story), but you can also use them to disable enemy weapons, stun them, or (my favourite), execute them completely, earning all your knights another action point, potentially giving you a crucial leg up in battle when times are tough.


These environments are made for carnage and chaos. Statues can be shot or pushed onto enemies, fire torches can be tipped over to blaze through hallways, and energy cells can be shot to explode like a makeshift grenade.

As any seasoned tactician will know, action points are the lifeblood of your party. Movement and attacks are drawn from the same pool in Chaos Gate - Daemonhunters, although here you'll also have to balance your knights' Willpower points if you want to charge up certain attacks or use special abilities. Such power does come at an additional cost, however. Your Willpower bar is one thing, but in each level you're also fighting against another ticking time bomb: the Warp Surge. This corruption meter increases every turn, and the frequency with which you exert your Willpower, plus the planet's overall corruption level, will affect how quickly it climbs to 100%. When a Warp Surge does occur, enemies will receive additional mutations, making battles progressively harder for a set number of turns. These range from the positively knuckle-biting +5 armour to all enemies for a turn, (a truly despicable kind of punishment), to wider party debuffs that slow your movement speed or take away a Willpower point for the remainder of the battle, for example. You never know what you're going to get, and the way it all feeds off your own desire to get things done quickly means you've got to be constantly on your toes, ready to adapt to whatever roll of the dice the chaos gods throw out next.


All hands on Deck
I ended up spending the majority of my review time playing on my Steam Deck, and cor, what a lovely way to play! I had to knock the settings down to Medium to get a steady 30-odd fps, but its game pad controls were surprisingly serviceable. Text was a bit on the small side, but all the environments and HUD icons remained highly readable and easy to parse. Verdict: a good Steam Deck game.

This alone gives Chaos Gate a hair-raising change of pace compared to its lauded source material, but the Knights themselves make for a heady power fantasy as well. Their ability to absorb and take hits gives them so much more flexibility than XCOM's puny humans, and the industrial playgrounds Complex Games have constructed only serve to highlight their superior battle skills. Cover isn't always a guarantee here, you see, and sometimes the best way to flush out enemies is to remove it altogether, either by chucking one of your grenades or aiming your gun at one of the many destructible (and often explosive) parts of the environment. At one point, I even chucked a sewer grate at a massive plague tree like a giant metal frisbee, an act that proved to be the decisive blow in an otherwise long and hard-fought battle. That's just the start of it, too. With shields on hand to protect from incoming fire, as well as teleports, rams, support fire, counters, and the ability to transfer armour, action points and more to other Knights, there's a surprising amount of depth to be found in its four main character classes, and it all adds up to make these walking talking shoulder pads a force to be reckoned with.

The decision to ditch XCOM's pesky hit percentage is key to this as well. At preview, Matt was worried this knowledge would rob fights of their moment-to-moment drama, but for me at least, the thrill is every bit as powerful. Knowing what will and won't hit in advance means you can deploy your soldiers much more effectively in the heat of battle, and some of my most memorable moments so far have all been born from making those collective, calculated decisions. I may not be holding my breath every time I take a shot, but the rush of completing a mission by the skin of my teeth, or suddenly having to hold out two more turns before being teleported the heck out of there, has still resulted in plenty of elevated heartbeats and sighs of relief.


The final mission of Act One is the moment I finally learned to let go of my XCOM cowardice, and it never felt so gosh darn right.

To close, I will leave you with this. At the climax of Chaos Gate's first act, you're tasked with protecting one of your crew in an enclosed, sunken chamber while enemies pour in from all sides up above. After dispatching a tricksy boss who split himself into three clones every time you hit him, I was barely holding on. My Knights were scattered, penned in by enemy overwatch cones, and my crewmate unprotected. Everyone was getting (war)hammered, but all I had to do was hold out for two more turns. Thinning out the crowds wasn't an option. Their armour levels were too high, and many were too far away to do any significant damage. I needed to get back to my crewmate, but as I said right at the start of this review, breaking out of cover and leaving my soldiers exposed goes against every single fibre of my being.

In the end, though, it was the only option left. I was convinced I'd fail, that if I was suddenly asked to hold out any longer (as missions often do), then I'd be done for. But I healed up as best I could, and used every last action point to manoeuvre my Knights round into a human shield, bracing for defeat as I watched my foes get into position and play their last turn. I winced as one Knight fell to his knees, but the others held firm, and let me tell you, victory had never tasted so sweet. It may not have been the most perfect win, but hot damn, it sure felt good. So embrace the chaos, friends, because Daemonhunters is the absolute business.
 

Infinitron

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Messages
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Codex Year of the Donut Serpent in the Staglands Dead State Divinity: Original Sin Project: Eternity Torment: Tides of Numenera Wasteland 2 Shadorwun: Hong Kong Divinity: Original Sin 2 A Beautifully Desolate Campaign Pillars of Eternity 2: Deadfire Pathfinder: Kingmaker Pathfinder: Wrath I'm very into cock and ball torture I helped put crap in Monomyth
https://www.pcgamer.com/uk/warhammer-40000-chaos-gate-daemonhunters/

WARHAMMER 40,000: CHAOS GATE – DAEMONHUNTERS REVIEW
Deal with cosmic plagues and a quarrelsome crew.

Grand Master Kai looms over my crew via hologram like an enraged Greek cybergod. It's our bimonthly report and he's not happy. Our onboard Inquisitor's desire to procure knowledge about the Nurgle plague has inadvertently accelerated its spread, and he wants to know who's responsible. Do I cover up for Inquisitor Vakir and piss off Brother Ectar, revered captain of the Grey Knights Space Marine Chapter, or do I throw the brash Inquisitor under the bus? Whatever I do, someone will be unhappy, and that will have knock-on effects.

I go for the third option: tell the Grand Master that the mission is going exactly as planned. He buys it, and seeing as we're doing so well in our campaign (which we're really not) he diverts our requisitions and armoury access to some other chapter that needs them more. My reluctance to attribute blame has meant I've stayed onside with my crewmates, but have also ensured that the next two months of our campaign are going to be particularly gruelling.

And here I was thinking that Daemonhunters would be a straightforward turn-based tactics game, content to tweak those sturdy XCOM foundations for the marketable mythos of Warhammer 40,000. Yes, you'll spend most of your time on the battlefield, hopping between planets in four-man cracksquads to combat a cosmic pox propagated by the Plague God Nurgle. But while Daemonhunters executes its combat very well, it also succeeds at all the stuff between the missions.

There is schmoozing, politicking and appeasement, space battles and text-based events, research and ship repair. You pick the pace at which you progress through the campaign, you balance the conflicting interests of your frustrated, fractious crew. You're an active character in a compelling well-written space opera, and your decisions as commander of the good ship Baleful Edict are just as important as your feats in battle.

Each crewmate on the upper decks of the Baleful Edict—the actual marines are presumably locked away in their barracks—has their own priorities within the larger conflict. Brother Ectar is a resolute Grey Knight veteran who's fiercely loyal to his fellow marines. Vakir, meanwhile, is an arrogant but dedicated Inquisitor, who believes that marines are expendable tools in the mission to understand and stop the Bloom. Then there's Lucete, the charmingly robotic Tech-Priest who'll often interrupt the other two's squabbling while preaching the importance of non-emotion (though you can also frazzle his wires by making decisions that jeopardise the safety of the ship he's responsible for restoring to its former glory).
There'll be times when Ectar will insist on observing Grey Knight traditions, such as organised fights between Marines or even dedicated days of meditation. Going through with these rituals will boost morale and grant XP boosts for your Marines, but frustrate the single-minded Inquisitor, causing you to suffer a penalty to research speed. You couldn't have picked a less compatible group of people, but even though they're all too embroiled in their personal missions to see the bigger picture, they're well characterised through solid writing, plentiful dialogue options, and surprisingly expressive cutscenes and animation. And hanging over the onboard politics are your regular reports to the Grand Master, with whom you'll need to tread carefully in order to secure upgrades to recruits and equipment.

The greatest overarching threat is the Bloom, the Nurgle-driven disease which breaks out at regular intervals on random star systems as you travel between them. Should you fail to reach an outbreak on time and quell it with your marine squad, that planet will gain a point of Corruption, which will make future missions there harder and increase the likelihood of Bloom spreading to neighbouring systems.

It's pretty much the core system of the board game Pandemic—which any fan will attest is masterful at generating tension. With that as a foundation, and the fact that your ship is seriously under-equipped at the start of the game, it makes every passing in-game day, every trip across the galaxy, and every decision to side with one crewmate or another, a tough one that will invariably have consequences.

Both tension and Bloom trickle down onto the battlefield like a loathsome fungal rot soaks through soil to attack the roots of a tree. Once you deploy your squad of Grey Knights on a Blooming planet, you get down to the turn-based battle part of the game. The more blips of Bloom on a planet, the harder the mission objectives, the more mutations enemies start with, and the more 'Gifts' that Nurgle can bestow to them during battle—whether it's covering the ground with plague tiles or calling in reinforcements through Warp Gates.

Bloom-infested planets will look different too, and I spent a good bit of time sweeping over battlefields to admire the eye-filled flora, tentacles and other pustulent masses that crop up. To top it all off, a 'Warp Surge' meter ticks up every turn, giving enemies nasty visible mutations like tentacles, horns and classic Nurgle gut-mouths, granting them various status boosts. The Bloom's effects on both enemies and environments are deliciously vile.

It all sounds a bit overwhelming, and indeed when enemies break out in boon-granting diseases, defeated cultists and Plague Marines rise from the dead or Graven Poxwalkers burst from the sickly ground, it can feel that way for a bit. The early going is tough, especially as your marines pick up injuries that usually won't have healed by the next time you head into battle. But once you get to grips with the impressive depth of tactical possibilities at your disposal, things really starts to click for you and your marines.

The environments, for a start, are a delight of destructible potential. Beyond the obligatory explosive ammo caches and fire pits, there are pillars to topple onto enemies and bridges to destroy—single moves capable of swinging a skirmish your way. Particularly impressive is the fact that most walls can be blown up, which adds a layer of volatility to even the best-planned moves. At one point, I pushed a column onto a line of four enemies, one of whom was sent flying into an ammo crate. As I power-fisted the air in ecstasy and the smoke cloud dissipated, I saw that I'd also blasted away a portion of wall, causing an enemy patrol from next door to come streaming in and putting an abrupt end to my celebration.

Combat has some classic XCOM foundations, from darting between partial and full cover, to action points and core abilities like Overwatch. But beyond that it very much carves its own path. There's almost no RNG, for a start, and what's the point of relying on cover when that cover may well be blown away in the next turn? Similarly, the rich interplay of the Grey Knights' classes and abilities meant that before long I'd all but forgotten that Overwatch—that trusty if fusty hallmark of the genre—even existed.

Take my Interceptor, Voldred Storm, who I trained into an elusive dual-wielding ninja with self-replenishing Action Points. Using Teleport Strike, I could seriously damage several enemies in a single AP, give that AP an 80% chance of automatically replenishing, then continue to tear up enemies deep behind their lines. Lacking Terminator Armour, Voldred is something of a glass cannon, but I addressed that with my Justicar, who could bolster his own armour, then psychically send all of it to Voldred for one turn, making him ready to receive his inevitable battering.

You can set enemies burning and bleeding, and use grenades or psychic abilities to send them into frenzies where they attack their own team. Stack that with an abundance of upgradeable wargear, weapons and armour, and there's bountiful room for build experimentation and metaplay.

But there's always a trade-off in Daemonhunters—a niggling Nurgle negative to counter the positives. Fancier psychic abilities use Willpower, which upon use tick up the Warp Surge meter, inching it towards mutations and other muculent gifts for the enemy. To counter these, you can research Stratagem cards, which let you do one-off things like teleporting your whole squad to one location or getting an enemy to fight on your side for three turns.

There are so many nice touches that flesh out Daemonhunters: the targeting of specific body parts, executions, text-based spaceship battles, bionic enhancements for marines critically injured in combat, and Prognosticars that you strategically place on the star map to inhibit Bloom growth and get bonuses in various star systems. All these little threads are tightly woven together into the story and play experience, feeling neither excessive nor superfluous.

Daemonhunters is not without a few frustrations. Enemy AI isn't too bright, often resorting to Overwatch in seemingly random directions instead of, say, shooting explosive nodes when you take cover behind them. There could be a bit more clarity in certain mission objectives too. Crucially, It was pretty poorly optimised on my setup, with sluggish framerates that don't respond even to drastic decreases in graphics settings, as well as some slowdowns between missions that can only be fixed by restarting the game.

With all that said, I imagine fledgling developer Complex Games will patch these issues up sooner rather than later. It would be foolishness bordering on heresy if they didn't, because they've created a bit of a gem here—one that smashes through its safe pre-release image as 'Warhammer 40K meets XCOM' to plant the seeds for its own series. Likewise, it breaks away from the austere stylings of 40K with a vivid, meaty art style that makes corrupted levels and enemy units ooze with character (as well as plenty of pus and bile). Where Daemonhunters could so easily have been 'yet another 40K game' or 'yet another XCOM-like,' it emerges as one of the best offerings on both fronts.

THE VERDICT
87

WARHAMMER 40,000: CHAOS GATE - DAEMONHUNTERS
A layered and engaging space opera that triumphs both on and off the battlefield.
 
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Shiiiiiiiiiit niggers, I am fucking pumped for the release tomorrow. I´ll be on homeoffice for the rest of the week, so I should have plenty of time to writte up first hand impressions ASAP.
 

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https://www.frontier.co.uk/news/pre...mer-40000-chaos-gate-daemonhunters-out-now-pc

VANQUISH THE PLAGUE OF NURGLE IN WARHAMMER 40,000®: CHAOS GATE – DAEMONHUNTERS, OUT NOW ON PC
chaosgate-keyart.jpg


Grey Knights and Chaos clash in the deep and thrilling turn-based tactics game set in the grim darkness of the far future.

Cambridge, UK – 5 May 2022. Frontier Foundry, the games label of Frontier Developments plc (AIM: FDEV, ‘Frontier’), today released the turn-based tactical RPG Warhammer 40,000®: Chaos Gate – Daemonhunters in partnership with Warhammer 40,000 creator Games Workshop®. Developed by Complex Games, players control the elite Space Marines chapter known as the Grey Knights as they purge a Nurgle-induced galactic plague known as the Bloom. The game is available to buy now on PC across Steam and the Epic Games Store, with a suggested retail price of £34.99/$44.99/€44.99 for the standard version and £44.99/$54.99/€54.99 for the Castellan Champion Edition.

English-language links to the launch trailer: PEGI / ESRB

In Warhammer 40,000: Chaos Gate – Daemonhunters, players command the Grey Knights in cinematic and aggressive ground combat missions, using firepower, melee weapons, psychic abilities and the environment itself to crush the colourful forces of Nurgle. Between battles, in the game’s rich strategy layer, they’ll manage the wider conflict against the Bloom from aboard the Baleful Edict strike cruiser, choosing where to take the fight next and researching new ways to overcome the forces of Chaos.

The Castellan Champion Edition of Warhammer 40,000: Chaos Gate – Daemonhunters unlocks access to the exclusive Grey Knights character Castellan Garran Crowe, warden of the powerful Black Blade of Antwyr, which he carries in-game. In this edition, Crowe will join the player’s campaign partway through the story and will then be available to select from the barracks for future combat missions, arriving with a full suite of abilities to use in battle. This edition also comes with the game’s original soundtrack by composer Doyle W. Donehoo, featuring a remaster of the famous Ultramarine Chant from 1998’s Warhammer 40,000: Chaos Gate. Base game owners can optionally upgrade to this edition for £12.99/$14.99/€14.99.

The goal of the Warhammer 40,000: Chaos Gate – Daemonhunters campaign is to eliminate the five Reapers of the Bloom to stop this cosmic plague, leading to a final conflict with the iconic Death Lord Mortarion, Daemon Primarch of Nurgle. Failure will leave the entire galaxy to succumb to the Bloom. Players have numerous tools at their disposal to repel Nurgle – including Exterminatus, a last-ditch weapon upgrade for the Baleful Edict that purges all life from a given planet in spectacular fashion with a single button press.

With a storyline written by Black Library legend Aaron Dembski-Bowden, Warhammer 40,000: Chaos Gate – Daemonhunters strives for authenticity in every detail, delving deep into the history of the Grey Knights to bring this story to life. In addition, actor Andy Serkis (The Batman, the Planet of the Apes trilogy, Black Panther) headlines the game’s cast, taking on the role of Grand Master Vardan Kai, who controls the player’s access to the Armoury and regularly checks in on their progress against the Bloom. The zealous Inquisitor Kartha Vakir, meanwhile, is voiced by Robyn Addison (Final Fantasy XIV: A Realm Reborn, Dragon Age: Inquisition).

Warhammer 40,000: Chaos Gate – Daemonhunters is the definitive tactical experience set in this iconic fictional universe, featuring a lengthy, challenging and dramatic campaign. With a story that’ll delight both diehard Warhammer 40,000 fans and newcomers alike, turn-based tactics fans will love this refreshing spin on such a beloved genre.
 

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