Chaos Gate: A compared review
After a few hours of play, I think it is time to review Chaos Gate - Daemonhunters.
For the record, I am a big 40K fanboy, and I loved the original Chaos Gate (OG Chaos Gate from now on).
Chaos Gate - Daemonhunters mixes the tactical gameplay of Gears of war tactics with a strategic layer like in XCOM.
If you have read a few other reviews, you'd probably have come to the conclusion that the game is unforgiving.
Except in theme, the game has very little in common with the original Chaos Gate from SSI. It is further apart than the newer XCOM were from their inspiration. Combat is closer from the new XCOM formula, with enemies "pods" that get triggered when you are in visual range of them.
The game also relies a lot on special abilities (as in XCOM, the performances of your knights are night and day between a fresh one who just graduated from supplicant school.
The immersion is good. I miss the old choir of the original chaos gate, and Nurgle lore is really weirder than Khorne lore, but the game makes a good job of conveying the fact that we are in the 40th Millenium.
However, your Grey Knights will suffer from gameplay/lore mismatch: Their survivability is much lower than you would expect, even when faced with mere cultists, and it is one of the areas where OG Chaos Gate got it right:
A dozen cultists will be a major threat to your squad of 4 knights, to the point you'd rather face 5 Chaos Space Marines, because their standard power armor offers no damage reduction. I was initially annoyed a lot by this fact, but I learnt to live with it. after all, in the original Chaos Gate, you could just ignore every cultist, and every Chaos Space Marine that didn't wield a heavy or special weapon.
I would have preferred a better compromise (like CSM being equipped with anti armor rounds, and a few cultists with special weapons).
This result in the early game being quite brutal. The difficulty has been one of the major complains about the game. But it is actually one of the parts I liked the best. Many complained that it was more unfair than XCOM.
But it took me a lot of campaign retries to survive the early game in both XCOM 1 & 2 at the highest difficulty level(60 or so for XCOM 1, and around 30 for XCOM 2), before cruising to the end game.
Unlike in XCOM 1, I never felt like I had to memorize the maps in Chaos Gate in order to survive in ironman mode. The game difficulty is also front loaded, but not as much as in XCOM.
Overall, I agree that the game is difficult, but I don't think it is unfair at all (I completed it on the highest difficulty level in grandmaster mode), and is comparable to XCOM.
You have a higher chance to love someone in mission, but the game gives you tool to recover from it (your knights can usually survive getting to 0 HP a few times in their career, and if they don't, their spirit can give boons to their brothers later on).
Another issue with difficulty is that the game features a lot of random events whose outcome can be very negative. Unfortunately, it is sometimes pretty hard to make an informed decision without refering to the Steam event guide (or reloading if not playing ironman), which is pretty annoying.
The game also likes hiding information that would be really helpful.
It won't tell you that you need 8 geared and leveled knights to handle the final battle, but it really should for instance.
Surprisingly, there is also quite a lot of randomness for a game that boasts to not have hit chances : the gear you get access to is random, the warp events that give boons to the opponent vary a lot, and there still are many rolls in the game to trigger some abilities, or critical hits, which make a huge difference.
It seems rather negative so far, but I really had a blast with this game. It is actually my game of the year on Steam for 2022, because the combat is really satisfying.
There are quite a few things it does better than XCOM, in my opinion
- You know the location of enemy pods, so you have less surprise triggers (even though it is not as true with the DLC, as some maps get pretty cramped).
- The ability can be really fun to combine, and there are many ways to build your squad, depending on the gear you get.
- As I wrote earlier, having ways to mitigate your losses really helps compared to XCOM
- it focuses a lot more on melee combat, which makes it much more satisfying to use than in XCOM2.
To me, the main weakness of Chaos Gate is the lack of variety, both in maps and enemies. The maps in XCOM felt much more impactful, but here, you end up charging in melee most of the time anyway, so the maps don't make a huge difference.
The game also lacks mission variety: I liked the set battles, even though I usually don't like boss battles in tactical games, but you only have 3 versions of the repeatable missions, which is an issue the game shares with its main inspiration, Gears of Wars: Tactics (but GoW:T had more hand crafted missions).
If you liked the original Chaos Gate
It departs so much from the original game that it is very hard to compare both. It still has a great atmosphere, but it feels much less faithful to the Codex Astartes (not that Grey Knights follow it), and the character count is much lower (4 instead of 15). It is a downgrade, but on the other hand, a good part of your squads were basically cheerleaders, because there was little more they could do with a bolter against CSM armor.
I also preferred fighting over the whole map, than having mini skirmishes with individual pods, like in XCOM 2012.
OG Chaos Gate also had a memorable soudntrack, while the one in CG:Daemonhunter is just serviceable. I still remember some themes from the original, but I would be unable to do so with the new game, despite having freshly spent 200 hours on it.
But the choice of equipment, strategic layer, and customization of each knights really adds a lot for me. I like Chaos Gate: Daemonhunters, but I loved his predecessor, so it is similar to the X-COM vs nuXCOM situation for me.
So overall, I can only recommend this game, but we warned it is pretty unforgiving, and the first playthrough might seem unfair, especially if played ironman without spoilers.
It is my preferred of the tactical or strategic 40K games that have come out in the last 10 years.