Widely considered to be the best Warhammer 40K game available, Dawn of War is a real-time strategy game that brings all the classic RTS gameplay tropes to the 40K universe.
In the base game, players can control one of four factions, ranging from the Orks to Space Marines, Chaos Marines, and Eldar 40K 's space elves.
Each faction has their own intricate tech-tree and specialized units, helping to increase the replayability of the game. Dawn of War is still considered by many to be the best 40K game available for a number of both gameplay and narrative reasons.
On the gameplay front, Dawn of War is an excellent RTS, with balanced factions, rewarding progression, and a natural learning curve that teaches the player the various complexities of the gameplay at a steady pace. From a narrative standpoint, Dawn of War does an excellent job at introducing the key factions of the 40K universe gradually, easing the player into understanding the ins and outs of the universe's politics.
For instance, the game starts with a simple premise, the player being tasked with using their squad of Blood Raven Space Marines to clear out a base of Orks. Soon, the player is leading charges against the Eldar and facing off against swarms of Chaos Marines, but it's all done with meticulous care to ensure that the player doesn't get lost. Regardless of where a player starts, getting into Warhammer 40K is a surprisingly rewarding experience.
While it may seem intimidating at first, the wealth of lore and source material available to a newcomer can be very exciting. And with new 40K games releasing next year like Space Marine II and Darktide , there has never been a better time to charge head-first into the franchise. He discussed working on The Witcher season 2 but also shed some light on one of his favorite hobbies. Holland seemed particularly eager to learn more, and Cavill jokingly agreed to help Holland get started.
Now, Empire reports Cavill is interested in a film or TV adaptation based on stories from the Warhammer 40, universe. The franchise is rich in lore, with many book series, games, and codexes adding to the official canon. Cavill said he would want to see this depth respected in any potential film or TV adaptation, stating that the IP " needs to be handled to a Lord of the Rings level. I mean, I don't know about Eisenhorn necessarily, when you've got Valdor and Primarchs out there.
It seems a shame to be a mere Inquisitor. But I would absolutely leap at that opportunity — it's something I'd be very, very excited to do. Cavill went on to discuss his love of Warhammer fantasy, calling out Sigmar in particular.
On enemy turns it'll show a random battle happening to an ally rather than your own troops being slaughtered. There's a storyline scattered about in quests, but to get anywhere with them you have to play an artificially long game or you'll defeat all the enemies and win by conquest before uncovering any of the tantalizing secrets it hints at. Finally, even with wildlife turned down to Very Low, the early turns of every game are spent fighting alien dogs and bugs and floating mind-control jellyfish for way too long before actually going to war with the other factions.
Although it launched in a terribly buggy and unoptimized state, an enhanced edition rerelease fixed some of its worst problems. Now it's a competent claustrophobic multiplayer game where you can dress up your terminators real fancy. As a singleplayer experience it's let down by daft AI, and even with friends you'll have to overlook whiffy melee weapons and shooting that feels more like you're turning on a hose than opening up with a mark-two storm bolter. Milton Bradley's follow-up to HeroQuest was a version of Warhammer 40, for ages 10 to adult, and Gremlin Interactive were once again responsible for the videogame.
Like the adaptation of HeroQuest, it's a pretty direct replication—although for some reason the genestealers have been replaced by different aliens called "soulsuckers. It's quite slow-paced and you have to choose between music or cheerfully rinky-dink sound effects because it can't do both at once, and of course it's lacking the board game's slick miniatures and card art.
Nostalgia's a powerful thing though, and I adore these goofy pixel space marines. This was our first look into the grim darkness of a near future where there are only PC ports of 40K games made for tablets. Space Hulk comes with all the limitations you'd expect from a game designed to run on an iPad Mini. This fine if unambitious version of the board game plays the same limited animations over and over, whether it's sprays of blood that appear sort of around genestealers as they're shot, or three red lines appearing in mid-air to mark a terminator falling to their claws.
The way genestealers suddenly transform into a pair of bleeding leg-stumps when hit by an assault cannon is unintentionally hilarious. Thanks to some patched-in improvements, like the ability to speed up terminators so your turns don't take forever, this take on Space Hulk ended up OK if all you want is a version of the board game with a singleplayer mode where you're the space marines. After the negative response to the PC version of their previous Space Hulk game, Full Control retooled it into Ascension, giving it a welcome visual upgrade and customizable marines.
More divisively it plays less like a board game, with reduced randomness, an upgrade system based on experience points, and tweaks to the way weapons work. Storm bolters gain heat when fired and jam when it maxes out, and instead of just filling an entire room or corridor with fire, the flamethrower has multiple modes of spray. And to make it look less like a board game there's fog of war, rendering the map dark beyond a tiny zone of vision. Some of the changes are fussy and don't add much, but it's a slight improvement overall.
Not many 40K games let you play aliens, but Dakka Squadron isn't just a game that lets you be an ork, it's committed to the bit. This is arcade aerial combat if Star Fox was violently Cockney and everything was soundtracked by wailing deedly-deedly guitar and shouts of "Dakka dakka dakka! It's maybe a bit too orky. Multiplayer is orks versus orks, and so is most of the singleplayer, though eventually you get to shoot down some Adeptus Mechanicus craft that look like flying boxes full of lasers, a few of the necrons' tin death croissants, and so on.
Mostly though it's endless orks in World War II fighter jets with nose-mounted spikes laughing as they krump each other.
Missions drag on, with wave after wave of enemies and the same combat barks as you shoot them down, but fortunately a three-lives system was patched in so you don't have to re-do an entire mission because you got krumped at the end.
I did turn down the guitars, though. Everguild Ltd. It's the Horus Heresy era again, only this time in the form of a free-to-play collectible card game. Though it plays a lot like them it's not as flashy as the big names in the genre, with the quality of the card art being all over the place. But if you've got the time or money it's a solid enough example of the form, and if you've read the books and the phrase "the Fall of Isstvan III" makes you feel like a 19th century French campaigner hearing the word "Waterloo," then there's a stirring singleplayer campaign that will let you experience that in card game form.
Pixel Toys Microsoft Store. I went into this with low expectations. A free-to-play adaptation of a mobile game, complete with loot boxes and multiple currencies and all that jazz? But Freeblade scores points for letting you play an Imperial Knight, a mech that's bigger than a house, and letting you color and customize your walker like you're choosing paints and decals for a miniature.
It's a simple rail shooter, basically a version of Time Crisis where you're the size of Godzilla, and better than I thought it would be. When your ace pilots in Aeronautica Imperialis: Flight Command kick the bucket, shot down by ork fighters in rustbucket planes made out of scrap in a cave, a commander slides onto the between-mission screen. Flight Command is an aerial-combat simulator where you program your planes with maneuvers and then watch 10 seconds of dogfighting play out in real-time.
Those 10 seconds contain a bewildering amount of stuff, as one plane powerdives to avoid an attack from behind, another explodes, and one of your pilots pulls off a high-G turn then blacks out. Switching to theater mode, which lets you see all this at once rather than following each pilot in turn, makes it easier, though I could do with a simple way to scrub the timeline back and forth. Planes can switch loadouts if you remove the default missiles, and pilots might gain skills if they shoot down enough enemies, but one fighter is much like another.
Even top guns are replaceable in 40K. Games Workshop published several pick-a-path gamebooks under the Path to Victory label, and this one was turned into a visual novel. Legacy of Dorn really gets across the oddness of a ship made out of the fused remains of multiple wrecks, and as you explore each section feels distinct, whether fungal and orkoid or sanctified by the Sisters of Battle.
The turn-based combat is nothing to write home about, but the difficulty options include the ability to skip the boring fights and cheat as if you're leaving your fingers in the pages, as is only right. Hammerfall Steam. Take chess, but make it 40K. That's Regicide, which you can play in classic mode using the boring rules of real chess, or in Regicide mode, which adds an initiative phase after every turn where pawns shoot boltguns and queens launch psychic lightning.
While taking a piece the usual way is an instakill, complete with gorey duels reminiscent of Battle Chess, attacks in the initiative phase chip away at the hit points of your target. At first it feels like regular chess, but focus fire and combine the right abilities and you'll soon remove a bishop from across the board. It feels like cheating in the best way, like you have outsmarted the centuries-old game of chess itself. There's a story mode, but some of its puzzle matches can grind to annoying stalemate halts.
Stick to skirmish play and Regicide does a better job with its ridiculous concept than you might think. Behaviour Interactive Inc. Initially billed as a Planetside-esque MMO with a persistent world for players to fight over, Eternal Crusade was scaled down in development. What eventually released was a lobby shooter that took the multiplayer combat from Relic's Space Marine and added vehicles, eldar and orks, as well as a co-operative PvE mode where four players take on tyranids. Players who'd bought in early were disappointed at the reduction, but here's the thing: Relic's Space Marine was great, and so was its multiplayer.
Building on that with missions where you might be defending a fortress while other players tried to smash through its gate in Predator tanks, or hovering over victory points as an eldar swooping hawk, made for some thrilling battles.
Hardly anybody gave it a chance though, and even after being released for free it's still almost empty. If you can get together some people or luck into a match, Eternal Crusade is better than its reputation. Rodeo Games Steam. The Deathwatch are elite alien-busting marines who draw their recruits from other chapters, and this turn-based tactics game gives you command of a squad of them. Deathwatch is another game originally made for tablet, which you can tell by the way you get new wargear and marines out of random packs with lootbox sparkle, though they're earned through play rather than microtransactions.
This Enhanced Edition for PC remastered the original's graphics and gave it a mouse-and-keyboard UI, though it could do with tooltips for the many buff icons each marine ends up with. Hive cities cram billions of people into illustrations of the class system someone drew winged skulls on. At the bottom of the hive, gangs who work for mid-level Houses fight over scavenger rights and who has the coolest mohawk. Underhive Wars is another turn-based tactics game that isn't content to copy XCOM and instead has to go and mess with it.
Every map's covered in ziplines and elevators, and gangers have enough movement to whip up and down them. Seen in over-the-shoulder third-person, the AI's moves are often baffling. Gangers run past enemies they could attack, deploy buffs for opaque reasons, pick up mission objectives then end their turn exposed, sometimes just jog on the spot for a bit.
And yet, if you ditch the story campaign after the intro missions and get stuck into the procedurally generated Operations mode, there's a fun game here. Though each gang has access to the same classes, gear, and only slightly different skills, over the course of an endless war of territorial pissing they feel like your own.
Customization makes your leather-fetish wrestlers or leopard-print amazons look rad as hell, and successive injuries, bionic implants, and limb replacements turn them into individuals with stories. It's essentially Tank Battle: 30, It's a particularly rock-paper-scissors wargame, with tanks, infantry, fliers, walkers and titans as counters to each other in specific situations, and terrain that's either damaging, hard-stopping, crossable only by fiers, or cover but only for infantry. Like all the Horus Heresy games and books it demands a dedication to the fictional history of Warhammer 40, as passionate as any WWII nut to get the most out of it, but if that's you then you probably already know Battle of Tallarn and are humming the theme tune right now.
Another take on the Panzer General turn-based hexgrid wargame, Armageddon is set on a hive world so polluted it's all fire wastes, lava canyons, and acid rivers, which the armies of the Imperium have to defend from hordes of orks. Each scenario is a puzzle where you'll have to decide whether to split your battlegroups or unite them in a single wedge, lock down the bridges or move into the bombed-out buildings, scout ahead with walkers or fliers, and so on.
There's DLC for various other conflicts that have played out on the well-named planet Armageddon, but skip the expandalone called Da Orks, which lets you experience the other side of the conflict.
Instead of handing you control of a horde it makes you play a balanced force that feels like a green reskin of the humies. The Imperial spacecraft of Warhammer 40, are one of its most distinctive elements. Each one looks like someone painted Westminster Abbey black, chucked a prow on the end, and hooked it off into deep space.
Battlefleet Gothic: Armada is an RTS where these stately, miles-long ships swing about on a 2D plane that emulates both a tabletop and the ocean. They do battle like it's the age of sail, complete with broadsides and boarding actions, though troops insert via torpedo rather than swinging over on a rope with knives between their teeth.
The other thing about Battlefleet Gothic: Armada that feels like the age of sail is the time scale. Even with the speed set to its fastest, getting into position at the start of an engagement takes a fair old while. And then by the time the fleets make contact, there's so much micromanagement it can feel overwhelming even slowed down.
It's deliberately paced this way, tempting you into mistakes and collisions that will cost you a capital ship with the population of a city inside it. A singleplayer FPS that's part looter-shooter, where you'll find a bolter and five minutes later swap it for a lasrifle because it's a higher rarity tier.
It's also a movement-shooter, with wall-running, dashing, sliding, a grapnel, and augmetics that let you double-jump, slow down time, and more. Even your dog has an upgrade tree. Each fight's a high-speed zip around a huge environment, abusing automatic takedowns for a window of invincibility and some health.
That said, the animations frequently look garbage and sometimes the whole thing breaks. There's a nonsense story that expects you to have read all the Kal Jerico comics I have , and cared I didn't. Side missions, which increase your rep with factions including genestealers and Chaos cults, are separated by difficulty grade—but some are always hard and others, where you can ignore the endlessly spawning enemies to zipline around completing objectives, are always easy.
And yet, it's really fun. The combat's hectic, and you end up with so many abilities it's like Borderlands only you're playing all the classes at once. Every level is a perfect evocation of the setting, whether corpse-grinding factory or maglev megatrain, with dead-ass servitors controlling doors, cargo ships, and even the bounty board.
One of the villains looks like Marie Antoinette gone Mad Max. If you like 40K enough to read this list, you'll probably like Hired Gun. When I wrote about Sanctus Reach, I said other games do what it does better. That was before Battlesector came out, but it's a perfect example.
0コメント