Some of the grenades have “WRATH” printed on the side. It’s little moments like these that add a bit of personality to the Space Marines, which are otherwise pretty much indistinguishable from one another.ĭaemonhunters really has more “style” than it does “personality.” Every frag grenade leads to a slow-motion cutscene of your knight pulling the pin, the camera zooming up to show the explosive as it arcs through the air. “Nothing personal, heretic.” Suddenly seven cultists are in 27 pieces. But six?Įvery overwatch trap becomes wasted effort if my knight can just suddenly disappear and reappear behind the triggerman. My men can eat one or two cultist salvos. It’s a genuinely brilliant way of dealing with the nine-foot cyborgs that just cleaved your cousin in half with a single sword swing. Every single one of those red triangles is an enemy cultist lining up overwatch - daring my knights to leave the red circle that’s about to explode for major damage next turn. Just look at the absolute violence in the screenshot above. Seven cultists, however, can drop a time bomb on your position and trap you with overwatch. Just one cultist can’t take down a Space Marine. Which is why the enemy AI loves to stall you out. Your knights can kill individual enemies in a snap, but doing so brings out the Bloom, which makes the remaining foes even stronger. The Bloom also feeds off your knights’ own psychic energy - rising faster the more you use powers like teleportation or magic laser bolts. This is where “ XCOM with walking wizard tanks” starts to make sense. Lest you get overrun with hypercharged enemies. You need to be quick and use your brain juice frequently. So the Bloom “rises” with every turn you take in Daemonhunters - filling a gauge that eventually makes your enemies stronger or adds hazards to the field. Why bother thinking tactically if nothing can kill you, after all? Yet most enemies can’t stand up against telepathic super-freaks in cyber-armor. Part of the appeal in any tactics game, you see, is the threat of loss. Does it normally take two actions to kill a Nurgle cultist? Not if you spend psychic power points to double your damage, it doesn’t. Which means using telekinetic powers to kill enemies more quickly is the only way to reliably protect yourself from bullets. If you can shoot something, you will hit it, and vice versa. And like a lot of modern tactics game, Daemonhunters forgoes the whole chance-to-miss thing. They’re also allowed to use psychic powers. Grey Knights don’t just have guns and fancy spaceships, though. All of which is done through shiny menus to drool over in your flying church-battleship: the Baleful Edict. ![]() This means rebuilding your forces, your spaceship, and your reputation on the homefront. Your group, fresh from having its ass handed to it and losing its leader in a kamikaze crusade, gets drafted by the catgirl from Final Fantasy XIV to stop the blight. He’s spreading a mutagenic virus across the stars called the Bloom. Hey, just like the name of the game! The big bad (or worse bad, as the case may be, since Space Marines are fascist pricks) is Nurgle. If you’re a Warhammer nerd - which I’m not but I do know some and they explained this to me - you understand that this is a special Space Marine faction dedicated to daemon hunting. Daemonhunters leans into that fact with a number of its own twists that feel both appropriate to the fiction and meaningfully different. But the thing about XCOM 2 is that it’s also very good. More accurately, it’s actually Gears Tactics with Space Marines - which was XCOM 2 with walking tanks. ![]() Dare I say even great (I do dare, as it turns out, since I already said so in the first paragraph). ![]() Not to mention most of them are mediocre.Ĭhaos Gate – Daemonhunters (or just Daemonhunters as I’m going to call it from now on) is different, though. Because boy, oh boy, are most of the many new Warhammer games coming out all the time some flavor of strategy game. As long as that genre is turn-based strategy. ![]() The fine folks at Games Workshop want to make damn sure that, if there’s a popular genre of game, there’s a Warhammer version of it as well. It’s the kind of gobbledygook word soup that would make a Tyranid say “Damn… That’s a lot of rough edges.” It also sounds exactly as generic as the 39,999 other Warhammer games you stumble across on Steam every day. Warhammer 40,000: Chaos Gate – Daemonhunters is a great game with a name you probably shouldn’t remember.
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