Arms up, Brothers of the Grey Knights. Your commander may have been lost to the fire of the cult you’ve been tracking down for well over a year, but the threat of a new enemy—one beckoned by the Plague God Nergle—threatens the billions of pure souls that loyally serve the Emperor. You will take on the mantle of the Baleful Edict in ‘Warhammer 40K: Chaos Gate – Daemonhunters, developed by Complex Games and published by Frontier Developments in this turn-based strategy where order reigns supreme, but chaos leaves outlook bleak… And a lot of saves reloaded.
A Sudden Edict
Daemonhunters is a turn-based strategy game in a similar vein to the XCOM games developed by Firaxis. You’ll commandeer a small group of Grey Knights as you complete missions across the solar system against diseased souls, cultists, and other daemons that rise to put a halt to your plans of Holy cleansing. On the battlefield, each turn you are given a set amount of action points to work with as you clamber about and explore zones until you reach a trigger point where baddies spawn and you take them head on. It’s kill or be killed and thankfully, you have a lot of ways to engage hostile scum.
Unlike XCOM, however, your brothers are far more competent than the agents of alien staving. The Grey Knights can actually aim, swing their hammers and swords true, have skills that can heal slash buff, teleport to and fro. Your units are a capable sort and they can also use their environment to their advantage as each map has plenty of destructible points of terrain and cover that you can use to clear out baddies. The maps themselves are hardly memorable, but they’re varied and generated uniquely enough that you’ll always find yourself in new situations, pleasant and not much so.
When you’re off the battlefield, you’ll be on the Baleful Edict, a ship as strong as she is beautiful. However, the last campaign your Order took on proved dangerous for the ship and its since seen better days. Part of your campaign will be to upgrade and repair the Edict while also researching the Bloom plague that is spreading across the system. Here you will also manage your Knights, checking their health, upgrading their abilities, and assigning them loadouts from all sorts of weapons and enhancements. Later on you’ll have the chance to build stronger Knights through Augmentations, which takes critically injured Brothers and can turn them into something much stronger—naturally, with a lot of risk.
So off the bat, I want to say that Daemonhunters is a solid and fun strategy game. Unit movement has heft and there’s plenty of animations for your Knights to demonstrate their abilities in clambering and wall destruction. Combat is strong thanks to a variety of builds you can craft from the game’s eight classes, insane number of armoury weapons, and abilities that you can assign. What’s even better is that, on the field, the world is your weapon as just about everything can break and explode (to your advantage and sometimes not at all).
Enemy variety is fair, for the most part enemy squads will spawn with a few ranged-capable cultists, Plague Marines, and infected that will attempt to swarm you. Fighting them off is generally easy enough, provided the game’s randomness doesn’t get to you first (more on that in a bit). You do need to keep on your toes however as baddies will take any advantage they can get to rain hell on you and your Brothers before squatting on one unit in overwatch.
One aspect of combat that I’m not too keen on is how much damage your units output. Inflicting bleed, weakness, and stunning enemies is key to wiping out squads of enemies before they can harm you. Which I suppose brings me to my next point—Daemonhunters is a solid strategy game, but just like how the franchise is (naturally) coated in this state of exhausted-ness and grimdark, our chaos cleansers have to put up with a lot of rubbish and very little resources to spare. And as you play Daemonhunters, you will be doing a fair share of save scumming.
Bloomin’ RNG
One of the first instances of hostility that you’ll face as you play Chaos Gate isn’t going to be the baddies and their amusing lines. No, it’s the Warp meter that fills as you complete missions on land. See, every turn or charged attack you take fills up this little meter at the top of the screen that, once full, will engage negative unit or battle conditions that can either amount to a mere nuisance or really impact how you’re planning an attack. This means taking it slowly through a stage isn’t really an option unless you want the game to blanket bomb your Brothers with plague or weakness.
But splitting up to cover much ground isn’t all too feasible either. See, missions can vary in objectives when you start them (reloading a save can get you better conditions sometimes), but a lot of the time your stage targets like seed carriers are almost always a big hike. As I mentioned earlier, enemy squads hide in fog of war and will happily come out to play once you’ve stepped in their way. Even if you try to avoid these dots of baddies, a Warp gate of reinforcements will probably open up anyway. Less pleasant is reinforcements that arrive to ruin your day once you’ve barely scraped by the main objective.
It frustrated me, because I was enjoying a lot of what Daemonhunters has to offer. I like the story and cast, who are in typical Warhammer fashion stuck up in duty but in turn will never show weakness, even in dangerous circumstances. The presentation is great and reminds me of strategy titles of yore thanks to the animation and framing of conversations.
But even outside of combat, it doesn’t take long for you to run into random events that can halt progress on repairs or research. Plague will spread across the planets out of your control and being proactive in getting to them can often feel like an impossibility. Getting to these planets late builds their corruption and makes tackling challenges on said planets more difficult later on. There are opportunities to cleanse this corruption mind, but it’s often up to the flip of a coin to get to that.
Now mind, if you do enjoy the oppressive approach to randomness and lack of resources, Daemonhunters is a great XCOM-like with your favourite band of Marines. Even a newcomer could pick up this game pretty quickly thanks to a solid tutorial and a decent user experience. It’s a blast up until the chaos begins and that just might be a make it or break it moment for the player. ∎
Warhammer 40,000: Chaos Gate – Daemonhunters
Played on
Xbox Series X
PROS
- Solid presentation and audio work.
- Good story and characterisation.
- Fun strategy combat with lots of approachability.
CONS
- RNG can wreak havoc on your playthroughs.
- Your Knights falling to fodder scum can be pretty dismaying.
