Warhammer 40k: Chaos Gate – Daemonhunters is an epic and detailed turn-based strategy game set in the authoritarian nihilism of Games Workshop’s dark universe. This is a game of stoic posthumans wearing ridiculous shoulder pads: the Gray Knights. Like the original aggro-rave band The Prodigy, the Gray Knights are still outnumbered, but somehow emerge victorious from a deluge of guts and mayhem. However, that’s where the comparisons to Liam Howlett and company end.
Chaos Gate – Daemonhunters is a strategy game that is as much about fending off massive waves of corrupting plagues as it is about careful management of the Order’s resources and politics. There’s a lot of XCOM and, more recently, Gears Tactics, but honestly, it goes so deep into the details of battleships, inquisitors, and a culture based on religious bigotry and cyber that you can’t help but feel good.
According to the story, a plague of chaos known as Blossom is ravaging nearby planets, the work of Nurgle himself and enough for an Inquisitor named Vakir to seize your ship and take command. And after a few fights, you probably won’t have any complaints. What Bloom can do alone.
The first and foremost thing demon hunters are good at is making their plague look like a plague. Bloom levels increase as your ship travels through the star system, corrupting planets and thus creating more cunning hosts for future battles, adding more mutated enemies and weakening your units. There’s never enough time to fast travel to all the planets that report a Bloom outbreak, and while it bothered me at first, I eventually admitted it was intentional.
Bloom also increases per turn during missions, eventually generating buffs for enemies and turning them into tougher, more evil variants mid-battle if you’re not cunning with each move. This again became a source of deep personal frustration: many times it was just one or two small insignificant enemies to complete the mission, I didn’t finish them in the last turn, and then I saw the screen fill up. with multitudes of new enemies. Enemies that spawned dead enemies like Poxwalkers and made me feel like I was starting a level from scratch, except I had no health or grenades left.
Chaos Gates are a great entry point into the world of Warhammer 40k, so they handle the vast amount of knowledge they have well.
Again, I finally accepted this as a design feature. Infections, invasions, and outbreaks (ironically) are ubiquitous in modern game design, from Rainbow Six Extraction to Subnautica, but they all feel very manageable and predictable compared to this one. It’s suitably dark and dark that Bloom never feels in control. Even if you lower the difficulty and easily win all the battles. Always find a way to infect your save game.
If conveying chaos is the Demon Hunters’ main strength, making it digestible is another. With so many different stories and mechanics, a game based on a turn-based structure should be a cumbersome mess. In some ways, unlike Games Workshop’s long tradition of licensed titles, this one is the exact opposite. It lays down the basics in dramatic opening combat training, builds on them at a well-thought-out pace over the next several hours, and delivers fair and understandable combat consequences at every turn.
In the long run, you’ll spend as much time on your ship’s menu, the Edict of Doom, as you would out in the field. But even here, the demon hunters show themselves well. Each area of the ship has a different look and feel, and each is populated by crew members who converse with you, fight, and play key roles in the larger story arc.
This alleviates some of the frustration of being mired in almost endless battles while watching your resources run out and having to get back to where you’re supposed to be. Either way, this story is meant to remind you that nothing good is meant to happen in this universe. Never.
I would even go so far as to say that Daemonhunters is a great entry into the wonderful world of Warhammer games, handling the vast knowledge at its disposal very well. And he uses it cleverly to organize the game, defying the odds in turns, never fully satisfied with the outcome of the battle, but achieving enough to keep fighting.
Source : PC Gamesn
