I was suprised by this game. (I come to expect anything bad of the GW franchise) I figured I would have gotten tired of it rather quick, but the way it's made kinda grew on me. This is very much the kind of warhammer game i've always wanted but never did stumble across. There are many many units available for requisition, as you obtain the help of other factions (such as the ultramarines) you gain access to their whole armories for requisition. This basically is how you custmoize your army based on what units you choose to field. The difference between some units is somewhat flavor but you can improve, and you can upgrade to stronger units over time. the variety here allows you to control the stat breakdown of what you field far more than a lot of games of this sort let you control. The game has a very battle isle, wesnoth, or panzer corp. I'll have to check out the secnario DLC. some are scenario packs and some are just different armies (with maybe campaign thrown in)
the story is light but for a low cost of production game its nicely done. theres no videos but You have enough voice acting and enough background art to make the game work. Units look nice and sharp as well. when you move units everything sounds really gritty crunchy and cool. its an interesting setting. i like the in game 'chat cutscenes' evne though they are obviously filler. the game was pretty long. it's about 35 scenarios and while they dont take too long but there are quite a bit of them.
stats and game rules work well as a game. not too complicated to know how it works, game is about experimenting and mastering it as you feel things out. It would be nice to be able to paint your units (like in DoW) or even assign some stat/point speccing as your main garrison levels, but its fine as is, the box you are working out of is plenty big enough to offer enough freedom. and this is a pretty fast paced grind it's not a drawn out ordeal.
there's a few drawbacks. there are some weird occasioanl crashes, that almost seems as if the game can't properly read its own data files/resources as graphics artwork goes missing, but with autosave this isn't a terrible thing. my main gripe is the game simply doesnt operate under any 40k rules at all, it's just a 40k setting and panzer corp or w/e. (am hoping one day to find something on par with the translation that was ToEE but yeah right...) this plays nicely enough (its essentially conflict or advance wars) with it's own rules though so it is forgivable. And it's far better than maybe anything else i've played under the GW banner. It is unfortunately quite a bit expensive considering the production, despite the length of the experience. the voice acted instant message styled 'cutscenes' are pretty cool and between that and the sound effects feels like a bit extra quality that they could have skmped on. it makes the game just engrossing enough to wade through.
my routine on building, etc:
I quickly became a fan of artillery. The medusa is a great unit once you get it, i then started to just favor range for my arty bits, relied on a lot of armor, which has a lot of experimentation to fidn the balance there alone. The hydra vehicle is a pretty nice support unit that i like more than most. and i found it had a pretty good survival rate too compared to the other vehicles since AI often goes for your arty and inf (if they are entranched at control points) it has range and decent attacks. snipers are tricky to use, ogryn are pretty effective and work well. in latter stage you just pump spare credits into titans with the infy doing the capturing and it kinda loses its balance. you can start off replacing your dead arty's with those titans and then if you can afford it just replace anything else, super heavy tanks lose their utility since they just can't move as well but they are good to cut through armor (shadowsword/stormblade) . i didnt really experiment with AA tanks much, but i did like the hydra at the very beginning of the game though i didnt use it for AA role. it seems that the sheer amount of attacks on some of the bigger vehicle simply makes up for a designated one shot off an AA gun... didnt experiment much with medium tanks either. i liked those speeders a few here and there (with attack range of 3) became a nice upgrade from those hydra autocannon vehicles, same range but faster, but they got killed way too quick for the price. i began replacing my ogryn with assault cannon termies, and lightning claw termies and would only use snipers as campers (along with wounded) on captured points just in case i got flanked somehow late game since they were cheaper that power armor and generally enemy infy would be doing the flanking.
eventually it dawned on me that when using slow infantry like terminator assault (lightning claws) it's good to give them land transport to move in. light and fast troops generally get killed off faster which i dont like. and they are pretty much only useful for taking over/camping on top of control points (sniper are good at this) so getting strong iny then ponying up for a ride is imo a good investment.
Rather fun game but a bit pricey in some ways. It feels like a tablet game but it's one of the better tablet games i've yet to see. HAs pretty much what i like in a TBT, and has good approachable pace while keeping it simple enough. by the end of it i pretty much felt i had the game figured out and it became a bit boring. There are some extra hard scenarios taht are standalone (challenge scenarios/untold battles?) which are actually pretty cool and more or less impossible tests of your skill but thnk i've seen enough here. AI is fairly predicatble on normal difficulty levels and tends to behave in same ways. 1. will go for your arty or 2. weaker infy or 3. any other targets of opp, for the most part its a reasonable method of managing your arty and infy and moving back the wounded or healing them if ya want to scrooge it and you can generally complete half the scenarios late game in two third to sometimes even half the turns on normal with no cheatin if you dont go losing units and have tons of points to spend on titans for every tank and whatnot that gets busted. it seems the ai either cant create a strat against titans or they simply are too weak to do much about it with only a few of their own, making it increasingly easier to clean up those foul orks.
if ya like simple mixed unit tbt types and liked Liberation this is worth getting if it goes on sale via steam
