Warhammer 40,000: Mechanicus (2018)

The turn-based strategy genre blows my mind (XCOM super fan) and this Mechanicus does not disappoint. He has good ideas, his own personality and I love how it reflects 40k.

First of all, the story is nothing special, but the conversations of the subdominus are entertaining. In addition, the setting is so well achieved that everything around you helps to get you into the world of 40k.

In the other hand, combat mechanics are good. You have different disciplines for each techpriest with a lot of options and Augment equipment for your characters, Additionally, you can discover guns or some objects in your run through the tombs, that you can equipt later.

With all of that in combat u can do a lot of actions, depending on your wepons, equipment and discipline of your techpriest. This disciplines have different passives for each character, and let you do some different actions in combat like buff damage for your wepons or more deffense for your team.

Additionally, you can have troops too, which I find very interesting and without a doubt a great success, cause they add more strategy to the game. They can be uplocked in missions, and in the same way u can upgrade them through the game. We have different types of this troops and with more game difficult, the more you need to choose wisely this characters and know when to use them.

They way you can get weapons, or upgrades for your troops, is doing missions for the subdominus, a mechanic so gratefull cause u can choose what mission, and for who, u want to do, with differents regards that can change entire game for you in the next battle.

The awakening mechanic is also interesting. It gives you a purpose with a time limit that is in line with your mission and adds a plus of difficulty to the game in general.

Like i said, i loved this game, and his try to not simply copy/paste the XCOM franchise. Developers tried here to give his own personality and they did it. Game is so fun and you have to learn things to play good in this 40k world.

Recommended. 8/10

Regards.

There is no % chance to hit like in Xcom but they chose to keep randomness with the glyphs and text challenges which feel a bit arbitrary. I'm not a veteran of the genre by any means but the combat feels a tad simplistic to me.

The setting and presentation are the main reasons why I'm able to overlook the fact that this game is turn based, a genre which I usually despise. From the voice acting to the in game sounds and music the sound in this game is phenomenal and is the main reason I like Mechanicus.

The difficulty is very customizable and I wish the graphics were too. The DoF hides some excellent character design and you cant turn it off, not even with a mod.

This game is a decent game. It's been updated nicely since I first got it. It's a bit repetive. But it does allow you decent squad customization. You do unlock improvmeents (in a way) and the random mission reward structure makes it so you are free of xcom style research pathways and instead greeted with a more rogue-like setting. However, once you gear your squad to your liking and get the hang of things its a bit of needless trouble to spend time ungearing or respecing your squad, so you dont feel a need to experiment. The TBT itself is fairly streamlined and straightforward and there aren't cover mechanics or too much to really consider. The battles are also stupid easy. The game lay somewhere between a Modern XCOM and what SpaceHulk Ascension Should have been. In short its good for GW but its definitely streamlined for a modern/casual/tablet experience and rather elementary and only above average in many ways really. You have melee and mid range considerations and a few special weapons with AOE, Cone templates and even lines that break through walls. You have sequence and you have AP allocation. You also have buffs on cool down which are managed to increase your AP per turn. Mastering the game is 80% AP allocation and tracking AP cost. There aren't many surprises or things left to chance. (you cannot miss)

The Augmentum update lets you crank up the different components of the difficulty. I haven't tried that. One aspect of this game that doesn't lend itself well towards being hard or fiddling with difficulty (when you dont know what to expect) is the meta/base apsect. There is a timer and you dont want to fail any missions as you make progress through your campagin. Seems like a tough game to tailor difficulty for your first go and probably not one that many people would want to play a second playthough really.

But hey if you want a legit TBT game with some options to outfit squad, (and with decent balance imo) this does that. It's be nice to see a bit more stuff out there with that in mind, and the other elements polished up, or more dynamic/divergent..