Warhammer 40,000: Chaos Gate - Daemonhunters

Warhammer 40,000: Chaos Gate - Daemonhunters has too long a name.

It's also a pretty good tactical squad combat game. It seems to capture the W40k atmosphere pretty well. That's something I appreciate in spite of issues with Games Workshop and knowing the game setting is ridiculously over the top with no real good (though some real evil).

You control a battle-worn Grey Knight team returning from a campaign that gets coopted by an Inquisitor to fight an emerging plant-plague spreading through a sector. 

Your space marines are pretty tough and capable, though not immediately quite as bad ass as you might expect. They level up from 1 to 9, gaining more abilities and such that make them more effective and tougher as you go. Similarly, your ship is in rough shape to start, requiring a resource (and time) to repair before you can even start making improvements. So while W40k Space Marines are generally better than their opposition, the game puts you in a challenging position right off the bat. In that sense, the game actually becomes easier as you play in spite of more difficult opposition because of the impacts of more skills and better gear.

Your units are hard to kill, but not that hard to injure, and injuries can take in-game weeks or months to fully heal. Unlike some games, though, you can field injured units - the only real penalty is a reduced maximum health. Upgrades can similarly take upwards of a month and my main run was something around 550 in-game days. Every several days, you get a bunch of 3 (give or take) possible missions. Typically, you can only reach one or two of them before they expire and the status of that world gets worse. And you weight that against possible mission rewards that can be gear, recruits, research increases, resources for ship improvements, or resources with which to purchase gear and recruits.

The game throws events at you every once in a while. Some are regularly, like sending a report back to Titan, some are seemingly random. Most of them can hose you in some way. I went through much of the early game unable to get any gear upgrades because I apparently said something the Grand Master didn't like during my first couple reports and that locked me out of requisitions (which means being unable to get new equipment). Other events can injure your support characters, leading to reduced XP gain or completely stalled building/research for a period of time. Thanks to this setup, I actually got locked into the last sequence of missions unable to use strategems (non-unit-specific "spells" of various effects).

It also manages to pull a couple twists. As you follow the campaign missions, you learn of five specific daemons defending the Bloom. You have to individually research, track, and fight them, though the order is up to you. After you take out three, however, the story veers away from that toward a final fight. Oh, but before you get there, one of the remaining daemons intercepts you, so you end up fighting four of the five. And while the Grey Knights are famously incorruptible, the Inquisitor leading the mission is not. Early on, you can see the research into trading down the Bloom seeds is taking a toll on her and that never ends well in the W40k setting.

The missions do get a bit repetitive after a while. And the final mission is a bit of a slog without some method of cheesing it as you go between one team fighting a five-phase boss battle and another team holding off waves of reinforcements for each phase. I'm okay with the concept, but it's a major time commitment and entirely possible to falter an hour or more in, which would mean starting again. And if you need to level up, I hope you have a save from a couple missions before that even because you're committed to the endgame once you finish the related ritual.

But moment-to-moment it plays pretty well with some rewarding tactical combat and a sense of improvement (even if some improvements can be stripped away with random events). I didn't even have to go all exterminatus on anything.