Install Steam. Your Store Your Store. Categories Categories. Special Sections. Player Support. Top Sellers. What's Popular. Top Rated. Results exclude some products based on your preferences. No results found. Showing 1 - 15 of 1 results. Warhammer 40, Gladius - Relics of War. Warhammer 40, Space Marine - Anniversary Edition. Instead of handing you control of a horde it makes you play a balanced force that feels like a green reskin of the humies. The Imperial spacecraft of Warhammer 40, are one of its most distinctive elements.
Each one looks like someone painted Westminster Abbey black, chucked a prow on the end, and hooked it off into deep space. Battlefleet Gothic: Armada is an RTS where these stately, miles-long ships swing about on a 2D plane that emulates both a tabletop and the ocean. They do battle like it's the age of sail, complete with broadsides and boarding actions, though troops insert via torpedo rather than swinging over on a rope with knives between their teeth.
The other thing about Battlefleet Gothic: Armada that feels like the age of sail is the time scale. Even with the speed set to its fastest, getting into position at the start of an engagement takes a fair old while. And then by the time the fleets make contact, there's so much micromanagement it can feel overwhelming even slowed down. It's deliberately paced this way, tempting you into mistakes and collisions that will cost you a capital ship with the population of a city inside it.
A singleplayer FPS that's part looter-shooter, where you'll find a bolter and five minutes later swap it for a lasrifle because it's a higher rarity tier.
It's also a movement-shooter, with wall-running, dashing, sliding, a grapnel, and augmetics that let you double-jump, slow down time, and more. Even your dog has an upgrade tree. Each fight's a high-speed zip around a huge environment, abusing automatic takedowns for a window of invincibility and some health. That said, the animations frequently look garbage and sometimes the whole thing breaks. There's a nonsense story that expects you to have read all the Kal Jerico comics I have , and cared I didn't.
Side missions, which increase your rep with factions including genestealers and Chaos cults, are separated by difficulty grade—but some are always hard and others, where you can ignore the endlessly spawning enemies to zipline around completing objectives, are always easy.
And yet, it's really fun. The combat's hectic, and you end up with so many abilities it's like Borderlands only you're playing all the classes at once. Every level is a perfect evocation of the setting, whether corpse-grinding factory or maglev megatrain, with dead-ass servitors controlling doors, cargo ships, and even the bounty board.
One of the villains looks like Marie Antoinette gone Mad Max. If you like 40K enough to read this list, you'll probably like Hired Gun. When I wrote about Sanctus Reach, I said other games do what it does better. That was before Battlesector came out, but it's a perfect example. It's the same kind of mid-sized turn-based tactics game where you control squads and vehicles rather than a handful of individuals or massive armies, but what Battlesector gets right is that it gives troops personality.
That's thanks to a momentum system that rewards you for playing to type, with bloodthirsty Blood Angels scoring points for killing enemies close enough to see the whites of their eyes, the swarming tyranids for staying within range of a hive leader, and the sadomasochistic Sisters of Battle for taking damage as well as dealing it.
It would be even better with some kind of veterancy system for squads rather than just HQ units, but Battlesector remains a cut above. There are other Panzer General-alikes with 40K trappings, but this one was straight-up made in the Panzer General 2 engine. It's got the tactical depth you want thanks to a collection of pixel units who all work slightly differently, with every turn a stream-of-consciousness where you're thinking things like, "If I attack this guy the heavy weapons will be able to support, but the jetbikes are in cover so they can make a pop-up attack, but then there's a unit who can attack and fall back in the same turn The campaign lets you play as the eldar, colorful but stone-faced murder elves with psychic powers and a weapon that unspools a long monofilament wire inside your poor enemy's body to reduce their organs to soup.
They can summon an incarnation of their war god inside a shell of superheated iron, and they charge into battle wearing harlequin pants. It's a crime more 40K games aren't about them instead of the same four chapters of space marines every time.
The first of the many attempts to turn the Space Hulk board game into a videogame remains one of the best for two reasons. An innovative freeze-time mechanic lets you transition into turn-based mode where you can move your five space marine terminators around like you were playing on a tabletop—but gives you a timer. When it runs out, you have to play in real-time, bouncing between them in first-person and the map to keep your squad alive while genestealers boil out of the walls.
Manage that for long enough and you earn more freeze-time, and the relief of switching back is intense. The other thing it gets right is the atmosphere. Spinning wall fans chunk away, unknowable alien sounds echo down the corridors, and somewhere in the distance there's a scream. When marines die their screen goes to static, fuzzing out one by one. Plenty of videogames have been inspired by Aliens, but few of them do the panicky "game over, man, game over" moment as well as this. It's brutally difficult, but that's because it's not really a strategy game—it's horror.
In the 40K universe faster-than-light travel is made possible by briefly hopping over to a universe next door called Warpspace, where distances are contracted. The downside to Warpspace is that it's inhabited by the Ruinous Powers of Chaos, gods who represent and are fueled by the dark urges of mortals.
Chaos wants to spill out of the Warp into realspace, and when they do you get places like the Eye of Terror, a hellish overlap at the edge of the galaxy. Near its edge is the Imperial world Cadia, a bastion that stood firm against multiple excursions led by the forces of Chaos—until the 13th Black Crusade, when Abaddon the Despoiler crashed a gigantic alien starfortress into it.
This happens several minutes into Battlefleet Gothic: Armada 2 while you're playing the prologue campaign. It's a hell of a spectacle. This sequel improves various small things about the spacefleet RTS game, adds campaigns from the perspective of the insectile tyranids and Egyptian robot necrons, and leaves its core of 2D sailing ship combat intact.
The one big thing it changes is that sense of spectacle, understanding what we want to see is entire worlds falling and a galaxy in flames. Where the first Dawn of War is about masses of tanks and a screen full of lasers, Dawn of War 2 gives you just four badasses, maybe eight replaceable squadmates, and a bunch of special abilities. It's not about researching at your base until you've put together an unstoppable force—most missions begin with you falling out of the sky, sometimes squashing a few enemies, and then it's on.
A typical battle involves parking the heavy weapons and sniper in cover, charging in with your commander, then telling the assault squad to jump-pack over the top. After that it's a matter of setting off abilities as they come off cool-down.
The boss fights can be chores, but maps where you're on the defensive , outnumbered by hordes of tyranids or whatever, are excellent—both in singleplayer and the Last Stand, a three-player mode with waves of enemies and unlockable wargear.
Final Liberation is a strategy game that gets the scale of conflict in the 41st millennium spot on, with a mixed force of Imperial Guard and Ultramarines having to not only pool their forces, but then unearth an entire lost legion of titans to repel an ork invasion on a planetary scale.
The orks are faster and brutishly hard to put down in hand-to-hand, but you have artillery on your side and, as the Tyrant of Badab said, "Big guns never tire. Every turn is a cautious advance, trying to keep the speed freeks away from your bombards and flatten buildings with thudd guns just in case orks are about to pop out of them, while staying the hell away from the gut buster mega-cannon that obscenely juts out of the gargant's undercarriage.
The peak of the 40K games to come out of the s, Final Liberation has two extremely s things about it. The first is its heavy metal soundtrack, and the second its FMV cutscenes. Both are cheesy in exactly the right way, clearly being taken seriously by people unconcerned with the ridiculousness of what they're doing. Criminally underrated because it came out after a string of middling games with the words Space Hulk in the name, Tactics is the best of them.
It's an adaptation of the board game that understands what makes it fun—the asymmetry of five clunky walking tanks pitted against limitless numbers of speedy melee monsters—and also understands that it's even more fun if you can play either.
Tactics has an entire genestealer campaign, and finally getting to be the aliens is a blast. It doesn't skimp on the marine side either, and the AI plays genestealers like a tabletop player would, lurking around corners until enough gribblies have gathered to charge an overwatching marine en masse, knowing his bolter's going to jam eventually.
Where Space Hulk Tactics makes additions to the board game's rules, like cards that give single-use bonuses, and a maze-like map of the hulk to explore, they're well-balanced and complement the base. In fact, they feel like they could be from one of Games Workshop's own expansions to the original.
While you can control from first-person for that Space Hulk experience, played in isometric view this is finally the XCOM-but-with-space-marines everyone wanted. During the dark heyday of the third-person cover shooter, Space Marine was a revelation. Why would an armored superhuman need to crouch behind a waist-high wall? Space Marine isn't having a bar of that. You regain health by killing bad guys up close, charging forward with your chainsword or slamming down out of the sky thanks to the best jetpack ever.
Each fight reminds you this is what you're genetically engineered to do, and early on there's a quiet moment where you enter an Imperial Guard base and wounded soldiers several feet shorter than you look up in awe.
It nails the fantasy of being a space marine. Specifically, of being Captain Titus of the Ultramarines voiced by Mark Strong, a man born 39 millennia too early. The Ultramarines are the chapter of choice for 40K videogames because they stick to the book. They aren't like the Space Wolves with their fangs and Viking schtick, or the Blood Angels and their periodic descent into the Black Rage. You don't have to explain anything extra to an audience who don't know the setting with the Ultramarines.
Because they're boring. Space Marine lets them be boring so Titus has something to rebel against. His brothers follow tactics from ancient tomes. Titus jumps out of a spaceship to fight orks across the deck of a flying pirate ship—and that's the tutorial. What Space Marine did for the third-person shooter, Mechanicus does for turn-based squad tactics. Your band of Adeptus Mechanicus tech-priests don't need cover. They've got disposable cannon fodder instead, servitors and skitarii soldiers to soak up the necron lasers.
Those predictable enemies will only attack the closest target, and that closest target should be a replaceable cyberzombie rather than one of your leveled-up tech-priests.
The psychologically abnormal scientists of the AdMech see everything as a learning opportunity, and while their subordinates are dying they're off examining the architecture and sending servo-skulls to inspect alien glyphs, all of which gives you cognition points. These can be spent on extra movement or activating special abilities, and when you defeat a necron you get more of them, with a bonus for reaching the corpse within a turn to stand over them creepily watching the light in their artificial eyes go out.
For science. Spend those points right and you snowball, ending each turn in the right spot to earn more. Your robed worshippers of the Machine God zip around the necron tomb they're investigating with a force axe in one hand and a data tablet in the other, six more Doctor Octopus cyberlimbs whipping around just for fun.
The AdMech normally show up as support in other games, but here they're the stars and everything from the way the mechanics accentuate their oddity, to the droning music, to the mechanical garble that serves as their voices fits perfectly. Because Dawn of War 2 ditched the base-building, its predecessor has become a standard bearer for fans of build orders who miss that particular flavor of RTS.
The thing is, what made Dawn of War's base-building great was how downplayed it was compared to the RTS games that came before it.
It's not about carefully managing walls and cranking out more gatherers than the other players so your economy can triumph. There's no gold, no spice, no vespene bloody gas. The main way to gather resources in Dawn of War is to kill for them. Nodes are spread across the map and you might grab a couple peacefully in those early moments where everyone is scouting and constructing their first power plant, but sooner than you think it's going to kick off.
Dawn of War is the RTS accelerated. Instead of marching individual soldiers out of the barracks one at a time and click-dragging them into control groups they come in ready-made squads, and if you want a squad to be bigger you can teleport more troops in while in the field. Same for reinforcements. Instead of constantly flicking back to the barracks to replace losses, you just teleport them in.
This squad needs a missile launcher because they saw an armored vehicle over the next hill? Teleporter goes brrr. Every Warhammer 40k fan, in the dark hours of restless nights, has laid awake wondering.
Are they like standard swords, but sharper? Or do they slowly slice through things like a normal chainsaw? Ahh, the Tau. The original release of Space Hulk could probably be on this list, because it cleanly recreates the horror of being a walking man-tank trapped in a corridor full of monsters. But the update looks nicer, and crucially, is much easier to buy.
Does it compare to playing the original on the grimy carpet of a trusted, 40k-loving friend? Probably not. And it feels right; like your favourite miniatures brought to life before you.
0コメント