Nameless Voice on 2/1/2017 at 20:42

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So, I've played a couple of levels of this.

The good:
The game looks awesome. It's really detailed and the 40K aesthetic is very unique - huge stone cathedral-like structures are not something you normally see inside space ships in games.
Great atmosphere and sound, too.

The bad:
The game is really buggy. Apart from the affinity bug, I also had a bug where all my weapons permanently jammed and I had to reload an earlier save to be able to fire again, a couple of crashes, and a rather annoying bug where the AI Apothecary likes to interpret any order as "heal yourself", wasting his limited medkit charges instead of doing what you actually wanted him to do.
The AI on the computer-controlled Terminators is also a bit poor, I'm sure I've seen them just stand there and let themselves be killed. I've reloaded more times because they got killed than because I did (though I think you can just use the psygate power to respawn them, since they technically get teleported out instead of dying.)

The uncertain:
Gameplay is okay. Nothing really amazing, but not bad either.
It's very much a shooter - you can do some small amounts of strategy, such as locking doors so that enemies can't use them, but I wish that was used a little more / a little more necessary.
Some of the enemies, especially turrets, feels unfair. They often attack you for huge amounts of damage as you come around a corner, and can also seem to stun you a bit so you can't just run back into cover before you die - and that's not even mentioning the fact that your battle brothers' AI will have them just stand there like idiots and let themselves be killed rather than ducking around cover and waiting for you to handle the turret.
You get a lot of weapons to choose from, so it's rather disappointing that all of them save your default Storm Bolter force you to forgo the Power Sword which cuts the cooldowns on your psyker powers by 40% - meaning that if you use anything except the most basic gun, you seriously cripple your psychic powers. I guess there's some kind of balance happening there, but it doesn't feel that great to be forced to choose between the two, especially when the psyker powers are so powerful and impactful.

I also don't like the Genestealer models, but I guess they're really that stupid-looking in the tabletop so they didn't have much choice. They look more clumsy and comical than the deadly creatures I'd imagined from reading the books.


I haven't tried the multiplayer yet, but I'd imagine it will play better than the singleplayer due to less effort managing the foolhardy AI.