For strategy fans, Warhammer 40,000: Chaos Gate – Daemonhunters is worth a look even if they are heretics who can’t do anything with Warhammer. And for fans, it’s a feast!
Waste separation: Plastic goes into the recycling, residual waste goes into the black bin, keys for Warhammer indie games go to me. Then I always first look for job offers in my area and finally reluctantly write a review about a complete cucumber that is discontinued shortly afterwards anyway.
And then suddenly a key for this nasty Warhammer 40,000: Chaos Gate – Daemonhunters lands on my desk. I don’t trust my first impression of this game, but after ten and also after more than twenty hours, one thing is clear: this game has broken the curse. It’s so good that I honestly checked several times to see if it was actually made by a small, independent studio I’d never heard of in my life.
So before I go on to describe why this game is so good, I’ll come straight to the most important point: Yes, buy it! Here you get a really well presented Warhammer atmosphere. At the same time, despite some minor problems, the gameplay is so good and, above all, so incredibly fun that you should risk a look even if you don’t really have anything to do with Warhammer. It may not be on a par with XCOM 2, but it’s damn close.
And if you’re wondering what this Warhammer 40,000 is all about, we’ve got something for you:
The fascination of Warhammer 40k explained: Games, books, Space Marines
Table of Contents
Grey Knights vs Nurgle
In Daemonhunters you fight against the hordes of the chaos god Nurgle, probably the only fictional entity to which Rule 34 of the Internet does not apply. He happily infects a whole bunch of star systems with five nasty plague strands that produce every conceivable form of mutation, undeath, cultism, scales and mixed skin.
You fly your spaceship, the Baleful Edict, which looks like a flying gothic cathedral, from one infected system to the next, teleport your team of four Grey Knights to the surface and have them clean up properly. Turn by turn, you’ll rush your techno-warriors across the battlefield, sending them into cover, throwing grenades, blasting Chaos’ minions to smithereens with your bolter or hacking them to pieces in melee combat.
Each of your heroes has three action points per round, which you can spend on movement, attacks and special abilities. When you target an enemy, you always see in advance exactly whether you will hit the villain and how much damage you will cause.
There is no random hit chance like in XCOM. As long as your opponent is within range and not completely covered by some obstacle, your attack will find its target. A small portion of luck is nevertheless helpful, then you may land a critical hit and can permanently weaken enemies – for example, by permanently destroying their armour or preventing them from ranged combat by chopping off their weapon hand. Groovy
Short and sweet
A mission rarely takes more than 20 minutes. The gloomy battlefields are always kept relatively small, and your Grey Knights are extremely powerful and can wipe out half a dozen enemies or more at once with a special attack.
At the beginning of the game, you put together your team from four classes: The tough Justicar, who you can power up with Terminator armour, the healing Apothecary, the Purgator, who specialises in heavy weapons, and the teleporting Interceptor, who slashes through his victims at lightning speed. Each of them is a formidable fighter in their own way and correspondingly useful.
By leveling up, you unlock additional abilities and passive bonuses for your knights after completing missions. This motivates you and drives you on to ever new missions. Once you have completed all mission-critical objectives, you teleport back to the ship. In many missions this takes a few rounds, during which you have to defend yourself against additional waves of enemies.
After the work is done, you receive some equipment as a reward, injured units go to recover and you invest some servitors in the repair and maintenance of your ship, which was severely damaged in the tutorial strictly according to the script and is now only chugging through space with all its might.
Ship upgrades can, for example, shorten the recovery time of injured knights or the journey to the next mission, offer additional protection against warp storms and enemy spaceships and create more space for additional knights. Along the way, you’ll explore the remains of your enemies and not only unlock new buffs, but also advance the story.
Fabulous Presentation
This game loop is great fun, not least because of its terrific staging. There are many great cutscenes with good voice acting and subtitles. The dialogues, the Warhammer lingo, the battlefields with their huge statues and gloomy cathedrals, the atmospheric soundtrack with its sombre choirs, the absolutely brutal manoeuvres of the Grey Knights on the battlefield – Daemonhunters conveys an incredibly gripping atmosphere! The game may not be a graphic bomb with a huge budget, but it exudes Warhammer flair and shows all the developers’ love for the setting.
Your knights look like mighty titans weighing tons, mercilessly milling through Nurgle’s minions. At the same time, they are surprisingly agile and nimble, kicking down steel gates that shatter into countless fragments, hurling themselves through bursting windows and swinging onto vantage points with their jump packs to let lowly enemies perish in a hail of grenades.
In addition, there are juicy weapon sounds and a dynamically destructible environment. Exploding cover as well as pillars and columns that crash down on your enemies not only look great, but also have a significant influence on your tactics. Because debris and explosions often destroy your enemies more effectively than direct fire, or they blow up completely new lines of fire. No one can withstand the power of your weapons. Well, almost no one, because sometimes the difficulty curve is a bit dented.
Sometimes too easy and sometimes too hard
Genre veterans will not find much of a challenge in most missions unless they play on the higher of the four difficulty levels. This is due to the aforementioned strength of your units, but also because the AI sometimes just doesn’t act very brightly. In situations where you have to survive for several rounds and wait for teleportation, enemies encircle you far too often and then sit around idly in Overwatch instead of actively attacking you.
Instead of directly killing wounded knights with their weapons, enemies like to leave a time bomb behind, giving you a chance to retreat. None of this is so catastrophically stupid that it completely screws up the game, but in the test version I encounter situations from time to time in which the AI spares me for seemingly no reason. Every now and then, the warp will buff your opponents or weaken your units. How often this happens depends on Nurgl’s influence in the respective system and is accelerated by the use of your special abilities.
The first real shock comes in boss fights, where the difficulty level suddenly increases so rapidly that it sometimes seems unavoidable to suffer critical injuries or worse. It also doesn’t help that injured knights recover from their wounds very slowly after missions. Here you have to decide whether to bring less experienced knights from the bench for a few missions or send the injured colleague into battle with a life point penalty.
The dilemma can be somewhat alleviated via ship upgrades, but never fully resolved. Depending on the difficulty level, knights can also only suffer a limited number of critical injuries before they die permanently. Consider carefully if you’re tough enough for hardcore mode, which won’t let you save freely!
On top of that, random events hamper your progress: an attacking ship has fried your engines and you can’t get to missions in time, the Grandmaster is annoyed and won’t send equipment for 60 game days, repairs take twice as long because an important NPC is injured – preferably all of these at the same time. Argh!
Now the real action begins!
After about the first ten hours of play, when you start to feel like you’ve got the hang of Daemonhunters, the game really kicks in: You get access to upgrades for masterfully crafted equipment, and a few hours later you can also unlock knights of the advanced classes Paladin, Chaplain, Librarian and Purifier, all of which are even more powerful and complex than their basic comrades.
The number of Nurgle-infested systems doubles, the variations and abilities of your enemies also increase significantly. Where you just shot away mostly mindless cultists and a few Chaos Marines, enemies now mutate before your eyes with every hit, grow bigger, stronger and sometimes continue to fight tirelessly even after you cut off their heads.
From now on, you hunt the five main bosses in the game, each of which represents one of Nurgle’s plague strands. At the latest here, however, a certain grind becomes noticeable: To become strong enough for the final confrontations, you hunt for equipment and experience points in many missions that become quite similar over time.
This is still fun, but after a certain point Daemonhunters feels a little too long and repetitive. If you cut your teeth on the bosses, you’ll also notice that you can’t change the difficulty level in an ongoing campaign.
Unexpectedly comfortable
Do you hate it when games throw around names for mechanics and effects that you don’t even understand until you go out and look them up on the official wiki? What the hell are Purity Seal enhancements, what do warp storms do, and what is the effect of Ectar being angry? All of this can be looked up directly in the game at any time. Can all games in the future please come with a built in guide and glossary?
Despite this, I would still like to see one or two improvements elsewhere. For example, you can only see the attack radius of your Grey Knights when you are not moving them. I wasted a lot of action points by placing units just out of range of an enemy and then having to take another step or two to finally attack. When manoeuvring, please show me whether I can target enemies from the desired position or not!
Another small point of criticism is the camera when the AI is on the move. Every now and then knights are shot at that are covered by objects or not in the picture at all, sometimes no life bar is displayed after a hit. This doesn’t happen often, but often enough to be annoying.
So it’s finally playing!
Daemonhunters is immensely fun! Bloody battles, fun upgrades for characters and equipment, a great staged story – Warhammer heart, what more do you want? Okay, maybe a slightly smarter AI, a more balanced difficulty level, a little more variety in the missions and maybe some missions where I can send out more than just four knights by default. There are a few of those as part of the story, but in general I would find the battles even more interesting with six or eight playable units, if only because of the expanded classes.
And did I mention that one particular hero, Castellan Garran Crowe, is only playable in the Castellan Champion Edition, which costs a tenner extra? The fun then costs 55 of your finest Eurons.
Minor flaws aside, stupid special editions aside, Daemonhunters is a gloriously brute strategy game that captures the Warhammer atmosphere magnificently and is still fun even if you basically don’t care about the 40K universe.
Editorial Conclusion
Lick me fat, what a relief! As a small indie developer, you get the 40K license easier than herpes. The result then is that many of these licensed titles are comparable to unexpected flatulence: They appear out of the blue and you fervently hope that no poop will come out of it in the end. What a relief that Warhammer 40,000: Chaos Gate – Daemonhunters has become a really good game! It doesn’t quite reach the quality of XCOM 2, the battles are a bit too compact in the long run, there is comparatively little variety and depth. Nevertheless, Complex Games has delivered an excellent game.
Let’s hope that fans will share my opinion and take the game to their hearts, because there’s plenty of potential for a sequel that goes the extra mile in all areas. For example, more factions with their own campaigns. Battles with more units. PvP multiplayer with a map editor. I’m sure this all sounds totally ungrateful, because I already want much more than is in here. Please don’t take the fact that I still want more after this game as criticism. But rather as high praise for this surprise hit!
