Review - Warhammer 40,000: Battlesector
What an amazing experience this game is.
I've had it wishlisted probably since it showed up but there it fell under my radar since its release. It may or may not have caught some sales in that time but again it went unnoticed and what an absolute crime that is. Released in 2021, it recently just came out with the T'au army which put the rest of the game and its various army packs on sale to an agreeable level, and putting it back on my radar.
Many Warhammer games usually nail the aesthetic, themes, diction, and storylines but very few capture the actual feel of playing on tabletop. There was Dawn of War which depicted swaths of armies cutting across the landscape but it was all in real time, the only methodology there was making sure your travelling teams had all the right counters to vehicles and infantry and after that you basically just let it go.
What we have here is a unique XCOM-like that may very well be the closest many of us will get to playing the actual tabletop game. We have a campaign (just one; following a Blood Raven chapter of the space marines) and two extra modes. Demonic Invasion is a wave based king of the hill type thing where you hold off for as long as you can as every round will continually spit the chaos god's minions at you. There's Planetary Supremacy, which is a sort of Catan/Risk style hex board that players of Dark Crusade or Soulstorm may be familiar with. It's the mode most of my hours have been played on. My only wish is that it could go for just a bit longer, maybe a bigger map, more enemies fighting each other, better node control.
In extension, there's also custom campaigns players can build as well as skirmishes for you to play against AI or other players. As of this writing there is no Co-op and that's quite a shame.
So there's a lot to do here. Some of the more mixed reviews, especially targetting the new armies, are complaining that there's not a super special story campaign for each and every single one of them. That is frankly not so much a problem for me, as I immediately gravitated towards the hex board game mode and just enjoyed having my hands on the Necron for the first time in many years. Now in HD with reflections! My dead bois are beautiful!
There's plenty to learn as well. Even on the easiest difficulties, the AI can route you. My Necron have units called Warriors, basically the equivalent to shotgunners. They also have the slowest movement of my army so it's difficult to get them into position and keep my general army momentum going. Sometimes they fall behind and I lack the much needed damage against enemy swarm units, and I've lost some good troops because I didn't have enough people shooting back. It's how I nearly lost against the Tyranids one game despite outnumbering them by 500 army points. Tactics very much matter here.
There's also a photo mode which is a bit fickle. The camera is locked at certain height over the floor tile so it's difficult to get sweeping, heroic visions of your armies from foot-level. You're more or less stuck staring at them from head-on. It's fun to play around with, though.
So while there is a campaign (just the one), this game could be treated more like a sandbox than anything else. I'm told from the game's discord they plan on releasing free units over the coming months. This is good, because that's one of my chief complaints about the game. There's a significant lack of versatile units to play with. Each faction gets around a dozen to fifteen to allocate with your army point cap (another staple of Tabletop that most games don't quite capture), with Khorne getting the shortest end of the stick (and the cheapest DLC) whom only have eight units to choose from. There's a significant lack of Kroot and vehicles here, and foot troops seem to be a choice between three different things. There's a lot more than that on tabletop.
Not that I expect this to be the tabletop simulator but it cuts real damn close. Closer than most games in this franchise. A must have if you like turn-based XCOM-likes.
