Warhammer 40,000: Space Wolf Preview

Warhammer 40,000: Space Wolf might be one of the least satisfying turn-based titles I’ve ever played. The pacing is slow, the balance dubious, and the tactical options are non-existent, rendering it into one long and boring affair of passivity with less strategy in it than a Call of Duty entry. It is not smart, it is not engaging, and it is simply not good.

The basic plot is straightforward and simple, with a Space Marine Strike Cruiser belonging to the Space Wolves Chapter being shot down in orbit of Kanak by traitorous Chaos forces. You and a few others survive the crash landing, and together you must regroup, destroy the Chaos troops, and leave the planet alive. The hand drawn sequence depicting the space battle is actually quite nice, and the music that accompanies it is exciting, possessing a pounding tempo with good use of percussion, but that’s when things quickly go downhill.

Nosediving might be a more appropriate term.

The gameplay revolves around tactical turn-based combat similar to XCOM, where you move your troops on a square grid and engage enemies. However, instead of having loadouts and abilities, you use cards. Those cards often are one use only, randomly appearing in your hand, and not only you need them to engage an enemy, but you also need them to move. This means that your Space Marine randomly summons several kind of weapons out of the air to shoot someone with, like flamethrowers, Bolters, or Plasma Guns, and you depend more upon the luck of the draw to kill an enemy than properly planning and using each character's strengths. It is an idiotic concept that sounds bad in theory and even worse in practice, and I fail to see how the game design for Space Wolf could ever be considered passable.

In most titles, cards are a fine -- if cheap -- mechanic. Movement with cards is not fine. Facing directions after moving with cards is even less fine. Basing your whole game interactions around cards, from attacks to overwatch to simply walking around the level towards the extraction point, is the most imbecilic idea possible. It frequently took me over five turns and ten cards just to cross half a map, and if there were enemies, I was unable to shoot at them if in a hurry, so I kept getting pummeled along the way. Dashing is impossible, as is taking cover, since Space Wolf has all the tactical depth of a drunken comatose spider.

But unlike a drunken comatose spider, Space Wolf is not interesting to watch.

It actually feels as if someone took XCOM’s exciting formula, stripped it from all that made it fun, and then tied it to the most slow, tedious, and boring game design imaginable to Man. Enemy turns take so long to complete that even short, quick missions take over 20 minutes -- not because of difficulty, mind you, but because you must watch every enemy move in extremely slow and unnecessarily long animations. You basically play for one fourth of the time, then just sit back and watch the CPU behave for the other three fourths.

Making matters worse is the weapons’ balance, which are completely out of whack. They always do enough damage to take between 75% to 90% of an enemy’s health away, meaning you must always waste an action (and a card) that deals around 150 damage to kill an enemy that has 10 health points left, since you have no way of dispatching them with quick, low powered attacks. This drags the gameplay down even further, but the worst part is that the chain of events often means you are either going to get damaged the following turn by an enemy -- with no chance of healing, ever -- or you can skip your last movement, hopefully start your next turn sooner than your enemy, and waste 2 cards to not kill that enemy and end up taking that damage anyway.

This game is on fire. Like London in 1666 was on fire.

During my first playthrough, I failed the second mission because my goddamn Terminator missed four Thunderhammer strikes in a row -- I not only had to wait for the right card to appear, but I also had to hope my guy wouldn’t miss a melee attack with a giant hammer. Which it obviously, shamefully did. Thrice. And then once more.

After that, it took me six freaking turns to cross a map heading towards an extraction zone that was less than one screen away, at which point the mission didn’t end and I had to fight off enemy reinforcements with a squad that had 20 health left. Of course, every one of my soldiers attacked the two lone enemy soldiers, but they never dealt enough damage to finish either of them. When the enemy turn started, my guy died. Thanks to the pathetic damage and reach of ranged weapons and the unbelievably stupid turn system, I had lost over 20 minutes.

Sniper shot to the chest deals 20% damage, sounds about right.

Besides the music and the opening cinematic, the only nice thing about the game was the fact that for once, the Space Marines are not made out of paper mache. Your squad members can usually take a lot more punishment than normal grunts, which makes this one of the few games in the 40K universe to actually respect that bit of lore, for a change. However, everything else is so frustrating that it renders the whole effort mute.

So far, the title is not promising. It is in Early Access, so there’s always a chance it may change; but given it’s a mobile port, I wouldn’t sit around and wait for that to happen. The problems are not the graphics, or the clear leftover mobile interface (which admittedly, works mostly well), or even the Early Access tag; the problem is the moronic game design that manages to remove all the fun from both the genre and the theme Space Wolf draws inspiration from. I can’t be more succinct than this: As it is right now, stay away from this game.