Warhammer 40,000: Kill Team Review

“In the grim nightmare of the future: there is only war” and in the case of Warhammer 40,000: Kill Team there are also camera issues, frustrating checkpoints and limited replay value. However, can the noble Space Marines manage to fight past these flaws and deliver some satisfying shoot ‘em up gameplay?

Warhammer 40,000: Kill Team takes place as a precursor to the forthcoming Space Marine title, with the game’s main campaign setting the scene quite nicely. An Ork Kroozer, a large and ramshackle spaceship, is ominously heading towards an important Imperial Forge World. Clearly worried, the Imperium sends in a squad of Space Marines to gather information and destroy the threat. You pick one character per mission, rather than controlling the whole squad of marines.

You have a choice of four different marines to play as: the Sternguard Veteran, Vanguard Veteran, Librarian and Techmarine. Each of these is fairly different and has strengths and weaknesses that cater for different playstyles. The Sternguard Veteran and Techmarine are more suited to ranged combat whereas the Librarian and Vanguard Veteran all pack brutal melee weapons. It’s nice to see these different groups and they’re pleasingly familiar to fans of the Warhammer 40K universe.

During each mission you earn experience by slaughtering your way through the hordes of enemies in true twin-stick shooter style. The more you foes you kill, scenery you destroy and the quicker you do it: the more points you earn. Stringing together larger combos also nets you a boost to experience, which is fairly tricky to do on anything other than the weakest green skins.

After set amounts of experience are earned you unlock new weapons and abilities for each of the classes. A particularly nice touch is that you unlock other marines’ weapons even when playing as a different class. Similarly, if you unlock a better upgrade of the same type as your current one, it is automatically replaced. This is especially helpful during the missions and means you don’t have to worry about backtracking to an upgrade station. However, it is disappointing that you can only equip one upgrade of each type. Personally we would have preferred an option to have the same types stack together, such as having a health bonus of +25% and one of +15%, but sadly this is not allowed.

Each class of marine can equip two perks and choose their primary weapon, of which there are three available, with two unlocking over the course of the game. There are some nice Warhammer 40K classics in there including Lightning Claws, Power Swords and Heavy Bolters. However, many feel quite generic and usually only the final unlock is really any different, such as the Sternguard Veteran’s Missile Launcher.

Fundamentally the game is a twin-stick shooter with some melee combat bolted onto it. You are swarmed with enemies during most levels with them pouring out of spawning points to attack. The two melee classes feel a bit lightweight when compared to the Sternguard Veteran and the Techmarine who are more effective at keeping foes at a distance. The levels are littered with traditional power-ups including temporary invulnerability, health restoration, enhanced firepower and stronger melee amongst one or two others.

At first the combat is quite satisfying and cleaving or blasting your way through swarms of Orks helps raise a smile as the blood spatters the Kroozer’s corridors. However, as the game progresses and throws more and more enemies at you things begin to feel tired. Quite often the gameplay takes on a trial-and-error approach as you have to play through a hard section once to find out where the power-ups are located. Then you’ll inevitably die and have to replay it armed with the new foresight of where you have to get to before you can heal. In the penultimate stages it was often necessary to backtrack for several minutes to collect an early healing bonus that you were forced to save.

There are only five missions to the game, each taking between 20-50 minutes in length, depending on how many times you are killed working out what to do. Death is inevitable and the checkpoint system is immensely frustrating. Often the checkpoints are situated fairly far apart, leaving you to replay relatively easy portions to get to the difficult section where you have died. Furthermore the cut-scenes that tend to precede harder parts of a level are unskippable forcing you to sit through 20 seconds of filler to get back into the action. Occasionally the title will throw chase sequences at you where you a forced to escape a pursuing enemy or explosion, usually while navigating small gangways. These are invariably the cause of several deaths while you learn the prescribed route or strategy and are more frustrating than impressive.

The camera can be a real nightmare and is uncontrollable. The fixed setting of it can vary wildly between efficient to a complete nightmare. In the game’s final confrontation it is diabolical and tends to be zoomed so far out that you need a telescope to even see your character, let alone the crowds of enemies busy using his power armour to sharpen their weapons. There is only a single Space Marine voice actor too who proceeds to tell you exactly what to do, often laying out the entire level plan in the first few seconds. Worse is the lazy scripting which doesn’t even bother to distinguish between single player and co-op. Frequently your character is referred to in plural terms despite being alone, which is just poor writing.

Despite some variation and a nice twist that will add more interest to Warhammer 40K fans during the game’s third level, there’s still very little here to set it apart from the slew of other twin-stick shooters on the market at the moment. It doesn’t really feel like a true Warhammer 40K game and the limited length of the game’s campaign is a real downside. Even the ability to play as different marines doesn’t really add much and the missions soon get monotonous a second time, even if they require a new approach.

There is the inclusion of some challenge, survival missions that are unlocked during the main campaign. These usually require you to survive for 4 minutes against increasingly tough waves. It’s another clichéd, standard mode these days and doesn’t offer anything that can’t be found in the main missions. There’s also some bonus artwork and collectibles that can be unlocked, but these too feel largely arbitrary. Perhaps the real draw to the game will be the ability to unlock a Power Sword in Warhammer 40,000: Space Marine but whether it’s worth playing through Kill Team to unlock is debatable.

Finally, there’s a co-op mode for both the campaign and survival which is local only. However, the same problems riddle this mode and whilst it can be fun in short doses with a friend it still can get quite repetitive quickly. The lack of online co-op will likely frustrate many and it is difficult to see why it wasn’t included in the package.

Warhammer 40,000: Kill Team is a flawed title, but one which could be of interest to Warhammer 40K fans. Both the story and gameplay are unoriginal and the camera and checkpoint issues will cause frustration. The lack of replay value and the aforementioned limitations mean that it is hard to recommend this over one of the countless other twin-stick shooters available for download. It’s a shame, but it seems that if you want a real Warhammer 40K experience, then it will be best to wait for Space Marine.