tl;dr if you like firaxis XCOM gameplay or squad games in general and you like the 40k aesthetic then this is a solid pickup.
You are the silent commander of a company of Grey Knights, the Space Marine arm of the Inquisition specializing in dealing with Daemonic threats. On your way home from another campaign your ship is commandeered by an Inquisitor to combat a newly discovered galactic scale threat. This is the setup for an xcom-style game set in 40k where you send 4-unit squads on turn-based tactical missions.
The game never stopped being fun for the whole 60 hours even if this kind of game does get repetitive. The way they did that is to make your units into total badasses who can wade through enemies even in early game. Mastery of the various mechanics rewards you with even more satisfying gameplay like chaining extra turns to mow down even more grunts. That's not to say there isn't any challenge involved but most of that is less about whether or not you will win but in how cool you can make your victory. Some story missions and boss fights might need to be played more than once until you figure out the right combination of builds and gear to get through them. I played on "normal" difficulty which felt about right.
Your units are each specialized classes with their own talent trees, some are better than others but none are useless. Later in the game you get "advanced" classes but imo it happens too late and other than the Librarian with his strong AOE none of them are particularly better than the base ones. It will take a bit of experimentation to find which of the talents you ilke best and which you think are crap, and unfortunately respeccing is fairly expensive.
A couple of mechanics stand out compared to XCOM. First there is no miss or (base) damage RNG. All shots always hit, but range, cover and special abilities can decrease damage. The RNG exists in the form of critical hits but those are strictly bonuses and iirc the enemy doesn't get them. There is more focus on melee and mobility and because your units are all tanks there isn't nearly as much emphasis on always moving between cover. Second your team's action points are restored when you enter combat. That way you don't have to worry about discovering the enemy with your last move and effectively giving them a free turn. One notable mechanic is the "stun" where enemies have a stun value that decreases each time they take damage or from specialized stun attacks. Once it hits zero the enemy is stunned and takes a guaranteed critical hit from melee. Small enemies can be executed when stunned which gives your whole team an extra action point which can lead to the aformentioned extra turn chains.
The strategic level isn't particularly interesting where you choose in which order you build various base upgrades, adjust your team's gear and recruit new units. The gearing UI is a bit clunky but adequate. One tip is to upgrade your ship's engine's twice before starting the Craftworld mission, you will need that speed afterwards. The reason you need the speed is each mission has a strategic time limit that is consumed as your ship travels and the map is large enough that you can't make all of them and have to choose.
The missions reward you with "requisition points" which you can spend on recruiting, respeccing, or loot. Each month you can also spend your requisition points on upgrading the chance of better loot in each category. This makes for interesting choices in the early and midgame about whether to save your points for better potential loot or to spend them on making your squad better now. It also means that you are a bit at the mercy of RNG because some gear will really make your life easier if you happen to get it earlier.
In addition to the missions there are events which require you to make story choices that give your ship, squad, or resources various bonuses or penalties. Unfortunately the developers made the decision to not tell you the game mechanics effect of each choice so either look it up on a website or go in not knowing exactly what you are going to get.
The story isn't anything really groundbreaking but it isn't gay. Though one of the main characters is female and seems eyerollingly smug at first she is well written and gets more interesting as the story progresses. Actually another of the 3 main characters is female but she is a Tech-Priest of the Mechanicum so she probably replaced her cooter with a co-processor or something and it never matters for the story.
Overall I enjoyed it a lot and while most missions were cakewalks there was occasionally enough clench factor to make for satisfying gameplay sessions.
I used to love turn-based strategy games when they had actual time-units/control-units, and weren't of the Firaxis variety.
The original hex-based Battletech games were great, and the first two Jagged Alliance and original X-Com trilogy were also awesome. I just can't get into these new games where your squad is forcibly limited to 4 - 6 units, and the turns are done using a couple of fixed action points.
That being said, at least this game sounds like it's cancer-free, so it gets props for that. It's just a shame that it seems none of the new turn-based strategy games are actual evolutions of the original time-unit strategy games of old, but all designed to appeal to the casual market like the newer XCOM games.
I can promise you that as someone who likes the new XCOM games, they aren't really making anything worth playing like them either. Every attempt is either a shoddy piece of crap that barely functions, or the literal same game with a new IP draped over it.
Its bad enough that the "best" game in the genre that isn't XCOM:EW/2 is a literal korean grindfest game (Troubleshooter) that somehow manages to make its 308324082 systems work together.
Phoenix Point is a bit better in that regard, no time units but grid squares which function similarly, you can shoot and move for example plus the shooting is very interesting. Large squads too.
Large squads? Nice. That's really one of my biggest peeves with the new XCOM games, the limited class-based squads.
I love being able to tactically (re)position units where I see fit, I also loved the old-school item micromanagement from the original turn-based games from the 80s/90s. I might add Phoenix Point to my wishlist -- Oh nice, bonus points that it's from the original X-Com creator.
Thanks for the suggestion.
Phoenix Point launched to resounding critiques. They basically used Epic games store-exclusive buyers as beta testers.
Over a year's time, up to the Steam launch, they made improvements. And then kept adding stuff/improving.
But at what point of this was the community supposed to jump in? I think they wanted that to be the Steam launch, but it still wasn't all done at that point. I don't blame people for not figuring it out. At the same time, it's something of a gem.
I was a huge fan of the original xcom but I do like the german boardgame feel that firaxis brought to it. It feels like discrete action points rather than the time pool create fewer, more meaningful decisions rather than many, less meaningful ones.
I didn't like how their use of Unreal engine limited the destructibility of the environment but xcom 2 mostly fixed that.
The thing that I hate the most about Chaos Gate is that its only Nurgle, they blue ball me with Bloodletters at the start, I get to play with daemon slaying Gray Knights then I ONLY get to purge Nurgle.
Space Marine 2, bet its going to be front loaded with nids then its going to whiplash me with fecking Nurgle again.
I liked Chaos Gate, couldn't finish it due to Nurgle fatigue, and being disappointed there wasn't at least some Khorne red bois to banish back to the warp.
You play the original 40k chaos gate? it's khorne and tzeentch all around. Not a single nurgle thing in there
Looks relatively interesting and I wanted to pull the trigger, but Denuvo. Then I thought, do I care enough to high seas it or just re-install XCOM 1/2 again.
Yeah, I can vouch it's a solid game too. The strategic level advancement can be pretty bland though, so it's easy to lose interest partway because things can start feeling repetitive with things changing too slowly. But the tactical layer's pretty fun.
Decent variety of build options, although the standard difficulty doesn't push you hard enough to really need to optimize. I kept going on standard in my main campaign even though it felt super easy at the start, because I've found these games often really ramp up the difficulty curve in the late game. But I got maybe 2/3rds of the way through the campaign before I moved on, and had never lost a mission or a troop, or felt in danger of losing.
The game is set up so it is really hard to lose troops, they have to die in 4-6 missions and getting "killed" just makes them stronger. It fits the theme of Space Marines are OP so I think it is forgivable.
I never lost a unit but In the later game I was playing so loose that I actually did lose a few missions to TPK and the final mission was a serious nailbiter. I did kill one of the bosses in one round because I happened to go into it with a comp that was perfect for him.
I'd also vouch for chapter master if 40k games are your jam, though I'm pretty sure they sell it under a different name.
This one?
That's the one and apparently it's still kinda going so good for them.
It was really good as far as these things go. I think some people wanted for a challenge, as is common in games these days.
Good. If I played as a fucking Grey Knight and missed at all, I'd throw my computer out of the window and rage at the machine god.