f13.net

As most of you already know I am a fully paid up GW fanboy. I've sunk almost a thousand hours into the various editions of BloodBowl, I played the hell out of the Dawn of War series. I'm a day zero buyer for pretty much anything with the GW IP in it. Obviously I preordered Space Hulk and obviously I sat refreshing the Steam library page over and over again at 10am PST on August 15th waiting for the download button to appear.

And now I don't know how to feel.

Let's start with the good. Full Control have ported the board game to the PC pretty much faithfully. It's the exact same rules, the exact same campaign even from the boxed set. You'll play through the Sin of Damnation as Squad Lorenzo and/or Squad Gideon just as you did with the limited edition 3rd ed box (which was itself a re-release of 2nd ed). The Terminators are modelled on the beautiful plastic miniatures in that limited box set as are the hulk tiles themselves. If you are familiar with the mechanics from the board game (and they are very, very simple) you'll be knee deep in Tyranid viscera in no time.

So what's not to like? Well this is a mid-range release. At €28 (plus €2 for the day 1 DLC), it's not really a budget game. But it feels like one. There are so many glitches, poorly designed UI elements and general what the fuck stuff going on that thirty bucks seems like a lot to ask for it. If it didn't have the Space Hulk IP, this would be a ten dollar game at most. Your Marines will often turn in a random direction and march through some walls before pinging to where they are supposed to be. There's a set-piece in a mission where you have to fire the assault cannon at a dead Marine and, because the dead marine is a scenery element rather than an actor, the tracers from the assault cannon just fire up into space rather than at the target? Really you didn't spot that in testing? Third mission in and it's the goddamn objective guys! You can undo actions which is broken because if you miss a Genestealer, you can just undo the action and shoot again. Yes, really. On the other hand, when you move by mistake (easy to do as movement is a bit glitchy and sometimes your marine will turn around and move forwards instead of taking a step backwards), the undo button just undoes the last action, so now your marine is staring at a wall and has still used all of his action points. There are a lot of UI bugs and so forth as well. Unforgivabley you can randomly lose missions after you've won them, lose credit for achievements after the popup telling you they've been awarded appears and many other issues that should have been fixed before release.

It's not quite Cyanide levels of broken but I can't in all honesty recommend it. If you like turn-based squad shooters, there are a whole lot of better games out there that are cheaper. If you're a fan of the Space Hulk boardgame, dust off your plastic Genestealers and make room on your kitchen table, this is not going to replace the big blue box any time soon.

GW needs to realize they're losing out on a lot of income by licensing to crappy dev houses.

 :heartbreak:

That's a shame.  I was really looking forward to this one. 

Ugh, so was I - have really had a hankering for something like FFT or something, but cannot seem to find much. Suggestions?

Maybe this will be playable in a few months after patches.

"Not as bad as Cyanide" sounds playable to me!

Save your money, wait for patches and for it to come down to $10. I played the Amiga version decades ago and it was better than this travesty. Buggy, fire cone issues, clunky and a whole heap of no fun. I loved the Amiga version but this is lazy programming at it's worst. This will teach me to get all nostalgic and impulse buy, I should have bought Duck Tales instead :(

Now that I got around to installing it (I had pre-ordered) I have to say that I think Iain is being overly generous with the comparison to Cyanide, I found myself longing for the Blood Bowl interface.

 :ye_gods:

It isn't even the worst game I tried this weekend! That would be SolForge.

He ain't lyin'.  SolForge is just god-awful.

Solforge looked awful in the promo videos they made for their kickstarter; people shouldn't be surprised that it wound up bad.