Warhammer 40K: Chaos Gate – Daemonhunters review: Gothic XCOM strategy

Warhammer 40,000: Chaos Gate – Daemonhunters, a turn-based tactical XCOM-like, is decidedly unsubtle. A colon and a dash! “Daemon” with an e! The excess! Like Games Workshop’s iconic pumped-up Space Marines, there’s something exuberant about this game. From the soaring cathedral spires of your battlecruiser HQ to your hulking, Grey Knight supersoldiers, Daemonhunters‘ aesthetic is thunderously loud.

Only a few minutes into the tutorial mission, my gruff squad of four Grey Knights are shoulder-barging through blast doors and into a demonic lair in slow motion. I order them to throw a frag bomb at them. A few underlings remain in the corner. The top-down tactical view suddenly and slickly zooms in on the projectile, the camera admiring the grenade’s contours for a split second, before doing a bullet time spin and zooming back out for a devastating overlook. On the same turn, I tell a second knight to slam into a pillar, thereby toppling it over and wrecking another congregation of enemies.

In my long campaign against the forces of Chaos, I witnessed these door breaching, grenade-throwing, and pillar-knocking animations countless times, and yet, after 40 long hours, I still haven’t gotten tired of seeing them play out. My fully-equipped squad of teleporters teleported down to the planet with a lightning flash. It’s something I can’t get enough of. The Interceptor, my favourite toy soldier man, has never bored me. Like many of the game’s classes, he’s melee-focused — but he can also teleport. As a single-man army, he acts as an ally to the enemy, showing up behind their lines and killing weaker enemies. He can also use the Daemon Hammer’s knockback ability to keep larger targets away. (He can knock opponents off cliffs or into pits which is a little like cheating, in the best possible way).

Much like Gears Tactics, Daemonhunters is an aggressive simplification of the XCOM formula. These percentage-based missed chances are gone, along with much of Firaxis’ sprawling scifi series.

Instead, Daemonhunters deploys a fast-paced system of stuns and executions, where successive attacks drain a meter, force an enemy to their knees, and allow for a melee execution that awards additional Action Points to everyone in the squad. Used efficiently, it’s possible to keep your turn going almost indefinitely. After being psychically enhanced by his Justicar, and given biomancy from the Apothecary, my Interceptor blinks between each execution, which allows the squad’s momentum and energy to build as they crush the enemy below them like an unstoppable Juggernaut.

While the combat in the present is quick, the campaign drags on. As is the case in XCOM, Daemonhunters places a strategic layer on top of its turn-based skirmishes. This layer tasks you with upgrading various sections of the Baleful Edict battlecruiser, from the industry of the Manufactorum to the research of the Libris (as is often the case in the Warhammer 40K universe, the Empire’s proper nouns are Latinized.)

Using your Strategium map, you will navigate through star systems trying to eradicate the infestations or plagues that have ravaged the cluster. It’s like a game of whack a mole. Daemonhunters‘ antagonists are the Nurgle — grotesque creatures obsessed with disease and mutation, but whose sense of humor makes for a fun contrast. At the micro level — with body-horror creatures sprouting extra limbs — Nurgle are the perfect foil to your sullen Grey Knights. However, in the big picture, having to fight off constant blooms of infection across the galaxy can quickly become tedious.

On top of this, a lot of Daemonhunters‘ missions act as filler. The levels are made up of highly destructive terrain that is chest high and purposely designed for Space Marine coverage. There are many worlds that you will explore, each with its own sci-fi portsacabins. Even though the environments may look slightly different, they feel identical. The most annoying aspect is that many missions will force you to wait for your ship’s teleportation systems to come online before concluding. Suddenly, a quick 15-minute excursion spins out into something twice as long. Tactical repetition is, of course, part and parcel of this genre. It feels especially egregious in this game, as the tactical elements feel so stripped back and the available strategies feel less like XCOM’s vast variety buffet, but more like a base for the story.

Daemonhunters‘ campaign feels like it’s dragging its feet in part because the story is so good. The game’s best attribute, however, is delayed by the tedious combat and the resource collection. It is an evocative Gothic piece, filled with purple prose and grim bureaucratic details about the Grey Knights’ imperium.

While you play an anonymous commander, there are three central characters on the Baleful Edict: a duty-bound veteran, a slightly unhinged tech-priest tuned to the whispers of the “Machine God,” and an ambitious young Inquisitor whose arrival kickstarts the plot. They are all superbly voiced and directed and each show a remarkable amount of nuance, as the Nurgle spreads across the galaxy. They also seem to be able to bounce off each other as tensions mount onboard and the campaign moves towards an epic end.

Daemonhunters‘ writing, story, and characters are easily its best attributes. Although I was expecting turn-based combat with utmost precision, I ended up wondering if I should be reading one of the tie-in novels. With mentions of “ancient archeotech,” “astropathic whimsy,” and “ruinous algorithms,” it’s exactly the kind of opulent, over-the-top stuff I love. Daemonhunters may only focus on a single faction, but by hyperfocusing on the Grey Knights, it manages to adeptly explore some of Warhammer 40K’s most interesting and expressive elements. From concepts of the “Warp” and the “Cult of the Machine” to thickly laden themes of corruption and heresy — this is that grimdark universe at its very best.

While there’s enough tactical depth and customization to sustain a playthrough, much of Daemonhunters‘ battles feel like vehicles for getting across its great story, and not the other way around. For many, XCOM is as much about the long journey — failures and do-overs included — as it is the destination. And while I don’t think Daemonhunters offers that same kind of obsessive replayability, it does lay a crunchy, thrilling tactical base for its brazen aesthetic and brilliant story to tread upon.

Warhammer 40,000: Chaos Gate – Daemonhunters will be released on May 5 on Windows PC. Frontier Developments plc provided a prerelease code for the game. The PC review was conducted using this code. Vox Media is an affiliate partner. Vox Media has affiliate partnerships. These don’t influence editorial content. Vox Media can earn commissions for products bought via affiliate links. You can find additional information about Polygon’s ethics policy here.