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I first played this in 2021 when it was in Xbox Game Pass. I immediately liked that it captured the essence of playing the Warhammer 40,000 table top game better than any other video game. The controls were a bit confusing and poorly adjusted, but it didn't prevent me from enjoying it.

Five years later, I have been crazy about Warhammer 40,000 for a while now, playing a lot of games, and getting into some of the strategy games a bit more.

I bought the game on PS4 and played it on PS5. I played through the whole Crimson Dawn campaign, and tested out some of the other modes. It is quite impressive how many different play modes they wrung out of the same assets and gameplay, and for no extra cost. What does cost extra are all the factions you can buy for 100 DKK per. A bit much, but I did get the Necrons on sale.

This version of the game is quite rough around the edges, the console controls are unintuitive and buggy, seeing unit info sometimes requires using L3/R3, buttons are used for different things depending on the UI focus, and the default stick sensitivity is completely off and has to be adjusted for the game to be playable. When it has been adjusted to feel OK, the strategic map is then incredibly slow and even more unusable. Speaking of the 'Tactical Map' - it is just a rendering of the normal level graphics from a top-down parallel projection view, and is completely useless, which is too bad, it would be nice to have a useful overview in this type of game. By the way, when moving around the camera to inspect enemies, and you hover over an enemy with detailed info enabled, the right stick changes function to scroll the text, locking the rotation of the camera until you move the cursor away again.

The stages look OK, but most of them feel very uninspired. More damning, the stages most often don't have any clearly communicated gameplay ideas to them, they mostly just feel like open spaces. There were only few stages that had something unique and memorable to them, but all of the gameplay intricacies come from how the units work. Nothing from the stage design contributes.

The unit graphics is rough from up close - it looks like it's the automatically generated lower LOD level from the Windows version, including wrong surface normals that makes every surface look round, which looks especially weird on the Space Marine armor and tanks. The animations are often quite rough and have a weird pacing to them, certain parts are infuriatingly slow, others too fast to feel impactful.

The sound is weirdly sparse and poorly mixed. Weapon hits sounds are as loud and often louder than weapon fire, which feels weird. A lot of the combat animations are also missing sound altogether. The main menu also has some weird squelchy sound playing always, which gets annoying with time.

Apart from the controls issues and 2 full crashes during the campaign, the game seemed stable and relatively bug-free until mission 17. From mission 17, it started getting really weird. First, a Tyranid flying monster started dropping Spore Mines, which froze the game for minutes every time. It was scary, but I learned to trust that the game would always come back from being frozen. The first time I panicked and reloaded my save. I discovered to my horror that reloading the save caused all my units to be missing some amount of HP (possibly corresponding to the difference between their upgraded HP and their original HP), even units that never received any damage. I couldn't do anything about it, loading all saves just has that penalty now. I decided that it was just an extra bit of difficulty I had to deal with, and completed mission 17 anyway. Now I'm in mission 18, and the problem still persists. Also, there are vertical columns in this level that fucks up the camera every time I pan past them. The game feels like it's falling apart at the seams.

A lot of complaints for what still seems like the best turn-based Warhammer 40,000 game I have played so far. The campaign mode gives me the Warhammer 40K fix I need, and even though it has a lot of flaws around the missions, and even the gameplay itself has a bunch of issues, it's still one of the games that best captures what it's like to play the board game.

Review score: (OK)