Warhammer 40,000: Battlesector (PlayStation 4)

The Imperial Guard showed up in Crusade Mode.

Mode overview:

Mode                 Description
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Campaign Mode        20-missions Blood Angels v. Tyranids
Planetary Supremacy  Hex-based overworld conquest
Crusade Mode         'Roguelike' Mode (1)
Daemonic Incursion   Survival Mode
Skirmish Mode        Single battle?
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1) Pick army, level up, go through sequence of randomly
   generated battles

Veteran Status - Each unit levels up and gains a Veterancy level, which gives them +1 accuracy and +1% critical chance.

• Intercessors

  • Standard tactical squad
  • The auto bolt rifle is a great upgrade, shoots double the number of bullets

• Aggressors

  • Short range tanky unit
  • Really high melee damage, can be used effectively against huge Tyranid units
  • Missile rack good against normal squads, deals low damage to every unit

• Hellblaster

  • Plasma guns is one of the only effective ways to kill the huge Tyranid enemies, when bolters can't penetrate their armor

• Landspeeders

  • High movement, OK armor, long range Heavy bolter

• Predator

  • It's a tank, great for drawing enemy fire

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.

List of issues for later:

• sound is weirdly mixed, weapon hit sounds are as loud and often louder that weapon fire, which feels very weird. A lot of combat animation is missing sound.
• the default camera controls are poorly scaled for the controller. It can be adjusted to feel OK, but then the strategic map controls incredibly slow.
• The strategic map is all but unusable, which is too bad, the game could need a nice overview.
• The models look weirdly off on PS4, like it's a automatic LOD downscale from the real model, which might actually be the case, since the Windows version seems to look way better. They do look OK from a distance. The combat animations are often very rough.
• Viewing info and selecting actions during gameplay is weirdly confusing, buttons are overloaded with different functions, you need to click L3/R3 for info, and the camera rotation can be overridden by textbox scrolling when hovering over an enemy, which can be confusing.

I have been playing and enjoying the Crimson Dawn campaign so far. The game is a bit 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. The 'Tactical Map' 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. The unit graphics is rough from up close - it looks like it's the automatically generated lower LOD level, including wrong normals that makes every surface look round. The sound is weirdly sparse and poorly mixed. However, 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 50 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.