XCOM is a game franchise that has many imitators but very few titles that can actually stand up to it. I’m not sure what’s so hard about breaking into the turn-based strategy/tactics genre, but every few years someone else shows up to try to get a piece of XCOM‘s pie with the same formula of turn-based gunplay, tactical positioning, and base management with limited resources and never quite gets it right. That’s where Warhammer 40k Chaos Gate: Daemonhunters comes in, a game that is very much like XCOM in almost every respect, except that rather than playing as under-equipped and poorly trained soldiers you are instead playing as immortal space knights that kill demons and their worshipers for breakfast. So there’s a bit of a power dynamic shift here.
Disclaimer: All of my comparisons to XCOM in this review will be references to the franchise’s reboots XCOM 1 and 2. I did play some of Chimera Squadron (I even did an impression piece on it) but the glitch that forced me to quit and some of the atmosphere left such a vile taste in my mouth that I blocked most of it from memory. So while I know that Chimera did do some quality of life improvements to the XCOM formula I won’t be referencing them here.
You don’t have to know much about Warhammer 40k to get into the plot of Daemonhunters, but it certainly helps as there is very little in terms of scene setting to guide you in the beginning. For those who know nothing about the franchise at all: the Grey Knights are a specialized army of the franchises’ iconic Space Marines that were created by humankind’s Emperor with the specific goal of fighting and destroying demons. These warriors all have psychic powers and are as powerful as they are secretive, usually operating independently of the rest of humanity’s armed forces from their base on Jupiter’s moon of Titan as they go on missions to hunt down the corruption that demons and The Warp (think hyperspace from Star Wars but it’s full of demons that want to eat you) inflict on the galaxy.
In Daemonhunters you control a single strike force of Grey Knights that just finished a grand, multi-year crusade against an especially powerful demon cult, but lost your commanding officer in the process. As is usually these XCOM-style games you play as a faceless, voiceless “Commander” that was nominated to run the show with no clear qualifications, though in this case it’s originally intended as a temporary appointment for the journey back to Titan. Your ship is badly damaged and your warriors are in dire need of rest, so it gets all the more grim when your ship, the Baleful Edict, is intercepted by a ship controlled by the Inquisitors (the Warhammer equivalent of the CIA) and your new command is superseded by Inquisitor Vakir, who insists that you investigate a nearby arm of the galaxy for signs of a demonic plague. The cyborg in charge of the Edict‘s maintenance, Lunete, immediately objects due to the sorry condition of your ship, while your senior advisor Ectar is fine with the concept of hunting down more demons but isn’t a fan of Vakir’s insistence to study the demonic powers more closely. Demons and chaos tend to corrupt, after all…
All of the above tension between the NPC characters and the state of your ship comes into play during time you spend between missions, but let’s talk about the actual gameplay before we get into that. Daemonhunters is one of those games that I’d almost recommend playing other games in the genre first (XCOM, in this instance) so you can appreciate the differences in power level and other quality of life choices that Daemonhunters has added for the sake of gameplay flow and also to make your Grey Knights feel like the competent powerhouses they are. Here’s the gist of what most soldiers are capable of in the recent XCOM titles: they can take two actions a turn (generally either moving twice, moving and shooting, moving and using equipment, etc), and generally anything aggressive ends their turn immediately. Mid/late game special abilities aside there is no shooting and then moving, no shooting twice, and if you do encounter hostile aliens they will immediately engage you as soon as your turn ends, forcing you to creep up slowly and always stick to cover lest you run into enemies without any actions left on your soldiers.
Almost none of this applies in Daemonhunters. Characters have three actions a turn and can attack as many times as they want, which dramatically swings the power level of the game in both directions since enemies can do the same. Every character outside of two classes can also be equipped with both a melee weapon and a ranged weapon, giving you the flexibility to have all your characters be powerhouses at all ranges of combat. Run up close and beat the hell out of someone three times? Sure. Throw two grenades and shoot any survivors? Why not. Tell your assistant robots to go heal someone or go attack someone, and then go do all your own actions because using robots doesn’t cost an action? You bet! Plus the psychic abilities of the Grey Knights mean you always know when you’re close to unseen enemies and you can’t be taken “unaware” like soldiers in XCOM, so as soon as you encounter new foes all of your actions will instantly refresh and you can move or attack on a brand new turn before the enemy even gets a chance to respond, which feels GREAT.
So yeah, you wouldn’t really appreciate everything I just said if you didn’t know how hard it was for regular grunts in XCOM, but the biggest difference of all is that attacks can’t miss in Daemonhunters. This is frankly unheard of in XCOM, as a good part of the tension, stories, and even reputation of the franchise comes from missing shots with a 95% chance to hit or hitting miracle shots with a 20% chance to hit. A seasoned XCOM player might even say that taking away that tension of whether you’ll hit and the opponent will miss sabotages a lot of the decision making and atmosphere of the game, and frankly they’d be right. It’s an understandable way to hammer home the power of the Grey Knights, after all you don’t live for three thousand plus years fighting an endless war just to miss your shots, but when enemies can’t miss either your turns become less about making sure your Knights survive and more about killing as many things as possible so that on the crackback you aren’t suffering too much guaranteed damage.
Of course, there are some ways mitigate your losses. Without the ability to miss the big thing limiting ranged combat is damage fall-off, with all guns having a maximum effective range that decreases damage by one point in increments the further away you are from it. Combat was fortunately balanced around this and so you’ll generally be fine using your ranged weapon at anywhere between fifty to seventy percent efficiency as long as you have units in melee to deal the big damage, and the game even has helpful numbers that appear over enemies as you plan your moves to show how much damage you’ll be dealing if you shoot them from that distance. Melee combat is a little harder to prevent damage in, though most swords have a passive ability to have a 50% chance to block damage and halberds will attack any enemy that comes near you automatically, giving you a chance to kill a melee enemy before they hit you.
In reality though the big thing that will keep you from suffering guaranteed damage is just how unbalanced the game is. After a rocky couple of early missions where you’ll have to get over the usual learning curve the game swiftly becomes trivial if you keep your head about you and remember a few important things. First, the interceptor unit is the most broken class that was ever made in an XCOM game, practically more broken than end game XCOM snipers (which is saying a lot). They have the ability to teleport at an absurd range, getting rid of all that pesky need to worry about things like terrain or enemy firing lines since you can just appear behind all their emplacements and pick off one (or more) strategic targets to let the rest of your forces advance. Additionally they’re also the class that’s built around critical strikes, which can be used to disable enemy abilities by chopping off their limbs, so they’re both the best class for mobility and the best class for locking down dangerous threats to your army. Now with both of these benefits in mind I’ll cap it off with this: interceptors have passive abilities that give a percentage chance to gain more actions every time they either teleport or crit. This is absolutely insane and can lead to interceptors getting anywhere between five to seven moves a turn as long as you keep teleporting and critically striking, which I’m sure you can imagine begins to diminish combat difficulty somewhat.
Something that makes the game even easier is that most of the missions end the second you complete your main objective. You might be neck deep in chaos monsters and bleeding out of your eyes but the second that counter hits zero or the last scripted enemy falls you’ll get a nice little “victory” screen and be back onboard the Baleful Edict before you can say “Emperor protects.” Compared to XCOM (especially XCOM 2) where almost every mission had to end with an evac sequence or the simple objective of killing every enemy, Daemonhunters leads to a much more blasé approach to combat once the objective is in sight, especially once you unlock the ability to teleport every unit in your army anywhere you can see. The fact that you never miss attacks makes most finales a math problem more than an actual challenge, as you mass teleport four of the greatest soldiers in mankind’s army on top of a plague monstrosity and know with absolute certainty that you can deal enough damage to win on the spot.
So most of the difficulty doesn’t come from the actual gameplay (once you get used to it) but that’s fine, since the between-mission segments throw you plenty of curveballs to make your life difficult. The Baleful Edict acts as your XCOM-style home base, and much like those home bases you’ll spend your time upgrading your ship’s systems and researching new technology that you can use against the plague. Unlike in XCOM though you can actually spend time getting to know the people in charge of these duties though dialogue “trees” and influence their willingness to help you by supporting them through critical moments…though this is generally at the cost of irritating your other support staff in the process. You have four characters to navigate: Vakir, Ectar, Lunete, and Vardan Kai, and each can either give you or take away their aid to you on a whim. Vardan Kai in particular is a pain in the ass to placate, with the Grand Master calling in every two months from Titan to criticize you for wasting your time on a plague that he doesn’t actually believe exists. If you talk back to him or, Emperor forbid, ignore the stupid things he tells you to do then you might end up going two months without being able to unlock new weapons, armor, or soldiers. Arguments that break out between your other advisers over how to do things will require you to make judgment calls over the right course of action, with whoever’s side you take working faster for a month and whoever you didn’t listen to feeling bitter and working slower for a month.
The worst part about most of these instances, and ironically the game itself given how the combat behaves, is that it’s all random. You may just be flying through space only to get hit by an asteroid that not only damages critical ship systems but hurts Vakir or Lunete for a month so good luck getting any research done. You may love giving characters swords to take advantage of their chance to block in melee combat, but since you can’t choose what weapons the game gives you for mission rewards you may just get hammers and halberds forever. Each Grey Knight you recruit has a random passive ability that may be the greatest thing ever for their class or might be completely worthless, such as my heavy weapons class character whose special ability was extra range on pistols or my front-line paladin starting with a skill that gives him extra uses of support robots. Those support skills not meshing properly are just Pokémon style min-maxing complaints compared to the real problem where new recruits start with a random splattering of class skills and there are just some class skills that are absolutely garbage. This is less of a problem in XCOM since most classes only have two options to pick per level but in Daemonhunters each class has four different tech trees you can go down, so the odds of a recruiting a high-level melee character with proper investment of melee abilities goes down drastically. And as for respecs…
Fire Emblem Shadow Dragon was the first Fire Emblem game that I played and it had a strange mechanic where you got bonus levels if too many of your characters died, the idea being that you’d need extra missions to refill your ranks of soldiers or else you couldn’t beat the game. I hated this since it was essentially keeping content away from players that actually knew what they were doing in the game, and the same sort of thing is oddly present in Daemonhunters as well. Grey Knights are exceptionally powerful, but if they take too much damage they’ll either need to heal for a long time or have their damaged body parts replaced with cybernetics, which allegedly gives them bonus stats. I say “allegedly” because I never had a Grey Knight hurt that much to experience it, and by that same token I never got to experience respecing abilities or bonus levels because your Knights need to die before you have the privilege to change your surviving Knights in that way. This was a double whammy for me, as my Knights not dying meant I was stuck with poorly spec’d higher level recruits AND if you’re a Warhammer fan you might have other ideas about what “save the bodies of your Knights for later use” means…but it’s never presented as an option in Daemonhunters. Maybe as DLC.
This review has gone pretty long but I need to talk about the presentation before I go. The game has a slightly cartoony artstyle that I’m not a huge fan of, but it was clearly a decision that was made to slightly tone down how often enemies are blown to pieces as well as a way for the engine to keep up. Helping the engine along is definitely for the best, because while XCOM-style games have always been glitchy it’s never been quite as bad as I’ve experienced in Daemonhunters. The glitches range from the mundane (ability tool tips just being placeholders and damage indicators showing the wrong things) to the annoying (abilities simply not doing what they say they should or enemies being immune to things they don’t say they are) to the game breaking (the game straight up forgetting that I owned grenades) and your mileage for how much you’re willing to put up with these errors will vary. Some of the more egregious glitches can get solved by validating your game files, but others are just built-in failures of design that you’ll just have to deal with until the devs either address it later or you’ve beaten the game before they fix them. To say these glitches make that game unplayable is a little over dramatic, however they are a common point of frustration that will most likely impact every player a little differently, and a mission being undermined by one never feels fun.
If you can look through the glitches (and if you play XCOM you probably can) then you’ll find that Daemonhunters is a fun, if imbalanced, tactical strategy game set in the Warhammer 40k universe. As usual, XCOM and XCOM 2 (as well as their expansions) are the more refined experience, but if you ever thought that XCOM soldiers were too weak for you to properly get anywhere, if you’ve wanted a more generous entry to the genre, or if you’re just a big fan of Warhammer and have wanted more good games made for the franchise, then I’d definitely recommend giving Daemonhunters a try.
