One of the great delights of being a purely surface-level Warhammer 40K enjoyer is that around every corner there’s always some new, human-made horror to discover. The other day, for instance, I learned about the Exterminatus, a giant, Galactic Empire-inspired space gun that blows up planets when all other options – Space Marines, Grey Knights, Titans, Orbital Bombardments, et cetera – have been exhausted.
Warhammer 40,000: Chaos Gate – DaemonhuntersPublisher: Frontier FoundryDeveloper: Complex GamesPlatform: Played on PC (via Parsec)Availability: Out 5th May on PC
Warhammer 40,000: Chaos Gate – Daemonhunters, a new turn-based tactics game in the vein of XCOM, coming 5th May, will let you fire it, and is actually the first 40K game to feature it as a proper mechanic.
The central premise here is that a plague called the Bloom has broken out across a series of planets, thanks to Nurgle, the Chaos “Plague Lord” whose MO is being gross on a large scale. It’s your job, commanding a squad of Grey Knights – mysterious, elite Space Marines – to save as many planets as possible and ultimately stop the spread.
Creative director Noah Decter-Jackson explained that this is the “main focus” of the strategic campaign and Starmap when he elaborated to us some more:
“There are a large number of solar systems that you can travel to, and the Bloom is starting to appear in the sector and it will continue to appear, and you’ll basically get eruptions of the Bloom over time, and you’ll have to decide which of those eruptions you want to deal with based one where you physically are within the solar system, how quickly you can get there,” he said. “But really, what you’re worried about is the advance of the corruption levels on these various systems – once they get to a certain level, then they’re at grave risk of kind of pushing things over the edge, in terms of what we call the Morbus, which is this cataclysmic event.
1 of 4 Caption Attribution Much time will apparently be spent on your ship, which needs repairs, upgrades, research and more as you play cat-and-mouse with the plague.
“So at the high level side, you’re trying to manage corruption, how you manage corruption is by fighting in combat missions to try to wipe out the spread of this corruption on the planet. However, there’s a lot of ship-based management decisions that you have to make that can improve your ability to do battle at this kind of solar system-based level.”