Chaos Gate – Daemonhunters transforms XCOM into a gripping gotchic space tale

Warhammer 40,000: Chaos Gate – Daemonhunters, a turn-based tactical XCOM-like, is decidedly unsubtle. A colon and a line! “Demon” with an a! The profit! Like Games Workshop’s iconic inflated Space Marines, there’s something exuberant about this game. From the soaring cathedral spiers at your battlecruiser headquarters to your big, gray knight supersoldiers, Demon hunters‘ aesthetic is thundering loud.

Just a few minutes inside the tutorial mission, my tough team of four gray knights shrug through explosion doors and into a demonic hole in slow motion. A group of underlings are lingering in the corner, so I give the command to throw a frag grenade at their feet. The tactical top-down view suddenly and smoothly zooms in on the projectile, the camera admires the contours of the grenade for a split second before making a bullet time spin and zooms out again for a devastating overview. On the same turn, I ask another knight to slam into a pillar, thereby overthrowing it and destroying another assembly of enemies.

In my long campaign against the forces of chaos, I have witnessed these door-breaking, grenade-throwing and pillar-knocking animations countless times, and yet after 40 long hours I still have not grown tired of watching them play out. I have not grown tired of watching my fully clothed team teleport down to a planet in a flash of fibrous lightning. I also have not been bored with my favorite little toy soldier: the Interceptor. Like many of the game’s classes, he is melee-focused – but he can also teleport. He acts as a bit of a one-man army, popping up behind enemy lines to massacre weaker enemies, or keeping larger targets at bay with the Daemon Hammer knockback effect (he can also knock enemies out of rocks and into pits, which feels a bit like about cheating in the best possible way).

Photo: Complex Games / Frontier Developments plc

With pleasure Gears tactics, Demon hunters is an aggressive simplification of the XCOM formula. The percentage-based miss chances are gone, and with them much of the complexity of Firaxis’ extensive sci-fi series is gone.

Instead, Demon hunters implements a fast-paced system of anesthesia 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 is possible to keep your trip going almost indefinitely. My Interceptor, mentally polished by his colleague Justicar and pumped with the pharmacist’s biomania, flashes from one quick execution to the next, allowing the team’s momentum to gather as they roll on and crush the enemy beneath them like an unstoppable man.

While the moment-to-moment struggle is rapid, things are starting to drag out over the course of the broader campaign. As is the case with XCOM, Demon hunters places a strategic layer on top of its turn-based skirmishes. This layer gives you the task of upgrading different sections of the Baleful Edict battlecruiser, from the industry in Manufactorum to the research in Libris (as is often the case in the Warhammer 40K universe, the empire’s proper names are Latinized).

Photo: Complex Games / Frontier Developments plc

By using the map in your ship’s Strategy, you’re jumping around in a web of star systems, and you’ll desperately need to clean up the nuisances and attacks that are causing chaos on the local cluster, like an elaborate game of slap-a-mole. Demon hunters‘ antagonists are Nurgle – grotesque creatures who are obsessed with disease and mutations, but whose sense of humor creates a funny contrast. At the micro level – with body-fearing creatures sprouting extra limbs – Nurgle is the perfect foil for your sultry Gray Knights. But in the big picture, having to fight constant blooms of infection across the galaxy can quickly become tedious.

On top of this, a lot Demon hunters‘missions act as filler. Levels is a jumble of very destructive terrain at chest height, specially built for Space Marine coverage. You will explore dozens of worlds filled with nothing but sci-fi portacabins. And even reaches the environments see different, they unfortunately feel the same. The most annoying aspect is that many missions will force you to wait for your ship’s teleportation systems to come online before they finish. Suddenly, a quick 15-minute excursion turns into something twice as long. Tactical repetition is, of course, part of this genre. But it feels particularly eerie here, where the tactical elements are so cut back, and the strategies offered feel less like XCOM’s extensive, varied buffet and more like a foundation for the game’s story to lean on.

Demon huntersThe campaign feels like it is pulling its feet in part because the story is so good. In other words, the time-consuming battle and accumulation of resources eventually feels like an obstacle that delays the game’s finest features. This is a cutting-edge gothic dripping with appropriate purple prose about the grim bureaucratic and ecclesiastical details of the Gray Knights and their vast, unmanageable empire.

Photo: Complex Games / Frontier Developments plc

While playing an anonymous commander, there are three key characters on the crooked edict: a dutiful veteran, a slightly independent tech chaplain tuned in to the whisper of “The Mask God,” and an ambitious young inquisitor whose arrival kickstarts the plot. Each of them is superbly written, voiced and directed, and they each reveal a surprising amount of nuance as Nurgle spread across the galaxy. The three of them also bounce wonderfully off each other as tensions on board rise and your campaign rises towards its epic end.

Demon hunters‘writing, history and characters are easily its best qualities. I went in and expected careful turn-based combat, but came out wondering if I should read one of many coherent novels. With mentions of “old archeotech,” “astropathic whimsy,” and “destructive algorithms,” these are exactly the kind of lavish, lavish things I love. Demon hunters may focus only on a single faction, but by hyperfocusing on the Gray Knights, it skillfully manages to explore some of Warhammer 40K’s most interesting and expressive elements. From concepts of “Warp” and “Cult of the Machine” to thickly charged themes of corruption and heresy – this is the ugly dark universe at its very best.

While there is enough tactical depth and adaptation to maintain a throughput, much is off Demon huntersMatches feel like tools to get through its amazing 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 even though I do not think Demon hunters offering the same kind of obsessive replayability, it forms a crunchy, exciting tactical base for its cheeky aesthetic and ingenious story to tread on.

Warhammer 40,000: Chaos Gate – Daemonhunters will be released on May 5 on Windows PC. The game was reviewed on PC using a pre-release download code provided by Frontier Developments plc. Vox Media has affiliate partnerships. These do not affect editorial content, although Vox Media may earn commissions for products purchased through affiliate links. You can find further information on Polygon’s ethical policy here.