Growing up my dad was a huge fan of Warhammer 40k. He read every Black Library book. For all my childhood I would build and assemble the minis he bought me on Christmas and birthdays. Space Marines and Imperial Guard were my favorite, while my brother built Necrons, Chaos, and Tyranids. I was never very good at painting—art and I don’t get along—but I look back on those times fondly.
Sitting at the bar countertop in the kitchen with my brother. Listening to Nirvana. Assembling Space Marine pauldrons upside down. Burning myself with a hot glue gun. These are among my best memories from childhood.
The mini painting bug bit me again earlier this year. I decided to buy a Necromantic team for Blood Bowl 2020. I’d build it, paint it, and see where it went from there.
It turns out that as an adult I have no patience for the art of miniature painting. Not only am I terrible at it (shaky hands), but I don’t enjoy it, either. I did one zombie and one werewolf and haven’t touched the figurines since.
Yet this brush with nostalgia reignited in me a mood for Warhammer 40,000. For the last two months I’ve been on a tear: Dawn of War: Dark Crusade, 2, and Chaos Rising; Space Marine; Inquisitor – Martyr; to say nothing of countless Warhammer Fantasy games. I’ve played through them all this year.
I stumbled upon one that looked particularly interesting in the midst of my searching. It was called Warhammer 40,000: Chaos Gate – Daemonhunters. The gist: XCOM with Grey Knights. Grey Knights were always my favorite chapter as a kid, for no reason other than that they have awesome armor, so as a huge XCOM fanatic I was intrigued. The only problem was the release date: May 4, 2022.
I forgot all about Chaos Gate – Daemonhunters—until I saw it pop up on Steam’s ‘Upcoming’ page three days ago.
Daemonhunters
In Chao Gate – Daemonhunters you play the newly-anointed Brother-Commander of the Baleful Edict, a Grey Knight Strike Cruiser damaged in a campaign against the minions of Khorne. On the way back to Titan for repairs, however, an Inquisitor named Kartha Vakir commandeers your vessel, directing your attention instead toward a Nurgle pandemic spreading across a nearby sector. It falls upon you, her, your command team, and your Grey Knights to purge the unclean and defeat this vile contagion once and for all.
In form, Daemonhunters is XCOM. The Baleful Edict is your base. Severely damaged, the player must recover Servitors to online its facilities one at a time. Inquisitor Vakir functions as research coordinator: recover Nurgle ‘seeds’ to learn more about the pandemic and instruct her what next to research. This is the primary way to progress the plot.
Otherwise, wait for missions to come up. Each give different rewards and have slightly different objectives. You’ll send out four Grey Knights at a time. They earn XP and level up, and if you aren’t careful they can die. Mission rewards come in the form of currencies which can be spent on new Knights, more gear, faster research, better facilities, and ultimately aid you on your trek toward the final battle.
Like XCOM, Daemonhunters is a narrative strategy game. The story is foregrounded. It is possible to lose—either by the Edict’s destruction or by managing the Bloom of Nurgle very poorly—but most campaigns will play out the same way. Replay value is limited.
The Game
So Daemonhunters is XCOM. It looks like XCOM. It feels like XCOM. The strategy elements are directly ripped from XCOM 2. But actually, although it looks and feels like XCOM, it's much more offensively focused, much more about managing damage (rather than avoiding it), and much more Space Marine. It feels quite unique in play.
Its major accomplishment is the removal of most RNG. Each class has a number of ‘Auto’ abilities—skills that trigger based on a percentage chance. There are also critical hits, which can be guaranteed in various ways. But beyond that Knights never roll to hit. Damage is always done directly. Cover reduces damage outright. A Knight will never miss at point-blank, and a melee attack will only ‘miss’ if the enemy has a particular Auto defense which gives a chance to parry.
Action Points work quite differently, too. Each Knight receives a base of three AP, contrary to new XCOM’s two. Turns never end on attack actions. That means a Knight in melee range of a Plague Marine can attack three times per turn, or perform any combination of move/attack/cast actions in any order.
As a Warhammer game, Daemonhunters is of course focused on melee combat. I find the above changes to be well-implemented in preserving the feel of an XCOM-like tactics game while adjusting for the needs of swordfighting. In addition the characters all have psychic abilities, so that they each feel a bit like Psychics from XCOM 2, but the individual powers—and Will resource that fuels them—is more like what we see in The Banner Saga series.
It otherwise is what’s promised. I’ve heard it bears more similarities with Gears: Tactics than XCOM 2, but I haven’t played Gears: Tactics so I won’t make any assertions on that fact. What I can say is that among the XCOM clones I have played—Mutant: Year Zero and Phoenix Point most notably, in addition to a few cRPGs like Wasteland 2 and the Shadowrun games—Daemonhunters stands out as far and away the best. The combat is tight, well-balanced, and engaging. The designers had ideas of their own and they feel well-implemented rather than grafted on. In totality it reminds me of The Banner Saga mixed with the old Warhammer iPad game Deathwatch, plus new XCOM. It’s a combination that works well.
Wargear
Recall back to Dawn of War 2’s wargear progression system in the single player campaign. Daemonhunter’s loot works similarly. Over time you’ll build up an armory of special relic weapons and suits of power armor, including Terminator armors, as well as trinkets, grenades, and servo skulls. Weapons and armors can also usually be upgraded to be much more powerful, which is done via Seeds (another currency, recovered from enemies during missions).
Each weapon is individually modeled. The armors come in three tiers, which are also all individually modeled. The variety is immense. Although a small point, the sense of visual progression as you find better gear for you Knights is immensely satisfying. I’m very glad they didn’t go the route of most games (I’m looking at you, Total War: Warhammer 3) and leave most of the variety to only the spreadsheets.
Wargear is an excellent adaptation of XCOM’s equipment system. It’s thematically appropriate for Warhammer and works well as part of the overall progression scheme of the game.
The Classes
There are eight classes: four basic, four advanced. The basic are the Apothecary, Justicar, Interceptor, and Purgator; the advanced are the Librarian, the Chaplain, the Purifier, and the Paladin.
All the advanced (except the Purifier) are stuck in Terminator armor. Apothecaries and Justicars may wear power armor, if they spec appropriately.
I found the advanced classes to be next to useless, although I only played on Normal. The Librarian was useful for his psionic storm ability, but the Chaplain was complete trash, and the Purifier and Paladin were similar to and no better than—and quite possibly worse than—their basic alternatives.
The basic classes are the real meat of the game. I would say I found the balance lacking, but that would seem to suggest I want it changed.
In effect the Justicar is a heavy-duty melee frontliner; the Apothecary is a medic and support unit; the Purgator is the ranged class; and the Interceptor is a teleporter-armed samurai. The Justicar has an ability to grant +3 Action Points and +1 Will Power to a single Knight, while the Interceptor has the ability to teleport across the field, deal massive damage to multiple units in a wide area, regain AP on crits and on teleportation, and shoot at nearby enemies whenever an ally makes a ranged attack.
About a third of the way through the game I discovered the combination of buffing my Interceptor with +AP, then having him kill everything in sight. To be honest he often didn’t need the extra actions, but with them, and armed with my best melee weapon, he almost never failed to clean up even the most fearsome enemies. Even bosses—there are several—melted beneath his blades.
The Interceptor, on Normal, is hilariously overpowered. And he is so much fun to use.
I would wager that two Justicars and two Interceptors would be ideal for every mission in this game, but I brought an Apothecary along just in case. His heal is invaluable, but his buffs are more dubious. Their use is apparent in the abstract—but when the minions of Chaos dissolve so quickly against the fury of my Interceptor, why bother?
My fourth squad slot stayed rotating throughout the game. The Purgator is of seriously questionable utility. The ranged weapons might be good if a high leveled one is acquired as loot, but the Purgator is forced to spec into them individually, and there aren’t enough points to acquire skills in them all. Since wargear acquisition is largely random, I found it hard to use my Psilencer-spec’d Purgator when the only level two ranged weapon in my arsenal was an Incinerator.
Overall I found melee to be overwhelmingly preferable to ranged anyway. This further increased the competitiveness of the Justicar and Interceptor and made mobility king. Sorry Terminators, but you don’t cut it. The ability to zip around the map and pick off enemies low on health was vital. Melee attacks can be made for free if moving adjacent to a nearby enemy, but ranged can’t—and there’s damage fall-off at half maximum range, and maximum range is usually shit.
Yet still. Overpowered as I found them to be, relatively, my Interceptors kicked so much ass, and my Justicar smashed the hell out of demons on more than one occasion. I had as much fun using these two classes as I have killing fifteen enemies in a turn in XCOM 2 using Serial on my Sharpshooters. I sincerely hope they don’t nerf anything. With that said, I do think the meta is too focused toward stacking AP on a single character at the moment. That's the optimal way to play the game, clearly.
Customization
As would be expected from any Warhammer game, as well as any XCOM clone, there’s extensive character customization in Daemonhunters. Your Knights may all be Grey, but you can find other ways to give them personality. There are ten voice actors to choose from—all of whom sound identical to me, except for the guy doing a funny Asian accent—and a whole selection of pre-written last names to give different Knights, so each character on the battlefield identifies himself in some way. This is an effective strategy to give a tad more personality to each squadmember, and the additional amount of production value required to pull it off shouldn’t be overlooked.
My only problem is that the bare heads are all terrible. What is it with games and having so few hair options? Oh well. Good thing Grey Knight helmets are badass.
The Metagame
I’ve described it already in brief, but the metagame should be touched on one final time. It’s what pulls a game like this together.
It’s XCOM. XCOM 2, to be more precise. Fly the Baleful Edict around, complete missions, wait for research to complete, wait for more missions, repeat.
I found this all well-implemented overall, with the exception of the game’s resource economy. Requisition points earn gear; Seeds earn research (and upgrades); Servitors repair the ship. Yet there’s no way to trade one for another—no exchange at all. This wouldn’t be as large of an issue if it weren’t for the severity of lacking one resource, particularly Servitors, when it’s needed.
Two story events and an encounter with a Nurgle ship lowered my hull integrity down to 1/4. To repair it I needed twelve Servitors, but I had already spent all of mine on upgrading the Edict’s warp engines. That meant for over fifty days I sailed across the sector in constant risk of a Game Over (I think) while I waited for a mission that rewarded Servitors to pop up, near enough to me that I could get to it.
Meanwhile I had 32 Requisition points and more Seeds than I could ever use.
Even at the rate of one Servitor per one Seed or Req point, a brutal exchange, it would’ve been worth it at that point. But there was no way for me to make that decision.
I managed to pull everything together in the end, but if I had been on Ironman mode, and if I had made some mistake to end my campaign, that would have felt like a stupid way for things to go down the drain.
Beyond that much I like what they’ve designed. It works. It feels Warhammer—at times reminiscent of StarCraft 2, and always like you’re managing a big spaceship.
The Missions
The only thing I dislike about the gameplay of Daemonhunters is the repetitive mission structure. There are two main types: destroy the Plague Spreader, or extract the Seeds. Both boil down to “kill all Nurgle things on the map,” basically. The only exceptions are story missions and boss fights, which make up no more than a quarter of total deployment time—and probably significantly less.
This is a big problem in variety. Daemonhunters needs more mission objectives. That would make its campaign far less repetitive and much more enjoyable.
There’s a soft-timer present, somewhat like XCOM 2, called Warp Surge; every two to eight turns, the Warp Surge ticks over, and you either receive a debuff or the enemy gets a buff. I never minded the timers in XCOM 2 and I don’t mind them here: some sort of pressure to prevent turtling is a good addition to this type of game. But I wish Warp Surge had a chance of a positive effect, too. It would be much more enjoyable as a mechanic if it was bad four out of every five times, but on the fifth the player received the boon instead of Nurgle.
That’s a small criticism overall. Even the lack of variety isn’t enough to kill Daemonhunters for me, but it will make replaythroughs significantly less enjoyable—despite the fact that the rest of the game has enough depth to warrant them.
The Story
While you, the unnamed Brother-Commander, are technically in charge of the Baleful Edict, it is effectively run by three NPCs: the Inquisitor Vakir, the Brother-Purifer Ectar, and the Tech-Priest Lunete. These three annoying talking heads put you on rails and determine where the story needs to go, every step of the way.
Daemonhunters is linear.
The only time you, as the player, assume any narrative agency on the ship—the only time anyone talks to you rather than at you or past you—is during exposition conversations. These are mind-numbingly dull and uninteresting. You pick dialogue options and your advisors explain things to you. What engaging gameplay.
Beyond that, you make choices when the Grandmaster calls in every 60 days to check in on your status. These have real mechanical consequences: delays to research time, damage to the ship, confiscation of leftover gear; or, bonus Requisition points, increased research speed, and other boons of that nature.
I use the word ‘choices’ deliberately. These ‘choices’ do matter, but they aren’t decisions. They’re mostly arbitrary in their making and their consequences are never clear beforehand. They either grant something or take something away, but they don’t alter the story meaningfully.
‘Granting something’ and ‘taking something away’ is better than nothing. It’s a small bit of ludonarrative consonance within an amusement park full of railroads. But it’s still not much to work with.
Mostly, the narrative progresses through cutscenes. I like these overall. The animation quality is good. The voice acting is solid. The dialogue isn’t bad. The plot is standard Warhammer faire—exactly what I would have expected, or even slightly better. But there are so many of them. One, two, sometimes three between missions, and they can go on for five minutes at a time. Most serve no purpose other than explain why our next course of action makes sense within the metaphysics of the Warhammer universe. Some small amount of that is endurable, but there’s way too much of it here.
Daemonhunters is monstrously overwritten. Before each mission, too much dialogue. After each mission, too much dialogue. But during the missions themselves?
The few in which the narrative does progress—those where you’re tasked with escorting the Inquisitor, and not many others—show a stark improvement over the rest. In those missions the story and the gameplay seem to have some bearing on each other. But otherwise they happen in different dimensions, only vaguely touching or influencing each other except in small ways, in the designated places (like Grandmaster calls)—and never anywhere else.
Daemonhunters doesn’t do a terrible job with this. In actual fact it’s hardly worse than the new XCOM games, if worse at all. The writing, plot, and characterizations are all better than XCOM’s. But the framing device which constantly reminds us that we are the Baleful Edict’s commander exacerbates the dissonance between the narrative and the mission structure of the gameplay, and amplifies the sense of being on a railroad.
When the three advisors have conversations, the camera is completely ungrounded. It cuts wherever it wants. It even breaks the 180-degree rule, which is extremely upsetting and makes the player want to vomit. We see everything from the ideal imaginary viewer’s perspective. Yet when the scene is over—never any time else, only as the conversation draws to its end, only after some course of action has been decided—the Brother-Purifier or Dominus will turn to the screen, look the player in his eyes, and tell him what next to do.
Where have we been all this time? Is the Brother-Commander a floating head? How did he receive a perspective on Vakir’s eyes that is physically impossible, through a table, from where someone else is standing? Why don’t we ever see the Brother-Commander, anyway? Where is he during all these conversations? We have full coverage, and apparently he’s there at the end, but we never catch a glimpse?
Of course the actual answer to these questions is because when the advisors turn to the screen and speak directly to the player they are doing just that—speaking to the player. But this whole framework only makes it more bizarre when I, as the player, have no actual input into the trajectory of the plot. These characters keep reminding me I’m supposed to be in charge! Why don’t they want my input!?
I’ve written a lot complaining about narrative in this game, but the truth is that it’s adequate. Could be better, could be a lot worse. I listened to about half of the conversations and watched four fifths of the cutscenes, which is infinitely more than I’ve ever sat through in XCOM 2, in which I’ve never watched a single cutscene I don’t have to.
But contrary to what some other writers have said about this game, I wish this type of fusion strategy/turn-based tactics semi-RPG would move away from linear narrative. I don’t care about my advisors at all. The characters that interest me are the ones I’ve made, who are fucking shit up on the battlefield.
Ajax Corvane the Interceptor? That guy’s badass. He once killed four Plague Marines, three Nurglings, a Plague Priest, and a Chaos Knight in a single turn. But Brother-Purifier—wait, what was his name? I’ve already forgotten.
Stop Wasting My Time
So writers: write less. Please. The game would be better for it. But it’s not just the writers. It’s the animators, too. Those cutscenes that play every time I exit or enter a mission area? Those cutscenes that last 30 seconds each, which I had to watch approximately nine hundred million times over the course of my campaign? Patch those out.
Sometimes less really is more.
The Verdict
Daemonhunters is a good strategy game and a great Warhammer game. It has its share of issues, fairly small ones, which I’m sure you can find other people bitching about elsewhere. For my part I give it a full recommendation. Between competent systems design and high production value I think it’s easily worth a $60 price tag—and it’s not $60. It’s only $45.
So pick it up if you’re interested. For my part Daemonhunters has flown right to the top of my go-to Warhammer games. I’m sure I’ll replay it multiple times in the future, and I’m excited for future expansions or sequels. Personally I can’t wait to fuck up Tau with my Interceptor; I bet he can take out fifteen Firewalkers per turn, easy.
I purchased my copy from Steam for $55. Yes, I got the upgrade pack. No, it absolutely wasn’t worth $10, but I’m not that upset over it. That’s still sub-full price, and I stand by my statement that Daemonhunters is worth $60. My final playtime was exactly 20 hours. I’ll probably play a bit more over the coming weeks, though I’m rather sick of seed extraction missions.
UPDATE: CAVEAT EMPTOR
Today (5/12/22) a balance patch was released which alters the gameplay for the worse. More than just changing the mechanics, though, this patch demonstrates a willingness on the part of Complex Games to retroactively adjust the core experience of their singleplayer games in ways that I find deeply troubling. Read more of my thoughts on this issue here. Until they renounce this patch, and vow to never update for "balance" ever again (highly unlikely), consider my recommendation for Daemonhunters significantly tempered.
UPDATE: UPDATE
As of late 2023, Daemonhunters has been so thoroughly molested by bad DLC and pointless balance patches that I would not recommend it under any circumstances. It’s no longer a good game. Very sad.