[h1] Extremely frustrating [/h1]
This is the most frustrating game I've played this year.
For every one thing it does well, it seems to balance it out with five things it does badly.
The game is essentially an attempt to make an XCOM-like game, but it focuses on and amplifies some of the weirdest aspects of XCOM while leaving out a lot of the things that made XCOM work so well.
[h2] The Commander [/h2]
You play as a commander, just like in XCOM. Your character is essentially a faceless and voiceless avatar that exists to immerse you in the game. Chaos Gate actually goes further with this and gives you more dialogue and interactions with your crew.
Unfortunately, it does this in a very strange way.
You start the game by leading your first mission with your commander actually being part of the squad. Then the commander dies during that mission, and you take over as the new commander.
Except... you never get to actually play as your commander again.
You remain a faceless and voiceless character sitting on the ship for the rest of the game.
This is such a massive missed opportunity. It would have been great to create your own commander and actually take that character into battle alongside your Grey Knights.
[h2] Combat [/h2]
The combat is similar to XCOM, but considerably more tedious and time-consuming.
XCOM uses animations for things that actually matter, like discovering hidden enemies or introducing new enemy types.
This game has an animation for everything.
Every enemy group has its own cutscene every time you encounter them, whether it's basic cultists or a squad of Terminators. Combat animations also take ages, with every enemy taking its sweet time moving around and entering overwatch.
And you can't skip any of it.
There is no button to speed up or skip animations. Every enemy gets to take their time doing everything.
Even worse, the game pauses whenever you Alt+Tab.
This is one of the strangest design decisions I've encountered in a turn-based game. It can even pause loading screens.
There are also plenty of situations where you can't press Esc to access the menu. You simply have to sit there and wait for an animation or cutscene to finish.
The game constantly prioritizes being cinematic over being playable.
[h2] Graphics and Grey Knights [/h2]
The graphics were actually a pleasant surprise. It looks a little like the Fable games: colorful, stylized and somewhat cartoony. It's arguably too colorful for a Warhammer game, but I got used to it.
My bigger problem is how uniform the Grey Knights look. I understand that they're supposed to have standardized armor, but it makes it surprisingly difficult to tell your units apart. Usually, the easiest way to identify them is by their weapons.
[h2] The Interface [/h2]
The interface is incredibly unintuitive.
At the start of a mission, you can swap your four selected Knights for others from your roster. But when you open the swap menu, the game doesn't tell you which Knights are already in your squad.
So you have to remember all four names and figure it out yourself.
The equipment interface has the same problem. You get rows of nearly identical-looking weapons and armor and have to inspect each one individually.
Even worse, when inspecting a Knight, their armor stats aren't properly visible. You have to open the equipment menu just to see what their armor actually does.
These are small things individually, but they constantly add friction to the game.
[h2] Difficulty and Mission Conditions [/h2]
The game is also extremely difficult, but not always in a satisfying way.
A large part of the strategic layer is deciding which one or two missions you can reach in time while accepting that the others will get corrupted.
That's fine in principle.
The problem is the additional mission conditions.
Some are completely unreasonable. You can be prevented from using your master-crafted weapons, forced to start with only three of your four Knights, or punished for failing to meet the condition.
One condition requires you to kill four enemies with grenades.
That sounds reasonable until you realize you usually have about four grenades for the entire squad. Against Chaos Marines, you have to deliberately weaken enemies to around 20% HP so you can finish them with grenades.
And even basic cultists can sometimes survive a grenade explosion.
Another awful condition is:
"Complete the mission without suffering a critical injury."
Sounds reasonable, until you complete the objective and have to survive another three turns before extraction.
The teleport happens at the end of the enemy's turn.
So you can complete the objective, survive two turns, and then have an enemy down one of your Knights on the final turn.
Normally you'd just reload the autosave.
But Chaos Gate has only one autosave slot, and it saves after the mission.
If you didn't make a manual save beforehand, you're screwed.
This happened to me, and my last manual save was two hours earlier.
[h2] The Bloom [/h2]
And then there's the Bloom mechanic.
Every few turns, the Bloom meter triggers an effect that buffs enemies or debuffs your Knights. It can trigger even faster if you use psychic powers.
Some effects are extremely disruptive.
Enemies can gain an effect where they explode when they die. If you brought a melee-heavy squad, you're suddenly punished for doing exactly what your squad is designed to do.
Or your extraction teleport can suddenly have its cooldown increased from three turns to five.
This is especially frustrating because the game is already throwing large numbers of enemies at you.
The Bloom essentially forces you to keep pushing forward and taking risks, while enemies can sit in defensive positions and abuse overwatch.
It also increases outside of combat, meaning you're encouraged to rush through the map instead of carefully positioning your Knights.
Movement is another source of frustration. Your squad has to move together, but movement is still turn-based. If one Knight gets too far ahead, the rest can end up a turn behind and have to waste an entire turn just catching up.
[h2] The Bottom Line [/h2]
All of these systems add up to a game that seems obsessed with making the experience cinematic, while constantly getting in its own way.
There are good ideas here. The combat can be satisfying, the Grey Knights are a great faction to build a game around, and there is clearly a lot of love for the Warhammer setting.
But the game constantly prioritizes animations, arbitrary restrictions and opaque mechanics over the player's time and convenience.
It's difficult without always feeling fair, unintuitive without giving you enough information to compensate, and tedious in ways that don't actually make the game deeper.
For every good feature, there seems to be another feature designed to frustrate you.
I really wanted to like this game, but after playing it, my biggest takeaway is that it desperately needed better quality-of-life features, better interface design, and much less obsession with forcing the player to watch everything happen in slow motion.
Not recommended.
