Warhammer 40,000: Sanctus Reach (Classic)

This is an amazing turn base game. I highly recommended it to play and it worth your money. You want to fight a battle? this is it. I actually find it better than battle sector. I wish they make another game like this but modern. In the mean time i appreciate this one.

Simple, relaxing tactical 40K game

[h1]Warhammer 40k: Sanctus Reach[/h1] Warhammer 40,000: Sanctus Reach (Sanctus from here on out) is a quite engaging turn-based battle system that lacks a larger metagame. The combat system, while mostly enjoyable, provides a great core to a game the developers missed the opportunity to create anything that might make the overall game compelling. What Sanctus ultimately is is nothing more than a loosely tied collection of fairly meaningless battles. There's quite a bit of good stuff in this game. The turn based combat system is quite engaging. It's nothing I haven't seem before but it's well done. I'm not overly annoyed at missed shots as each unit can fire twice during combat plus move. The maps are large enough to allow for tacticians to maneuver and create advantageous positioning, which is really appreciated as so many games turn their turn-based combat into little more than puzzles to be solved because there's no room to move. There's also a fair variety of units, each with pros and cons, making placement, picking the right matchups and combined force strength real possibilities. It does all of this with a combat system that's really not too complex, making this a game that I can pick up and put away at my leisure without really having to remember how to play. Some combat systems are so complex that you're hosed if you don't play for a month as you struggle to re-learn how to play. Sanctus is much more casual. Because I got the entire pack for cheap before it was off steam, I got all the DLCs as well. There's a lot of content there and I could sink hundreds of hours into playing Warhammer 40k battles in Sanctus for what amounts to pennies per hour played. I probably won't play all that much but if I feel like it, the content is waiting for me. I also liked the musical score. It's not amazing but it has that bombastic combat sound and isn't something I want to turn off yet. So there are positives but there are some pretty serious issues with the game. First, while there are a lot of campaigns, much of the content in the one I'm playing is nothing but filler. There's a mission battle and then 3 skirmishes. Then another mission. Then 3 more skirmishes. The skirmishes are pure filler, designed to provide more hours in the game without providing anything of substance. But I actually like the skirmishes more in a way because the campaign missions are poorly done. Enemy units come from nowhere with no warning from all sides of the map, which just throws proper mission planning out the window . I can't make rational tactical decisions with essentially no established lines or boundaries. A case in point was the 3rd campaign mission. I had multiple targets and split my forces to deal with each one, balancing the need and moving forces between my groups as the situation demanded. Except about halfway through the battle enemy units spawned from literally every side of the map, just throwing my plans into absolute chaos. There was no warning and no way to plan for such an eventuality. The skirmishes are more straightforward but another campaign mission or two like that and I'll just uninstall the game. Proper planning and tactics should be rewarded and it's not when the campaign missions spawn enemies willy-nilly. It also doesn't help that the Orks greatly outnumber my forces. This turns the larger campaign missions into slogs and slugfests, which makes everything much less interesting. With so many units, enemy turns might take 5-10 minutes as well, compounding the problem. The controls seem sketchy - unselecting units seems unusually difficult. I'll click on one unit and get another, I'll right click to clear the selection and it won't clear sometimes, and overall the controls seem to be very fiddly. I've even thrown grenades at my own troops because I couldn't unselect units. Units ostensibly level up but as a player I have no control as to how or what skills they might get. Even when starting a new battle I only can choose between a smaller selection of units. This makes the level up system and even the unit seleltion system seem random and unimportant. The biggest issue however is that there's no meta-game here. There's barely a paragraph of a story to tie this whole campaign together. There's no equipping of units with better weapons, or crafting, or base building, or player-controlled leveling system, or any strategic decisions whatsoever. What I'm left with is a loose collection of random missions. This is a huge miss because I feel no connection to this world or my units. I'm basically playing chess against the AI. This game would have been so much better with some overarching game mechanic. It has nothing like that. So overall, it's a really decent PC version of the tabletop game with some very odd and disappointing campaign battle situations and nothing to pull me into feeling that this is important and part of some larger conflict. I'll give it a thumbs up because the battles are engaging but this could, and should, have been so much more.