If you have read any of my content at all on this site you know I absolutely love anything in the Warhammer 40,000 Universe. So when I heard that Tindalos Interactive was bringing their expertise in space combat to the Warhammer universe I was extremely excited. The result of all of their hard work is Battlefleet Gothic Armada. Fans of the Warhammer table top games will know that Battlefleet Gothic is the space branch of the 40K universe of games, and involves a much different rule set than the tabletop game. Ships still have gear, and crew, and all sorts of manuvers, but Gothic is a slower more strategic game. Knowing that I went in expecting a fairly faithful recreation of the game, and Tindalos has done a really good job of that. The game is real time, but other than that change, it feels extremely similar to the tabletop.
To understand the story mode you may want to dig in to 40K lore a little bit, but basically the Gothic Sector is its own area of space, quite close to the eye of terror. From the eye of Terror, which is a rent in space emerges Abadon the despoiler and he’s here to kill humans, in the name of Chaos. So stars the Gothic War. That’s about the entire story I needed. It should be mentioned here that the Beta we were given access to, only gave us access to the first act of the story. This arc, which is a tutorial of sorts and showed off only three of the 4 races, but already, I am in love with this game and its story.
The real question of course is how does that story and gameplay translate to the PC experience? So far very well. The game is fun, its deep but not impossible to get in to, it has plenty of room for charging in and trying to just brute force things, but also requires strategy and longer term planning and larger thinking to overrule brute force. A very nice tutorial is provided for players who may not understand how RTS style games work. This is really important because moving a ship is nothing like moving units in standard RTS. The huge ships of the world of Warhammer do not turn on a dime, instead they shift, have weight, and move like you might expect a spaceship to move.
