Warhammer 40,000: Chaos Gate

Warhammer 40k Chaos Gate DaemonHunters Review

Chaos Gate – Daemonhunters: First 20 Minutes of Gameplay on PC

When it comes to model war games, non are bigger than Warhammer 40,000. With such a long legacy we are now treated to the latest digital slice of tactical warfare in Chaos Gate – Daemonhunters. Check out the first 20 minutes of hellfire gameplay on PC.

Warhammer 40k Chaos Gate DaemonHunters Review

Grand Master Kai looms over my crew via hologram like an enraged Greek cybergod. It’s our bimonthly report and he’s not happy.

Our onboard Inquisitor’s desire to procure knowledge about the Nurgle plague has inadvertently accelerated its spread, and he wants to know who’s responsible. Do I cover up for Inquisitor Vakir and piss off Brother Ectar, revered captain of the Grey Knights Space Marine Chapter, or do I throw the brash Inquisitor under the bus?

Whatever I do, someone will be unhappy, and that will have knock-on effects.

Warhammer 40,000: Chaos Gate – Daemonhunters review – rich, raucous Space Marine strategy

In the grim darkness of the far future, there is only satisfying turn-based squad battling let down just a touch by a sluggish resource-gathering midgame.

It feels blasphemous to call a Warhammer 40k adaptation slick, let alone subtle. This is the universe of endless grot, rancid liturgy and heavy-duty cybernetics, its warriors held together by rivets and fanaticism, its starships ancient Gothic ironclads recovered from asteroid fields.

You don’t expect a delicate handling of inspirations or considerate presentation from such a setting: you expect clashing cogs and excessive crenelations and hint windows that read like catechisms. You expect things to wallow like a Dreadnought knee-deep in Plaguebearer offal. But save for that slight (and to be fair, genre-typical) over-reliance on grinding to help the plot over the next hilltop, Daemonhunters positively glides.

At a glance the interface looks like a Borg sneezed all over a cathedral, but in practice this is both a fine balance of ideas from XCOM and Gears Tactics, and a crisp boiling-down of a gargantuan fiction that somehow renders everything digestible, even snappy, without sacrificing the source material’s morbid intricacy.

Warhammer 40K: Chaos Gate – Daemonhunters review: the best kind of tactical mayhem

I’ve never been one for playing aggressively in turn-based tactics games. I will hug and skulk between half and full height walls like nobody’s business, creeping up the map inch by inch lest one of my precious party members accidentally sets off an entire warren of alien nasties by blundering too far ahead or, heaven forbid, one of them gets nicked by a stray bit of shrapnel. To say I’m overprotective is an understatement.

Thankfully, the Grey Knights in Warhammer 40K: Chaos Gate – Daemonhunters are made of sterner stuff. I mean, just look at these brutes. They’re enormous. Even the Gears Of War lads would be jealous of the kind of muscle these big robo boys are packing, I’m telling you now.

They’re by no means invincible, of course, but they can hold their own out of cover, and pick themselves back up again when your best laid plans inevitably start going down the drain. It may not be my most natural style of tactical manoeuvring, but man alive is it liberating.

It’s a good thing, too, as the foes in this corner of the Warhammer 40Kverse are anything but a walk in the park. After encountering a strange plague unleashed by everyone’s favourite chaos god Nurgle, you and your fellow knights (aboard the wonderfully ornate Baleful Edict) must patrol the depths of space and purge the plague from existence.

You’ll do this by fighting Nurgle’s diseased agents of chaos down on the ground in isometric turn-based battles, and by researching the seeds of this demonic plague back on your ship as you attempt to track this deadly ‘Bloom’ to its source and be rid of it once and for all.

Chaos Gate – Daemonhunters transforms XCOM into a gripping, Gotchic space tale

WarhammerWarhammer 40,000: Chaos Gate – Daemonhunters, a turn-based tactical XCOM-like, is decidedly unsubtle. A colon and a dash! “Daemon” with an a! The excess!

Like Games Workshop’s iconic pumped-up Space Marines, there’s something exuberant about this game. From the soaring cathedral spires of your battlecruiser HQ to your hulking, Grey Knight supersoldiers, Daemonhunters’ aesthetic is thunderously loud.

Only a few minutes into the tutorial mission, my gruff squad of four Grey Knights are shoulder-barging through blast doors and into a demonic lair in slow motion.

A group of underlings linger in the corner, so I issue the command to hurl a frag grenade at their feet. The top-down tactical view suddenly and slickly zooms in on the projectile, the camera admiring the grenade’s contours for a split second, before doing a bullet time spin and zooming back out for a devastating overlook. On the same turn, I tell a second knight to slam into a pillar, thereby toppling it over and wrecking another congregation of enemies.

Warhammer 40K Chaos Gate – Daemonhunters gameplay

“Violence against human and fantasy characters, dismemberment, depictions of realistic violence of a minor nature towards a human-like or animal-like character that does not result in any obvious injury or harm, depictions of realistic looking violence towards fantasy characters”

Chaos Gate – Daemonhunters console

If you wonder if Warhammer 40k Chaos Gate Daemonhunters is releasing on consoles, the answer is unclear and doubtful. At the moment, it appears Steam and Epic Games on PC are the platform the game will launch on.

The developers or the publisher have not announced any planned move for the game to release on PlayStation, Xbox, etc. The official websites for Chaos Gate also don’t mention the game releasing on consoles. Because of this, we feel it’s doubtful Chaos Gate Daemonhunters will release on any platforms other than PC. However, things might change later down the line, depending on how well the game does.

The best Warhammer 40k games 2022

Warhammer 40k videogames have a bad rep, but – from Dawn of War, to Space Marine, to Mechanicus – these are the 40k games you shouldn’t miss.

Dawn of War
Space Marine
Battlefleet Gothic: Armada 2
Mechanicus
Space Hulk: Tactics
Dawn of War 2
Gladius – Relics of War
Inquisitor: Martyr
Battle Sister

Warhammer 40,000

Warhammer 40,000 is a miniature wargame produced by Games Workshop. It is the most popular miniature wargame in the world, and is particularly popular in the United Kingdom. The first edition of the rulebook was published in September 1987, and the ninth and current edition was released in July 2020.

Warhammer 40,000: Chaos Gate – Daemonhunters

Warhammer 40,000: Chaos Gate – Daemonhunters. Lead humanity’s greatest weapon, the Grey Knights, in this fast-paced turn-based tactical RPG. Root out and purge a galaxy-spanning plague in a cinematic, story-driven campaign, using the tactics and talents of your own personalised squad of Daemonhunters. $44.99.

Warhammer 40,000: Chaos Gate is a video game set in the gothic science fiction backdrop of the Games Workshop game system Warhammer 40,000.

Is Warhammer 40k still popular?

Warhammer 40k is the most popular property made by its parent company, Games Workshop. Its popularity has helped the company’s stock price, which has risen by more than 60 percent in the last two years.