Battlefleet Gothic: Armada

I bought and played the game on Steam. The obvious first: None of the pictures above show the actual gameplay, they are all cutscenes. You play in a visually unimpressive top-down isometric view, far zoomed out with your ships tiny images the size of icons. It never looks like in any of those pictures. Even though your are in "space", you play each encounter on a tiny, rectangular 2D map where your ships may move in only one plane, making this feel much more like naval warfare. Fleet sizes are also tiny esp. in the beginning, as you are usually restricted to no more than 5 ships. The tactical aspect is also limited by the fact that all you do is use the primary ability to fire on your enemies and click on buttons for special abilities whenever you can. All the tactic is in positioning your ships right, which is sometimes made tedious by a sub-par AI. In short, the gameplay felt a bit underwhelming, like something you would expect on a smartphone, but not a PC. The rich Warhammer universe unfortunately is cut down in this game to only three factions and bland storytelling. The DLCs don't really change that as they are just for multiplayer and don't affect single player campaigns. The most important note (for some of us): Be warned that the minimum and recommended specs listed here and elsewhere for the game are incorrect. Aramada requires 16 GB of RAM to run smoothly. If you got 8 GB or even less, the game will start, but it wil max out your RAM and you machine will start swapping, causing incredibly long loading times and making it a real pain to play, even to the point of being entirely unplayable. All in all, this would have been an okay-ish casual game if it was just a little less demanding on the system requirements, gameplay was just a little less repetetive and the story would have made more of the rich lore the Warhammer universe has to offer. As it is, however, this feels like a great idea with poor implementation.