Warhammer 40,000: Chaos Gate

Chaos Gate oozes with atmosphere: The soundtrack feels like it was made in universe (even though it is mostly repurposed religious chants). Your Space Marines feel like walking tanks. They can still die, and each death of a brother feels painful (especially if playin Mighty Hero mode), but it will take a lot of firepower to bring them down. The game is played over a set of fixed campaign missions, with some randomized skirmishes in between. The campaign missions are pretty well done, and feel like 40Kish X-COM. The skirmish missions are usually much less interesting. Over the course of the campaign, you will unlock a large part of the standard Space Marines roster and armoury (Terminator armors, Librarians, assault marines with jump packs), but you can only bring 3 squads, and need to adhere to the Codex Astartes when it comes to mission loadout (so you'll have more bolters than you'd want!). Even to this day, I still consider it one of the best 40K games made on PC, and I played all of the tactical/strategic ones.

It's a mix of mandatory story-related sequential missions interspersed with optional randomized simple side missions. Troops gain better stats with experience and can equip different weapons, but limited to codex compliancy (e.g. you can't equip a whole tactical squad with heavy bolters, even if you had enough). You can also find unique weapons with better stats hidden in some missions. The story is pretty basic WH40K fluff, moved forward in the form of technically pretty good cutscenes for the time, but with sometimes beyond corny dialogue. Overall a very good game with lots of tactical options, but quite hard bordering on the unfair on the higher difficulties.

This game is a product of its time, for better and for worse. It gloriously captures that feeling of 80s and 90s warhammer and if that's what you're into, you honestly probably already own this game! This is the game's main draw, but with troopers that progress through the campaign, new weapons and squads to unlock, and a good variety to story missions, the gameplay is very fun. There are downsides. The UI is very clunky by modern standards. This is to be expected from an old title, but it can make even simple tasks pretty labour intensive. The internal balance is pretty poor too. (Spoliers) Once you unlock terminators, and specifically give one an assault cannon, all other squads almost pale into irrelevance. Your baseline marine with a bolter quickly becomes fairly useless, especially in more confined missions such as inside a spaceship, where you can't even get them into a decent firing line and try to use mass bolter fire to make up for their individual weakness. Other quirks of the tabletop game also seep through, like how many librarian powers are incredibly niche/useless. With all that being said, it is an utterly charming game and a very nostalgic throwback to a time when Warhammer didn't take itself too seriously, and you can simply have fun chasing down a Sunday morning cartoon Chao Lord and give him the Emperor's judgment.

Exactly as the title, if you played the O.G Xcom game but wanted the same with Astartes and more of them on the ground to face the forces of Chaos,well here you go. The RNG doesn't seem as harsh as what plagued the Xcom games, sometime turning them into save scummers just to get by without losing those troops you've nurtured from the early days ( up until that point where psyonics made it all irrelevant ). Game works fully with Windows 10 out of the box, so that's a massive winner ! The Soundtrack is also legendary and you'll already know most of the tunes if you've watched any of the fan made stuff on You Tube - Especially BRUVA ALFABUSA and the excellent 'If the Emperor had Text to Speech' series, and if you haven't watched any of that, get this game then go away and watch TTS immediately. Yep, soild recommend, even I dare say at normal price, but it's 26 years old so no rush, wait for that glorious sales time. That's it 10/10 Have a good 1

This is the best 40k game ever