It's a pretty good game if you like slow turn-based tactics. Plus, it's a WH40k game that gives focus to a faction often overlooked in other WH40k games. The "cognition gauge" game mechanic may feel a bit weird at first, what with it basically amounting to "you need to collect data during combat in order to be able to use your advanced weapons and abilities or move extra distance", but you get the hang of it quickly, and, somehow, it manages to make sense for this particular faction. I didn't find the early game to be too easy or too difficult (I played on "Hard" difficulty with permadeath on) - it worked well enough to learn the main game mechanics and not be overwhelmed, while still being pretty challenging. And learning to exploit the game mechanics is fun. Eventually, you'll learn to optimize your builds and tactics to destroy the enemies before they can retaliate while keeping your cognition gauge filled - which, when you manage to figure out such a build, is quite satisfying - at first. Later on, though, the same thing carries the risk of turning the game into a predictable, monotonous slog, as you start methodically obliterating the enemies without any real risk. In the end, this is what caused me to not finish some of the campaign's questlines and go for the final boss early even though I still had some time on the campaign awakening gauge left. But that could be just personal preference - I tend to quickly get bored when a game becomes too predictable - and becoming predictable is not uncommon for a turn-based tactics game like this, especially as I keep trying to make every move as effective as possible. Some minor shortcomings: - Just a minor oversight, but with the campaign consisting of several parallel questlines, some dialogues can become contradictory depending on what missions you did before. - No option to speed up animations.
