Pros- Its pretty and its fairly accurate to the lore from around the time of 8th edition. Cons- its a buggy mess, your character can get stuck on a single blade of grass and then mobbed, controls work..some of the time. Worst of all its BORING, with the diablo series you at least felt the impact of upgrades, in this there is no difference between having an attack of 50 and attack of 5,000 that critter that took 3 hits back when you were level 1, still takes 3 hits 20 levels later.
Due to Gog not keeping this upto date it WILL NOT RUN as provided on a new install of windows 10 past 22h2 or any version of Win 11, as windows no longer ships with all the required direct draw files. Fortunately the fix is easy to find off site and there is a neat directdraw-DX9 wrapper that can fix the same issue in most of these old direct draw games. The game itself is a fairly accurate port of the ancient games workshop game EPIC, this is both its strength and its weakness. Games workshop have never figured out how to write decent or coherent rules and you end up with this game as a result. Of the huge number of units available almost all of them are utterly useless and you will find yourself using the same 5 units exclusively. Following the X-com idea the AI gets HUGE bonuses to hit percentages and penetration, expect them to hit you at least twice as often as you hit them, forget about being aggressive as the AI will wipe you out with incredibly accurate fire while your troops struggle to hit a barn door at 5 paces. If you enjoy fielding a ton of tanks,artillery and walking cathedrals festooned with mostly useless weaponry this game is for you.
Ok I know the nids are all about the swarm tactics, but this game takes that to silly levels. Expect to have 4-5 times your number of units heading your way and your only effective anti-swarm weapons are a grenade (once you upgrade) and handflamers (again an upgrade). Missions boil down to rush to location X and deal with the MASSIVE swarm attack..without any weapons actually effective at anti-swarm UNLESS..you buy the Elite units DLC..surprise surprise. The enemy have several units utterly immune to almost all your weapons..while even your most heavily armored units are vunerable to the most basic of attacks. The occasional good game sneaks past GW`s quality control..this is not one of them.
The soundtrack is still the standard when it comes to 40K themed games, solid vocalisations and brooding gothic music. You get a demi company to play with that comes with most of the toys from 2nd edition table top. Your marines can be swapped around between Tac,Assault,Devestator and Terminator roles (once they win their crux terminatus of course). The missions are the same..exterminate the heretics but they play well. Its XCOM set in the 40K universe and its done better than 95% of the recent 40K license tie ins. It also works almost flawlessly with Win 10. The only two reasons its not a 5 star game. 1 Vehicles just don`t work anymore..you can`t move them. so they are just weapons platforms until they die. 2 No Blood Angels...if you are happy with Ultramarines then bump it upto a 4.5 review.
Despite the best efforts of support which included applying the unofficial patch I was unable to get this to actually work. However GOG have an exceptional refund system, so go for it, if it doesn`t work for you, you can always get your money back and this was a little gem when it was released 20 years ago.
This game would have been barely acceptable had it been developed and released in 2006, the game engine is bug ridden and runs at a glacial pace, the graphics are several generations out of date, the towns are little more than interchangeable place holders. As a GW tabletop port its probably one of the better ones...the designs and ideas follow the tabletop but as a pirate based game this is beaten hands down by Sid Meier`s Pirates a game over a full decade older. Save the money buy the older game.
