whine whine whine, it's not like X-Com whine whine...
This is a good turn based tactical game and a great 40K experience and there's no reason to punish it for not being another game that you mistakenly tough should define a whole genre.
Grow up and get over yourselves.
I love the grimdark setting and I am a big time w40k lore junkie, which is why I bought the game in the first place. Playing as the Mechanicum operative/cultist is a breath of fresh air after the oversaturation of various Astartes implementations. The story seems intriguing and keeps pushing you to play and discover more, but I do not think it has any replay value.
Not for the bad part. I have seen lots of reviews and catchy headlines praising this game as the "Grimdark XCOM". Do not, I repeat: DO NOT BELIEVE THIS TO BE TRUE. Both the original author of this comparison and everyone that keeps using it either have never played XCOM, or they just blatantly lie to hook you in. There little to no tactics, no cover, no proper gear upgrades, you shoot with a w40k equivalent of a BB gun until you gather enough "Cognition" to fire anything that actually can harm the Necron warrios. The fights are tedious, repetitive and simply boring. Praise the Omnissiah that there's not so many of them.
If a comparison to another well-known game could be made, it would be the Darkest Dungeon. Mechanicus is basically that in a different universe with a quasi-tactical combat system impletented.
I give it 3 stars out of five only because of the egagning story, nice graphics and great audio. If you are looking for a mechanically well-made tactical strategy game, go back to XCOM or keep looking. This is not what you're looking for.
In terms of presentation, the game is good. Really good. I can see the reason for all the praise.
In terms of mechanics, it's a lot more shallow than it seems to be. Despite seeming complexity, there is very little to character building and combat strategy boils down to a few simple heuristics. That can be disappointing, but it's not the end of the world.
The UI, however, is just not functional.
The camera keeps getting stuck and refusing to move. That happens all the time in combat. Sometimes, the game will just ignore your clicks because some decorative piece of debri on the foreground covers that cell on the battlefield. Yeah, guys, I certainly want to target that piece of decoration, nevermind it's not possible. Sometimes, worse yet, a popup causes the same issue. There are pieces of tech you can scan during the battle, and that's indicated by a small window that says "Scan". Guess what? It blocks your clicks to, so if you are unlucky and want to move to the cell where that popup is positioned, you have to carefully find a spot that isn't covered.
The font choice is terrible, because D there looks like O and 0. It's mildly amusing to read "1 OMG" instead of "1 DMG". It's not funny or amusing to read it as "10 MG" at a glance and think someone just dealt 10 instead of 1.
The character upgrade UI does not show how many free augment slots it has. It shows the total, and it shows how much each piece of equipment takes, but it refuses to show this other piece of vital information.
Some icons are clickable for absolutely no reason at all. How about an icon for a passive upgrade in reward menu? Clicking it does nothing, but it reacts visually. That's just inconsistent.
And the funniest part? It's been 3 years since release. They found time to make a DLC. But they couldn't find time to fix the camera.
Sets the language to the default your OS uses and doesn't allow to change it, forcing localised versions on anyone, even if they'd rather play in English.
I was really excited for the first hour or two. The atmosphere is excellent, with lots of fun characterizations of the Adeptus Mechanicus. I enjoyed seeing the tension between differing viewpoints within the same faction play out as dialog exchanges between the various characters. The music is very immersive: dark glitchy ambient transhumanism.
As the game unfolded I lost interest in the actual running of missions. I found it difficult to justify to myself the logic behind some of the mechanics. For instance, I don't understand why I can't attack an enemy standing in melee range until I perform some OTHER action in order to earn a "cognition point." I'm probably missing something but it seems like hitting an enemy with a melee weapon should be a basic action that can always be attempted without having to first spend a turn studying an ancient monolith or scanning a hostile creature.
It's probably just me being dumb, but I wanted to like this game a lot more than I ended up liking it.