The best Warhammer 40K games: Every single Warhammer 40,000 game ranked | PC Gamer - trevinomostases
All Warhammer 40,000 game, hierarchical
PC Gamer Ranked are our ridiculously comprehensive lists of the best, worst, and everything mediate from every box of Microcomputer gaming.
The introductory edition of tabletop wargame Warhammer 40,000 in 1987 nailed the setting's tone right by. It described humans's future in bleak terms, summing up what it's like to be a citizen of the Imperium comparable this: "To be a man in such times is to be one amongst untold billions. Information technology is to live in the cruellest and most bloody authorities imaginable."
The back cross indorsement was no less pessimistic. "There is no time for Peace," it declared. "No respite, No forgiveness. There is only if WAR."
Though frequently counterpoised by a tongue-in-cheek gumption of the absurd, the various adaptations of Warhammer 40,000 that followed delighted in its rigorousness. In the board game Space Predominate, doomed blank space marines are beamed onto derelict craft in oversized power armor then afraid by aliens through corridors they can barely round around in. In the Eisenhorn novels, an Regal Inquisitor, soh scarred by torture he loses the power to grin, makes via media after compromise until helium's identical from those he hunts. In the miniatures game Necromunda, the underprivileged at the bottom of the hive away urban center live on a diet of form, rats, and food for thought made from the recycled dead. You can practically hear the writers striving to outdo to each one other.
At their C. H. Best, videogames have taken the same glee in depicting this fancy world, its cursed inhabitants, and their awe-inspiring Three Weird Sisters. At other times they appear many like the cyberpunk COOL FUTURE meme with power armor on. And at that place are a lot of them. They can't all be winners.
The Criteria
Number of entries: 44. New and unsexed entries in the latest update are marked 💀.
What's included: Every Warhammer 40,000 mettlesome along PC, including those in the Horus Heresy setting, which rewinds the clock 10,000 years to depict the precipitation of the Empire and how information technology got so messed up.
What's not enclosed: Games that were off before full release like the MOBA Brunette Link Fiel, which was briefly gettable in Early Access. Standalone expansions the likes of Dawn of War: Dark Crusade and Inquisitor—Prophecy are considered part of the original game, like regular expansions. Games in the Old World and Age of Sigmar settings are in a separate ranking of all Warhammer Phantasy game.
And forthwith: Every Warhammer 40,000 game, ranked from worst to best.
44. Mass murder Champions (2016)
Roadhouse Games
Carnage was a sidescrolling autorunner, Canabalt with a thunder hammer and a heavy metal soundtrack. At some point the server was taken offline and straight off this game—this entirely singleplayer game, I should note—no more runs whether you got the free-to-playact mobile version or paid actual money for the now-delisted Steam interpretation. This, obviously, sucks.
43. Down Team (2014)
Nomad Games/Sega
Steam
No relation to the tabletop game named Kill Team that lets you play 40K on a budget, this is a twin-stick shooter made with repackaged assets courtesy of Relic's Dawn of War 2 and Infinite Water. The co-op is local only, which is a shame, and checkpoints before stamp introductions are always annoying, merely what really sinks information technology is the photographic camera consistently swinging into the lowest positions. You'll be double-dyed at some pipes and a gauntry piece 15 orks shout the same recycled "Waaagh!" and murder you somewhere in the blackness taking up the rest of your screen.
42. Amulet: The Horus Heresy (2016)
Nomad Games
Games Shop released the first version of Talisman: The Magical Quest Game in 1983. It was a race-to-the-centre board game, half of which you spent finding a talisman to Army of the Pure you access the middle of the board, and the early fractional non letting someone other steal information technology from you. Tied if the separate players didn't drag you John L. H. Down, the luck of the cards and dice would. It was fantasy Snakes & Ladders with PvP.
This videogame reskins it with The Horus Heresy, a prequel setting 10,000 eld in 40K's past that's been the groundwork for a huge amount of novels, some of which are in reality good. It's an even more desperate and serious version of Warhammer 40,000, all at odds with a chaotic beer-and-pretzels brave about chucking cube and laughing at your latest misfortune. In the original control panel spirited players got turned into toads on the diarrhoeal. In Talisman: The Horus Heresy someone might find a card that gives them +1 to the Resource stat and consider it an exciting turn.
41. Space Loom: Vengeance of the Blood Angels (1996)
Krisalis/Electronic Arts
This was the second attempt at adapting the room lame Space Hulk, and the worst. It's a first-person shooter where you get down to control a team, take out the first six missions of the campaign don't actually allow you. Once you make out drive command, it's just pausing to drop commands on the map, which is both fewer innovative than its 1993 predecessor with its realtime/turn-based jazz group and less satisfying than having stuffed control over them.
The fully grown problem with Vengeance of the Blood Angels is that information technology came out when 3D graphics and CD audio were new and inquiry and seldom any good. Everything's stuttery and enemies awkwardly bulge out into rendered CG when they're skinny enough for a scrimmage animation. The Marines are garrulous, but their dialogue is stitched together from samples. The way they bark "SAPHON / research this area for / AN ARCHIVED RECORD" and "I haven't found / AN ARCHIVED RECORD" at each different will make you long for their destruction, especially when BETH-OR! shouts his nominate with the same cadence all time he's elect. It's entirely charmless, and not worth setting up the virtual machine you'll ask to start it running game today.
40. Infinite Wolf (2017)
HeroCraft PC
Steam
40K + XCOM is such an obvious estimate the Steam Workshop is air-filled of mods for XCOM 2 that combine the two. Games that attempt the one have been a mixed bag. Space Wolf looks the part, even zooming in on dramatic attacks just like XCOM does, just it doesn't play the part as recovered.
The levels are small, which makes artillery ranges weird—a boltgun is only able to shoot up four squares—and when new enemies breed they're right away next to you. Plus, every character has a deck of cards and the entirely way to round is to play one of the arm cards you've randomly drawn. Your transport toilet shoot a plasma gun when atomic number 2's got the placard for IT, and past just forget IT exists until you line another plasma gun card. Depending on the luck of the draw, in the meantime he might suddenly give birth three different heavy weapons, somehow pulling them out of nowhere like they're in a bag of holding.
39. Storm of Vengeance (2014)
Eutechnyx
Storm of Vengeance is a lane Defense Department game, sort of like Plants vs. Zombies only when instead of spending sunshine to grow plants you're spending buyback points to make Dark Angels pop out of their drop pods. Actually, what it's more like is Ninja Cats vs Samurai Dogs, an earlier game from Eutechnyx. Storm of Payback is the same game, alone with a progression tree soh you can unlock frag grenades, a multiplayer mode, and 3D models of orks and space marines where the ninja cats and samurai dogs used to be.
💀 38. Battle Sister (2020/2021)
Pixel Toys
Oculus Quest (2020) | Eye Falling ou (2021)
The first VR-exclusive 40K game is a disappointment. Impressive as it is to take that sense of presence, whether you're poking around a spaceship or looking raised at a space marine, it's a rudimentary corridor shooter. Plus, the physical controls for everything from throwing grenades to holstering weapons are unreliable, and when that gets you killed in one of the levels with a savepoint on the wrong side of a teacher operating theater an elevator ride? That's unpardonable.
37. Dawn of Warfare 3 (2017)
Relic/Sega
Steam
If you like the kind of RTS where you manufacture a Brobdingnagian measure of troops then drag them put together in a glorious blob, the first Dawn of State of war is for you. If you choose a handful of units and heroes with their own special abilities to cautiously manage, that is Dawn of Warfare 2's undiversified treat. Break of the day of Warfare 3 tries to split the difference, and it's an awkward compromise. Elites all have different things they arse do and some of your units get an power or two, just there are long stretches where it feels like you should cost using them yet there's nothing for you to do.
In the story campaign you alternate 'tween marines, orks, and eldar nonpareil mission at one time, never playing any 1 group for long enough to bring fort comfortable with them—almost every plane feeling like a reintroduction of abilities and tech IT expects you to sustain forgotten, as if the tutorial never ends. While the first 2 games are divisive and there are plenty of passionate defenders of each, Cockcrow of State of war 3 didn't end prepared appealing to anyone.
36. Fuel Warrior (2003)
Kuju/Chilled Mouse
GOG
There are surprisingly some 40K first-someone shooters, and not many games where you undergo to be the T'au, the mech-smitten weebs of the setting. Fire Warrior isn't about mechs, however. IT's a corridor shooter ported o'er from the PlayStation 2, a superfine console that didn't have a single decent Federal Protective Service to its mention. (Red Faction fans, you're kidding yourselves.)
You'll undergo to turn auto-aim on to fix the broken mouse controls in Fire Warrior, but nothing wish fix the boring guns or inactive enemies. 2 things bring up it, however. Peerless is that the first time you have to fight a space marine he seems borderline unstoppable in some respects that feels right, and the second is that Tomcat Baker recorded roughly bright narration for the introduction.
35. Eisenhorn: Xenos (2016)
Pixel Hero Games
The Eisenhorn novels are some of the better 40K books, cooked Raymond Chandler police detective stories about an Inquisitor who finds himself devising trade-offs with his principles while he hunts heretics and easy comes to grips with the Inquisition's corruption. This adaption of the first book did unitary matter right-minded by casting Mark Strong as Eisenhorn. He's perfect, but the articulation direction is weak and every cutscene is rich of characters at wildly different levels of intensity.
Between the narration bits is a mish-mash of tierce-person combat, collectible hunts, hacking minigames, that thing where you spin clues around to examine them—a wad of features lifted from separate games and artlessly glued conjointly to fulfill the gaps. It feels like the kind of budget movie tie-in game that used to be commonplace, only this time it's a book link-in.
34. The Horus Heterodoxy: Betrayal at Calth (2020)
Steel Wool Studios
Steam
At that place are plenty of turn-based 40K games about squads of place marines jogging from hex to hex, but what makes Betrayal at Calth different is its viewpoint. You command from the position of a servomechanical-skull, a camera that swoops around the battlefield and lets you appreciate the architecture of the Horus Heresy-era up close. You can even play in VR.
It's a cool idea. Unfortunately, you can tone where the money ran unconscious. A incomprehensive phone number of social unit barks ingeminate (a great deal from a different direction to the playing whole), just about weapons possess animations while others don't, and the mission objectives occasionally leave out details you pauperization to know. It started in Azoic Access and clearly didn't make enough money to keep it in that location until it was done. Information technology's exterior now with a version number thereon, only it doesn't feel finished.
33. Warhammer Combat Cards (2021)
Advisable Played Games/The Genus Phoenix Beacon light
Steam | Microsoft Store
In 1998 Games Shop free collectable cards with photos of Warhammer miniatures that had stats so you could play a undeveloped Top Trumps kind of game with them. It went done several iterations, and the 2017 variation became a free-to-play videogame with painted 40K miniatures on the card game.
Don't gestate Wizardly: The Gathering. You build a coldcock of single warlord and a bundle of bodyguards, keeping trinity of them live, replacement bodyguards as they die. Each turn you choose whether to make a ranged, melee, or psychic attack and the relevant numbers game get added sprouted and damage exchanged. Military science choice comes via buffs to the attacks you don't choose (which can pay off in later turns), and deciding when to play your warlord (a efficacious card whose death means you lose).
Funnily, the only PvP is within your clan and mostly you play against AI that uses other players' decks. Not that Warhammer Combat Cards tells you this, or much of anything other. Good luck trying to join a kin group even after you've leveled-up the appropriate total, thanks to a designed-for-mobile interface.
32. Interrogator—Martyr (2018)
NeocoreGames
Steam | Microsoft Store
Inquisitor—Martyr is pulling in three directions at one time. It's a game about being an Inquisitor, investigation the mysteries of the Caligari Sphere, chief among them a ghost embark called the Martyrise. It's also an fulfi-RPG, which means if it goes for more five minutes without a fight something's wrong, and among the most pivotal qualities your heretic-hunting space detective genius possesses are their bonus to crit damage and the select of their loot. Finally, it's a live-service game with unfirm seasonal content, spherical events, small-scale-length vendors, daily quests, heroic deeds, none offline mode, and the expectation you'll replay samey missions for hundreds of hours every time on that point's a content update.
The action-RPG part is OK, Diablo with guns, but it doesn't mesh with the perch. Why would an Interrogator spend so much time crafting new gear? Why serve I need to gather up a different color of shards all time there's a unexampled "Void Crusade"? Every bet on wants me to collect shards of something and I'm just so tired.
31. Adeptus Titanicus: Dominus (2021)
Membraine Studios
Steam | GOG
Scale is important in a setting where billions die and nobody blinks. Mechs rear't just be mechs in 40K. They'ray titans, god-machines up to 100-feet improbable that stomp through fancy gothic megacathedrals without slowing down.
Dominus pits maniples of titans belonging to the Empire and Chaos against apiece other successively-based scrap. You order a titan to act and a hologram appears at its end position; you choose who it's going to target and color-coded projections reveal which weapons will be in range. You commit and the titan spends 10 seconds stomping to its terminus, firing unceasingly the entire fourth dimension—just spaffing out barrages of missiles and lasers while walking through buildings.
You get a lot of odd-looking turns where about of the shot is at impenetrable rocks that go on to be betwixt titans, which ISN't helped by the AI's tendency to dissipate when it has no chance of hit, or the cinematic camera's inclination to clip inside mountains. Another oddity: you put on't plot kayoed moves only simply pick where to finis. Sometimes you'll select a put off within the movement radius and the holograph will instead appear on the diametrical side of where you started because apparently you need to go the long way round and preceptor't have enough movement after all.
Some missions give you a fresh maniple, but partway through the campaign suddenly half the missions have to follow completed with the titans that survived the previous one, a fact Dominus doesn't bother to tell you.
30. Chaos Gate (1998)
Stochastic Games/SSI
GOG
A squad tactics game reminiscent of Jagged Alliance or X-COM, but with less of a scheme layer. If the specialized flavor of original X-COM is more to your liking than advanced, hyphenate-less XCOM so Chaos Gate may be your thing, but it does lack foeman variety. You'Re up against the forces of Chaos, which means Chaos Cultists, Two-timer Marines, and half-a-dozen varieties of daemon. Meanwhile you're in charge of the Ultramarines, and while you fanny rename your troops and assign a limited number of heavy weapons per squad, after a while every battle feels the same. They drag on too, thanks to the Traitor Marines who litter near maps being able to survive ninefold krak grenades and heavy bolter rounds.
29. Sanctus Compass (2017)
Straylight Entertainment/Slitherine
Steam | GOG
The classical hex-and-counter wargame Armored General has inspired a good deal of 40K games, and Sanctus Reach, which pits Space Wolves against orks, is certainly one of them. It's not bad, but it is basic. The objectives are much just capturing or defending victory points and only after tercet levels of those will you arrest something different same an escort mission or something, the story's a paragraph of text between maps, there's no strategy layer, and everything on the presentation side, from unit types to animation to flat furniture, feels like the absolute minimum, where 40K should be all about maximalism. Other games do this identical thing better.
28. Gladius—Relics of War (2018)
Proxy Studios/Slitherine
Steam | GOG | Large
Take Civilization 5 (OR perchance Warlock: The Exiled, or Age of Wonders), then remove the diplomacy so it's all about war. Add some inspiration from RTS base-building, with divided barracks for infantry and vehicles around your city, so add heroes who horizontal up and gain around quite an Warcraft 3 abilities on top of that. Gladius is an intriguing strategy plot Frankenstein's monster, but IT's got issues.
Happening foeman turns IT'll picture a random combat occurrence to an ally rather than your own soldiery being slaughtered. There's a storyline disconnected about in quests, but to get anywhere with them you have to play an by artificial means long game or you'll defeat all the enemies and win by conquest before uncovering any of the tantalizing secrets it hints at. Finally, even with wildlife turned down to Very Low, the early turns of every game are spent fighting extrinsic dogs and bugs and vagrant mind-control jellyfish for way too long before in reality going to war with the other factions.
27. Space Hulk: Deathwing (2016)
Streum On Studio/Focus Home Interactive
Steam | GOG | Microsoft Store
A multiplayer co-op FPS, Deathwing is Left 4 Dead with genestealers. Although it launched in a abominably buggy and unoptimized state, an enhanced variation rerelease fixed or s of its last problems. Now it's a competent claustrophobic multiplayer gage where you can attire your terminators real fancy. As a singleplayer experience it's bring down by crackers AI, and even with friends you'll have to overlook whiffy melee weapons and shot that feels more similar you're turning along a hose than opening up with a mark-two tempest bolter.
26. Space Crusade (1992)
Gremlin Interactive
Milton Omar Bradley's abide by-up to HeroQuest was a version of Warhammer 40,000 for ages 10 to adult, and Gremlin Interactive were once again causative the videogame. Like the adaptation of HeroQuest, it's a pretty direct replication—although for some reason the genestealers have been replaced by different aliens called "soulsuckers."
Information technology's quite slow-paced and you have to choose between music or cheerfully rinky-dink sound effects because it can't do both like a sho, and of trend it's lacking the control board halt's dodgy miniatures and placard art. Nostalgia's a right thing though, and I adore these goofy pixel space marines.
25. Space Hulk (2013)
Ample Control
This was our first reckon into the dour darkness of a virtually time to come where at that place are only PC ports of 40K games ready-made for tablets. Space Hulk comes with entirely the limitations you'd expect from a game designed to keep going an iPad Miniskirt. This fine if unambitious version of the plank game plays the synoptical limited animations over and over, whether it's sprays of blood that seem sort of around genestealers as they're iridescent, or three blood-red lines appearing in mid-air to mark a eradicator falling to their claws. The way genestealers suddenly transform into a pair of bleeding leg-stumps when bump off by an assault shank is unintentionally humorous.
Thanks to some patched-in improvements, like the ability to quicken terminators so your turns don't take forever, this take on Space Predominate ended up Okey if all you wishing is a version of the board game with a singleplayer manner where you're the blank space marines.
24. Space Hulk Ascension (2014)
Full Control
After the negative reply to the PC version of their early Space Loom game, Full Control condition retooled it into Ascension, giving it a welcome modality upgrade and customizable marines. More divisively it plays less equivalent a board gage, with minimized entropy, an ascent system based on experience points, and tweaks to the mode weapons work. Storm bolters derive heat when unemployed and pickle when it maxes out, and instead of just filling an entire room or corridor with fervidness, the flamethrower has multiple modes of spray. And to make information technology flavor to a lesser extent like a circuit board game there's fog of warfare, rendering the map dark beyond a tiny zone of vision. Some of the changes are particular and assume't attention deficit disorder practically, only information technology's a slight melioration overall.
23. Dakka Squadron (2021)
Phosphor Game Studios
Steam | GOG
Non many 40K games net ball you play aliens, but Dakka Squadron isn't just a game that lets you be an ork, it's committed to the bit. This is arcade aerial battle if Star Fuddle was violently Cockney and everything was soundtracked aside wailing deedly-deedly guitar and shouts of "Dakka dakka dakka!"
IT's maybe a trifle too orky. Multiplayer is orks versus orks, and so is most of the singleplayer, though eventually you rile take down some Adeptus Mechanicus craft that depend like flying boxes full of lasers, a fewer of the necrons' tin expiry croissants, and so happening. Mostly though IT's endless orks in World War II fighter blue jets with nose-mounted spikes laughing as they krump each some other.
Missions pull on, with wave after wave of enemies and the same combat barks as you shoot them down, but as luck would have it a three-lives system was patched in so you father't make to re-do an total missionary work because you got krumped at the end. I did turn down the guitars, though.
22. The Horus Heresy: Legions (2019)
Everguild Ltd.
Steam
It's the Horus Heterodoxy era over again, only this clock time in the form of a free-to-turn collectible board game. Though it plays a bunch like them it's non American Samoa tatty as the big name calling in the music genre, with the quality of the card art organism all over the put together. Just if you've got the clock Beaver State money it's a solid enough example of the form, and if you've read the books and the formulate "the Slip of Isstvan III" makes you feel like a 19th century French campaigner quick-eared the word "Waterloo," so there's a stimulating singleplayer campaign that will let you experience that in cards form.
21. Freeblade (2017)
Pixel Toys
Microsoft Store
I went into this with low expectations. A free-to-play adjustment of a mobile game, complete with loot boxes and multiple currencies and all that do it? But Freeblade scores points for letting you play an Imperial Horse, a mech that's bigger than a house, and letting you coloring material and tailor-make your John Walker like you're choosing paints and decals for a miniature. IT's a obovate vituperate shooter, basically a translation of Clock Crisis where you'rhenium the size of Godzilla, and better than I thought it would be.
20. Aeronautica Imperialis: Flight Command (2020)
Binary Planets/Immature Man Play Publishing
Steam
When your maven pilots in Aeronautica Imperialis: Flight Mastery kick the bucket, shot down by ork fighters in rustbucket planes successful prohibited of scrap in a cave, a commander slides onto the between-mission screen. "Your pilot numbers are depleted," she says, "You may call happening reserves." There's no sound judgement in this because every haphazardly generated pilot is entirely useable.
Flight Command is an aerial-fighting simulator where you program your planes with maneuvers and then vigil 10 seconds of dogfighting play out in period. It's someplace between Sid Meier's Ace Combat and the cooccurring turns of Frozen Synapse. Those 10 seconds contain a bewildering amount of stuff, as one plane powerdives to avoid an attack from behind, some other explodes, and indefinite of your pilots pulls forth a high-G turn then blacks stunned. Switching to theater modal value, which lets you see all this at one time rather than following each pilot in turn, makes it easier, though I could do with a simple way to scrub the timeline back and forth.
Planes ass switch loadouts if you remove the default missiles, and pilots might gain skills if they shoot down enough enemies, but one fighter is a good deal like another. Even top guns are replaceable in 40K.
19. Legacy of Dorn: Herald of Oblivion (2015)
Tin Human beings Games
Games Workshop published several pick-a-path gamebooks low the Way to Victory label, and this one was turned into a visual novel. If you ever read the kinda Unpeaceful Fantasy/Lonely Wolf/choose-your-own-stake books that declared, "YOU can cost the hero," that's what this is, only YOU are a lone space marine cut off from his squad on a distance hulk, striving to find your engagement-brothers.
Legacy of Dorn really gets crossways the oddness of a ship made out of the fused remains of multiple wrecks, and as you explore each section feels distinct, whether fungal and orkoid surgery sanctified away the Sisters of Battle. The turn-based battle is nothing to pen home about, but the trouble options include the ability to skim the boring fights and cheat as if you're leaving your fingers in the pages, equally is only right.
18. Regicide (2015)
Hammerfall
Steam
Take chess, simply make information technology 40K. That's Regicide, which you tooshie play in classic musical mode victimisation the uninteresting rules of real chess, or in Regicide style, which adds an initiative phase later on every turn where pawns shoot boltguns and queens launch psychic lightning. While taking a piece the usual way is an instakill, complete with gorey duels reminiscent of Battle Chess game, attacks in the initiative phase chip by at the hit points of your target. Initially information technology feels the likes of rhythmic cheat, but focus fire and combine the right abilities and you'll soon remove a bishop from across the board. It feels the like cheating in the best style, like you have got outsmarted the centuries-old game of chess game itself.
Thither's a story mode, just some of its puzzle matches bathroom grate to plaguey stalemate halts. Stick to brush play and Regicide does a better Job with its cockeyed concept than you might think.
17. Eternal Crusade (2017)
Behaviour Interactive Inc.
Steamer
Initially billed as a Planetside-esque MMO with a persistent world for players to fight over, Eternal Crusade was scaled down in development. What eventually released was a lobby shooter that took the multiplayer combat from Relic's Space Marine and added vehicles, eldar and orks, as well as a CO-operative PvE mode where four players consume on tyranids.
Players who'd bought in early were disappointed at the reducing, but here's the thing: Token's Quad Shipboard soldier was good, and so was its multiplayer. Building on that with missions where you power comprise defending a fortress while other players well-tried to dash direct its gate in Predator tanks, or hovering over victory points as an eldar swooping pitch, made for some stimulating battles. Hardly anybody gave it a chance though, and even after existence released for footloose it's still almost empty. If you can get together some people or luck into a match, Eternal Press is better than its reputation.
16. Deathwatch—Enhanced Edition (2015)
Rodeo Games
Steam
The Deathwatch are elite alien-busting marines who draw their recruits from separate chapters, and this turn-based tactics game gives you instruction of a squad of them. You can have a Space Wolf and a Blood Angel and an Ultramarine, all hunting tyranids side by side.
Deathwatch is other game earlier made for lozenge, which you can tell incidentall you get new wargear and marines out of stochastic packs with lootbox sparkle, though they're earned through play preferably than microtransactions. This Enhanced Variant for Microcomputer remastered the archetype's nontextual matter and gave it a mouse-and-keyboard UI, though it could do with tooltips for the many a buff icons each marine ends awake with. If you want a budget version of a Firaxis-style XCOM simply with infinite marines, it's a decent option.
15. Necromunda: Underhive Wars (2020)
Rogue Factor/Focus Home plate Interactive
Steam | Microsoft Lay in
Hive cities ram billions of people into illustrations of the class system someone John Drew winged skulls on. At the bottom of the hive, gangs who work for middle-level Houses conflict over scavenger rights and who has the coolest mohawk.
Underhive Wars is another turn-based tactics game that isn't content to written matter XCOM and instead has to go and mess with IT. All map's covered in ziplines and elevators, and gangers have enough movement to whip up and down them. Seen in over-the-shoulder third-someone, the AI's moves are often baffling. Gangers run past enemies they could attack, deploy buffs for opaque reasons, pick up mission objectives past end their turn exposed, sometimes just jog on the spot for a bit.
And yet, if you chuck the history campaign after the intro missions and get stuck into the procedurally generated Trading operations musical mode, there's a amusing game Here. Though each ring has access to the same classes, gear mechanism, and only slimly different skills, over the course of an endless war of territorial pissing they feel like your own. Customization makes your leather-fetish wrestlers operating theater leopard-print amazons look rad as hell, and successive injuries, bionic implants, and limb replacements turn them into individuals with stories.
14. The Horus Heresy: Engagement of Tallarn (2017)
HexWar Games
HexWar Games has its own take on the Armored General series called Tank Battle, with multiple iterations like Army tank Struggle: 1944 and Tank Battle: 1945. Battle of Tallarn reskins the WWII back to cost about the largest tank confrontation of the Horus Heresy epoch. IT's essentially Tank Battle: 30,000.
It's a especially rock-paper-scissors wargame, with tanks, infantry, fliers, walkers and titans equally counters to each opposite in particular situations, and terrain that's either damaging, hard-stopping, crossable only by fiers, OR covering but only for infantry. Similar all the Horus Heresy games and books IT demands a dedication to the unreal history of Warhammer 40,000 as passionate as whatever WWII nut to get the all but out of it, but if that's you then you probably already have intercourse Battle of Tallarn and are humming the theme tune right now.
13. Armageddon (2014)
Flashback Games/The Lordz Games Studio/Slitherine
Steam | GOG
Other need happening the Armored General turn-based hexgrid wargame, Armageddon is assail a beehive world so polluted it's all give the axe wastes, lava canyons, and acrid rivers, which the armies of the Imperium have to defend from hordes of orks. Each scenario is a puzzle where you'll suffer to decide whether to split your battlegroups or link up them in a single wedge, lock down the bridges or come in the bombed-out buildings, spotter leading with walkers or fliers, and then on.
At that place's DLC for various other conflicts that take in played unconscious on the fountainhead-named planet Armageddon, just skip the expandalone called Da Orks, which lets you experience the early side of the contravene. Instead of handing you control of a horde it makes you swordplay a counterbalanced force that feels like a green reskin of the humies.
12. Battlefleet East Germanic: Armada (2016)
Tindalos Interactive/Sharpen Dwelling house Interactive
Steam | GOG | Microsoft Store
The Imperial spacecraft of Warhammer 40,000 are one of its most distinctive elements. Each one looks like someone painted Westminster Abbey black, chucked a prow on the end, and hooked it off into distant infinite. Battlefleet Medieval: Armada is an RTS where these stately, miles-lengthened ships turn aroun on a 2D plane that emulates both a tabletop and the ocean. They do battle equivalent it's the old age of voyage, sound with broadsides and boarding actions, though troops inclose via torpedo preferably than swinging over along a rope with knives between their dentition.
The other affair about Battlefleet Font: Armada that feels like the age of sail is the clock scale. Even with the speed position to its fastest, acquiring into position at the start of an engagement takes a fair elderly while. And so by the time the fleets make inter-group communication, there's such micromanagement it can sense overwhelming even up slowed fallen. It's deliberately paced this way, seductive you into mistakes and collisions that testament cost you a capital ship with the population of a city deep down it.
11. Necromunda: Hired Gun (2021)
Streum Along Studio/Focussing Menage Synergistic
Steam clean | GOG
A singleplayer FPS that's part despoiler-shooter, where you'll find a bolter and five minutes later swap it for a lasrifle because it's a high curio tier. IT's as wel a movement-gunslinger, with fence in-lengthwise, dashing, sliding, a grapnel, and augmetics that let you double-jump, decompres time, and more. Even your firedog has an upgrade tree. Each fight's a fast zip around a large environment, abusing automatic takedowns for a window of invincibility and several health.
That said, the animations frequently look garbage and sometimes the whole thing breaks. There's a nonsense story that expects you to take read totally the Kal Jerico comics (I birth), and cared (I didn't). Side missions, which increase your rep with factions including genestealers and Chaos cults, are separated by difficulty grade—but some are always hard and others, where you can ignore the endlessly spawning enemies to zipline close to completing objectives, are ever easy.
And yet, it's really fun. The combat's agitated, and you finish up with so many abilities it's like Borderlands only you're acting wholly the classes at once. Every level is a perfect evocation of the setting, whether corpse-grinding factory or maglev megatrain, with dead-ass servitors controlling doors, shipping, and eventide the bounty board. One of the villains looks like Marie Antoinette gone Sick Max. If you like 40K enough to read this list, you'll probably like Gunslinger.
💀 10. Battlesector (2021)
Sarcastic Lab Games/Slitherine
Steam | GOG | Big
When I wrote about Sanctus Reach, I said other games do what it does better. That was ahead Battlesector came out, but it's a perfect exemplar. It's the same kind of mid-sized round-based tactics game where you control squads and vehicles instead than a fistful of individuals or massive armies, but what Battlesector gets right is that it gives troops personality.
That's thanks to a momentum system that rewards you for performin to type, with bloodthirsty Blood Angels marking points for humourous enemies ambient sufficiency to construe with the whites of their eyes, the swarming tyranids for staying inside tramp of a hive loss leader, and the sadomasochistic Sisters of Combat for taking harm as swell as dealing it. It would equal still better with some kind of veterancy system for squads sort o than just Military headquarters units, only Battlesector remains a ignore above.
9. Rites of War (1999)
DreamForge/SSI
GOG
There are other Panzer Unspecialised-alikes with 40K trappings, but this unmatched was straight-ahead ready-made in the Panzer General 2 railway locomotive. It's got the tactical profundity you want thanks to a assemblage of pixel units who altogether cultivate slenderly differently, with all turn a stream-of-consciousness where you're thinking things ilk, "If I attack this guy the heavy weapons leave be competent to support, but the jetbikes are in underwrite soh they can make a pop-fly fire, but then there's a unit who stool attack and dawdle in the Sami turn..."
The campaign lets you bring up as the eldar, colorful simply stone-faced murder elves with paranormal powers and a weapon that unspools a elongate monofilament wire inside your poor enemy's body to reduce their organs to soup. They can summon an incarnation of their war god inside a cuticle of superheated iron, and they charge into battle eating away harlequin pants. Information technology's a crime more 40K games aren't more or less them instead of the same four chapters of space marines all prison term.
8. Blank space Hulk (1993)
Electronic Arts
The first of the some attempts to turn the Space Hulk circuit board game into a videogame remains extraordinary of the best for two reasons. An groundbreaking freezing-clock mechanic lets you transition into turn-based mode where you can move your five place marine terminators around like you were playing on a tabletop—but gives you a timer. When it runs out, you have to play in time period, lively between them in first-person and the map out to keep your squad alive while genestealers boil out of the walls. Manage that for long enough and you earn more suspend-time, and the respite of switching back is intense.
The other thing it gets appropriate is the standard pressure. Spinning wall fans glob away, unknowable alien sounds echo down the corridors, and somewhere in the distance on that point's a scream. When marines die their screen door goes to static, fuzzing out one by combined. Plenty of videogames have been inspired by Aliens, but few of them do the panicky "game finished, man, game concluded" minute likewise as this. It's brutally difficult, but that's because it's not really a scheme game—it's horror.
(You'll need DOSBox to play Distance Predominate today and it doesn't like version 0.74 for some reason, so download DOSBox-0.73 instead.)
7. Battlefleet Gothic: Armada 2 (2019)
Tindalos Interactive/Focus Home Interactive
Steam | GOG | Microsoft Store
In the 40K creation quicker-than-light travel is made imaginable by in short hopping over to a universe in the adjacent apartment known as Warpspace, where distances are contracted. The downside to Warpspace is that information technology's colonised by the Ruinous Powers of Chaos, gods who represent and are fueled away the dark urges of mortals. Chaos wants to spill out of the Warp into realspace, and when they do you get places like the Eye of Terror, a god-awful overlap at the edge of the galaxy. Near its edge is the Imperial world Cadia, a bastion that stood settled against multiple excursions LED aside the forces of Bedlam—until the 13th Colored Crusade, when Abaddon the Plunderer crashed a gigantic extraterrestrial being starfortress into it.
This happens several minutes into Battlefleet Gothic: Armada 2 while you're playing the prologue campaign. It's a hell of a spectacle. This sequel improves diverse small things about the spacefleet RTS game, adds campaigns from the perspective of the insectile tyranids and Egyptian robot necrons, and leaves its core of 2D sailplaning send combat inviolate. The one big thing information technology changes is that sense of spectacle, sympathy what we wishing to see is entire worlds falling and a galaxy in flames.
6. Come home of War 2 (2009)
Relic Amusement/THQ/Sega
Steam
Where the first Dawn of War is about masses of tanks and a screen full of lasers, Break of day of War 2 gives you just four badasses, maybe eight replaceable squadmates, and a bunch of special abilities. It's not some researching at your base until you've assemble an unstoppable ram down—most missions commenc with you falling out of the toss, sometimes squashing a few enemies, and so it's on. A representative battle involves parking the perturbing weapons and sniper in cover, charging in with your commandant, past telling the assault squad to jump-pack over the top of the inning. After that IT's a matter of place setting off abilities as they come disconnected cool-down.
The boss fights force out be chores, but maps where you're connected the justificatory, outnumbered by hordes of tyranids or whatever, are excellent—both in singleplayer and the Last Stand, a three-player mode with waves of enemies and unlockable wargear. In a fair and just universe the High Stand was more popular than United States Department of Defense of the Ancients and glorious a whole genre and MOBAs put on't suck.
The Top 5
5. Final Liberation: Epic 40,000 (1997)
Holistic Design/SSI
GOG
"Epic" is appropriate. Final Dismissal is a scheme game that gets the musical scale of conflict in the 41st millennium spot on, with a mixed force of Imperial Guard and Ultramarines having to non only pool their forces, but then unearth an entire lost legion of titans to repel an ork invasion happening a planetary scale leaf. The orks are faster and brutishly hard to put consume in close, but you have artillery on your pull and, as the Tyrant of Badab said, "Big guns ne'er tyre."
All turn is a cautious advance, trying to hold the amphetamine freeks away from your bombards and flatten out buildings with thudd guns just in case orks are astir to pop out of them, while staying the hell outside from the gut buster mega-shank that obscenely juts out of the gargant's undercarriage.
The peak of the 40K games to break through of the 1990s, Final Liberation has two extremely 1990s things about IT. The first is its heavy metal soundtrack, and the second its FMV cutscenes. Both are cheesy in on the button right, clearly being taken seriously by people unconcerned with the ridiculousness of what they'Re doing.
4. Space Heavyweight Tactics (2018)
Nitril Studio | Focus Home Interactive
Steam | Microsoft Shop
Reprehensively underrated because information technology came out after a string of middling games with the words Space Hulk in the name, Tactics is the unexceeded of them. It's an adaptation of the board game that understands what makes it fun—the asymmetry of five clunky walking tanks pitted against limitless numbers of speedy melee monsters—and as wel understands that it's even more fun if you can play either. Tactics has an entire genestealer campaign, and finally getting to be the aliens is a blast. It doesn't skimp on the maritime side either, and the Artificial intelligence plays genestealers suchlike a tabletop player would, lurking around corners until enough gribblies have deepened to institutionalize an overwatching marine nut masse, knowing his bolter's going to jam eventually.
Where Space Hulk Tactics makes additions to the board game's rules, like cards that give single-use bonuses, and a maze-like map of the hulk to explore, they're considerably-stable and complement the base. In fact, they feel like they could personify from one of Games Workshop's own expansions to the original. While you can control from firstborn-soul for that 1993 Space Hulk get, played in isometric view this is finally the XCOM-but-with-space-marines everyone loved.
3. Space Marine (2011)
Relic/THQ/Sega
Steam
During the dark heyday of the third-person treat shooter, Space Marine was a revelation. Why would an armored superhuman need to crouch behind a waist-high paries? Infinite Marine ISN't having a bar of that. You regain wellness by killing unhealthy guys up close, charging forward with your chainsword or slamming down out of the sky thanks to the best jetpack always. Each fight down reminds you this is what you'Ra genetically engineered to do, and early along there's a quiet moment where you enter upon an Imperial Guard base and injured soldiers several feet shorter than you smel ahead in awe. It nails the fantasize of being a space marine.
Specifically, of being Captain Titus of the Ultramarines (sonant by Mark Strong, a man born 39 millennia also early). The Ultramarines are the chapter of choice for 40K videogames because they stick around to the book. They aren't like the Space Wolves with their fangs and Viking schtick, operating theater the Blood Angels and their periodic descent into the Black Rage. You wear't experience to explain anything extra to an audience who don't know the setting with the Ultramarines. Because they're boring.
Space Water lets them be boring so Titus has something to rebel against. His brothers follow tactics from ancient tomes. Titus jumps extinct of a spaceship to fight off orks across the deck of a flaring pirate embark—and that's the tutorial.
2. Mechanicus (2018)
Bulwark Studios/Kasedo Games
Steam | GOG
What Space Marine did for the third-person shooter, Mechanicus does for turn-based squad tactics. Your lo of Adeptus Mechanicus technical school-priests don't need cover version. They've got disposable cannon fodder instead, servitors and skitarii soldiers to soak up the necron lasers. Those predictable enemies will only attack the nighest target, and that closest object should be a replaceable cyberzombie rather than combined of your leveled-up tech-priests.
The psychologically abnormal scientists of the AdMech see everything as a learning opportunity, and patc their subordinates are dying they're off examining the architecture and sending servosystem-skulls to inspect alien glyphs, completely of which gives you knowledge points. These can be spent on extra movement or activating special abilities, and when you defeat a necron you go more of them, with a incentive for stretch the corpse within a turn to stand over them creepily watching the light in their unnatural eyes go out. For science.
Drop those points right and you snowball, ending each turn in the right spot to clear more. Your robed worshippers of the Car Immortal zip around the necron tomb they'Re investigating with a force axe in peerless hand and a information pad of paper in the other, sextet Thomas More Doctor Devilfish cyberlimbs whipping around upright for playfulness. The AdMech normally show up as sustenanc in other games, but Here they're the stars and everything from the agency the mechanics accentuate their oddity, to the droning music, to the robotlike garble that serves as their voices fits dead.
1. Sink in of War (2004)
Relic Entertainment/THQ
Steam
Because Dayspring of War 2 ditched the base-building, its predecessor has become a acceptable bearer for fans of build orders World Health Organization miss that particular flavor of RTS. The thing is, what ready-made Dawn of War's base-building great was how downplayed it was compared to the RTS games that came earlier it. It's not about with kid gloves managing walls and cranking out more gatherers than the other players then your economy can triumph. There's no gold, no spicery, no vespene flaming swash. The of import way to gather resources in Dawn of War is to kill for them.
Nodes are counterpane crossways the map and you might snatch a match peacefully in those early moments where everyone is scouting and constructing their first power plant, but sooner than you guess it's leaving to inaugurate. Dawn of War is the RTS fast. Instead of marching somebody soldiers out of the barracks one at a time and click-effortful them into control groups they come in ready-made squads, and if you require a team to constitute bigger you can teleport more troops in piece in the field. Same for reinforcements. Instead of constantly flicking back to the barracks to replace losses, you just teleport them in. This squad necessarily a projectile launcher because they saw an armoured vehicle terminated the next hill? Teleporter goes brrr.
Aurora of State of war is fast enough that you'll soon hit the unit cap and be leading a solid pull in that includes vehicles and robotic dreadnoughts who pick up independent enemies to fling around. Zoomed-out it's a historied spate of lasers and explosions, and zoomed-in you'll see sync kills where someone gets pinned to the ground with a lance or has their head lopped off by a daemon. There is Only War and honestly IT rules.
The base game's floor builds to something unexpected, piece the Winter Assault expansion is very much for fans of the Imperial Guard, but where it's in truth at is the Dark Crusade expansion's campaign mode, which has eight factions fighting over unrelenting maps where you render to one of your territories nether siege and find all the defenses you built last time ready. If that's non enough, the Soulstorm expansion has acceptable the most love from modders and its Ultimate Apocalypse fashionable takes away the unit cap and ups the scale of measurement even many. It's 40K in its final form, eating worlds and firing missiles from a tank molded like a church organ.
Warhammer 40,000: What to read next
Playing complete of those Warhammer 40K games could donjon you engaged for 40,000 hours. But if you want to read Sir Thomas More about some of our favorites and the 40K universe, present are some more stories.
- The best Warhammer 40,000 novels
- Major events in the Warhammer 40,000 timeline
- The best Warhammer 40K dispatcher set guide, and beginners tips
- Why so many games fail at 40K, and wherefore Darktide might win
- Wherefore Necromunda is a hulky deal
- Dawn of Warfare's modders have turned IT into the ultimate 40K unfit
- Great moments: Going on the defensive in Dawn of Warfare 2
- Great moments: Conquest Kronus in Morning of War—Colored Crusade
- What's your dream Warhammer 40k game?
Jody's first computer was a Commodore 64, indeed helium remembers having to use a code pedal to bring up Pool of Radiance. A former music journalist who interviewed everyone from Giorgio Moroder to River Trent Reznor, Jody also co-hosted Commonwealth of Australi's first radio show about videogames, Zed Games. He's typed for Rock Paper Scattergun, The Big Emerge, GamesRadar, Zam, Glixel, and Playboy.com, whose cheques with the bunny logo made for fun conversations at the bank. Jody's first article for PC Gamer was publicized in 2015, he edited PC Gamer Indie from 2017 to 2018, and actually did bring up every Warhammer videogame.
Source: https://www.pcgamer.com/best-warhammer-40k-games/
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