Recent reviews by Questionable

Get bugs, eat faces.

More factions is always good, the Tyranids have a distinct roster and playstyle from the other races and are very refreshing after playing a lot of the starter 4 factions.

The Necron unit, the Canoptek Wraith has gotten some updates since my initial review, buffing their durability making their ability to move freely through units more useful as they won't immediately die after infiltrating the enemy ranks, or at least will absorb a lot of attacks in the process. Their attack (and the silly little noodle arms) is still pretty underwhelming but I don't think their attack is the main focus, while they can still kill a model or two their biggest strength is the ability to project a zone of control in the middle of an enemy army, especially strong when they're wanting to retreat or rearrange their forces as they'll barely be able to move while the Wraith is adjacent to them (unless they ignore zone of control or are a flyer which most units don't/aren't).


The Space Marine unit is an absolute wrecking ball with all the punching power of a Tau battlesuits but trading the mobility for sheer durability. With two lascanons and rocket launchers each with a cycle option between rocket propelled grenades and krak missiles there's nothing these absolute units can't smash through. Pair these chunky chads up with some apothecaries and the amount of punishment they can take skyrockets. With a solid economy they easily replace the role of the standard Devastator in the Tier 8 stage of the game. In the words of the Immortal God Emperor "That is actually very cute. Look at its little legs and oversized body. Adorable."


The Warlock is a very powerful and very mobile assassin with the natural drawback of being very fragile. While I still would have liked some alternative options and find the design of the Warlock a little odd its fine and its strong. Since I initially made the review the Warlock has recieved some minor nerfs, reducing their immense damage output a little bit. They are however still very strong and fill a niche in resource costs (energy/food w/ energy upkeep) that makes them fit in really comfortably with pretty much any Aeldari build.


The Venomthrope is still a pretty underwhelming addition to the Tyranid roster but some rebalancing to some units have made them not-as-bad but still not fantastic. The Malanthrope had the "Spore cloud" ability removed from them, meaning that now only Venomthropes have the ranged damage reduction aura, so if you want a little more durability against ranged damage you'll need a couple venomthropes. They'll even do some solid damage against infantry with their toxic miasma ability (shared with the malanthrope but with 3 models it does 3x the damage), but as was already the case the Tyranids are far from hurting for ways to annihilate groups of infantry meaning that the only trait that the Venomthrope has that is useful is that aura but the venomthrope itself is quite squishy and easy to blow up, meaning they can't really provide that aura (because they're dead). Having one or two isn't terrible but its also not really that helpful since they take up space for backline attacking units and synapse creatures.


The Dark Disciple is pretty bland. It has a neat model, cultists in robes wielding flaming symbols of chaos. They're not meant for combat with low defenses and a pitiful attack, just mobile damage reduction auras, kinda making the role of the Noctolith Crown more moot than it already was. Their damage reduction aura was nerfed in an attempt to give the noctolith crown a reason to exist but its still a bit meh.


The Krootox Riders unit is quite a powerful 3man squad of monstrous infantry, with a surprisignly strong 3 range attack and a very strong melee strike they give the Tau an impressive melee option for a faction that was previously devoid of melee bruiser units. The Kroot do well to fill in for the weaknesses of their Tau masters.


Ratling Snipers was not something I was expecting to see but more of the abhuman forces prevalent in the Astra Militarum is not something I'll turn down. Functionally the Ratling Snipers are Aeldari Rangers but for the AM, they have long range and are good at taking out infantry. Nothing ground breaking but something new for the defenders of mankind.


I wasn't sure what to make of the Killa Bursta at first but after playing around with it it compliments the lategame Ork army quite nicely, a fine edition to the array of super heavies at the WAAAGH's disposal. In both form and function the Kill Bursta is an Ork Land Raider with a jumbo-sized gun in the middle of it, appropriately Orky. Its a good heavy transport, more of a mobile fortress, excellent for keeping your comparatively squishy infantry safe until you can get them into chopping-distance, and with a transport capacity of 4 its excellent for Da Jump deepstrikes alongside the Gorkanaut with its transport capacity of 2, delivering a party-pack of Meganobz, Warbosses and Flash Gitz anywhere where a git needs krumping.

Boring, spammy, hectic, play Planetside 2 instead get the same experience but for free

A fun spectacle fighting game

This game is horrendously broken, especially for the campaign, the AI blatantly cheats (infinitely spawning infantry swarms pouring out of barracks for instance) and gamebreaking bugs like nod infantry becoming permanently cloaked even when under the range of a detector.
The balance of the campaign missions are also completely out of whack, unless you're already proficient at the game it is no fun as some missions are hilariously easy and others are frustrating beyond belief as balance changes to the functionality of units and structures skew the challenge of many missions, especially when you're expected to rely on defensive structures.

Gud game

This DLC adds two things: Pets & Farm Ranches

Pets: They're a cosmetic aspect with no mechanical impact what so ever. If there's a dome, and people are in it, animals will spontaneously appear and wander around. They don't consume food, oxygen or space, they just exist like some kind of phantom.
There's a lot they could have done with pets mechanically but they did absolutely nothing with it. A lot of these pets are rather baffling too. Llamas and Deer for instance...

Farm Ranches: An alternative to growing crops, you can raise animals for slaughter to provide food.
But wait a minute, don't animals consume more food than they produce? Correct! But not on Mars apparently!
Some strange product of the Red Planet has caused animals to be able to subsist on nothing but Oxygen and Water, making them very efficient and an easy alternative to those bland greens you were growing in that hydroponics tower. To boot, apparently you need absolutely no skills or training to handle, raise and butcher farm animals so any old person can do it, no specialisation required! Another one-up on those no-good botanists!
If you can't tell I'm being sarcastic, the Farm Ranch is poorly balanced and some of the livestock options feel like bad jokes, like being able to farm OSTRICHES in out-dome ranches. There are no tech bonuses or specialisations for ranches and with no requirements you can use unspecialised colonists on them and again the real nature of livestock inefficiency is entirely ignored. Cows hanging out on dirt will eventually grow to full size and produce food without needing to invest any of your other crop stock into them.
A more realistic and appropriate use of livestock would be as a food-sink comfort boost for any non-vegan colonists.
But no its just an unbalanced reskin of standard farms.


This DLC is a very easy pass. It adds nothing of meaningful value and personally I disable it because it reduces my enjoyment of the game by being quite immersion breaking for me.

Edit: Game got an update out of nowhere which improved stability, it doesn't seem to deteriorate as badly as before but it still feels pretty on and off performance wise.

While this game is pretty fun and has a lot of neat ideas and inspirations from other games its very unstable and no longer supported, though it was still pretty unstable even when it was supported...
POint is this game doesn't run well, sometimes it won't run at all and unfortunately it doesn't matter how fun or good a game is if its outright broken.

A superb game about knocking flying gun-bricks the size of freeways together.
The campaigns are tough especially in the start but really fun once you get the hang of it, and get a few ranks of renown. Make sure to save often! Its a light 4x style of game in the campaign kind of like Star Wars: Empire at War just with no ground battles and there's an urgency meter that builds up and makes the campaign harder as time goes on so you can't just sit back and turtle, but gets reset every time you complete a mission (including side missions). It can be a little stressful but its an appropriate mechanic for a scenario where the stakes are high.
While there are only campaigns for The Combined Imperium (Imperial Navy, Mechanicus Fleet & Adaptus Astartes all at once), Necrons, Tyranids & Chaos (with the DLC) they're quite large campaigns with a lot of nice lore detail and lots of missions.
While it would be nice to have an Ynnari campaign with combined Craftworld/Corsair/Druchari fleets and an Ork campaign to round out the active factions in the setting (No Tau in the Eye of Terror I'm afraid) what's already in the game is a heap of content and the Aeldari ships are honestly pretty hard to use, very fragile and micro intensive. Orks would be easy though. There doesn't seem like there will be any more DLC campaigns at this point so oh well, just Chaos.

Opinions on the story and writing is mixed but I think its good as far as 40K Video Game story telling goes, the cinematics are very pretty and the majority of the voice acting is top-notch and carries even some of the worse dialogue.

I have no opinions on the multiplayer, I played a couple of matches and it seems okay, I'm not really a PvP person.

End of the day I think the game is well worth it just for the campaigns, especially if you get it on sale (I did and it was a downright steal getting this game 75% off).
Quick buyer beware though: If you have trouble with "Easy Anti-Cheat" avoid this game I'm afraid, it uses it and the launch commands on steam to disable it don't always work.

Warhammer 40,000: Gladius: Relics of War is not only an obnoxiously long name but is also not like most games that it looks like. This game is not like Civilization or Endless Legend, it is not an empire simulator.
Gladius is a war-game.
The central focus of the game has more in common with most Real Time Strategy than Turn Based Strategy games, the purpose of cities is not to spread culture or house population but to create factories and barracks and harvest resources for the sole purpose of making war and destroying your opponent.

I've seen more than a few complaints about the game based on this misunderstanding so I thought I'd make that clear on the get-go.

In addition to this I've seen a few comments regarding the game feeling incomplete without the DLC. I can't really deny that the DLCs for this game add a fair amount, especially the faction DLCs but I think the base game is plenty worth it for the price of admission, on top of that the game and its DLCs regularly go on sale.
In all honestly I don't entirely understand this complaint and I can only assume that these people are not particularly familiar with the way that game development works, especially for strategy games and that for the game to be developed as much as it is, it needs the DLCs, effectively functioning as expansion content, not very disimillar to the likes of the many Dawn of War DLCs to fund continued support and development of the game.



Your primary goal regardless of faction is to control the map and the many resources and features dotting the surface of the titular planet Gladius Prime, the planet having been recently devastated by an enormous Ork Waaagh, leaving the hive cities of the world as nothing but smoldering ruins, closely followed by the sudden appearance of a terrible warp storm, cutting off the world from the rest of the galaxy.

You start each game with only the most basic unit production capacity, a unit to settle your first city and 2-3 of your most basic infantry. From there you need to research more advanced army units and production facilities and produce more units to secure the map and combat the diverse and deadly Fauna that emerged from the smouldering ruin of Gladius, something of a "greatest hits" collection of infamous monstrous wildlife in the 40K universe including Catachan Devils, Bastard-space-wasps-with-an-unpronouncable-name, feral kroot hounds, ambulls and the slightly contentious addition of the ancient Enslaver species who guard mysterious artifacts of the Old Ones that can give powerful boons to anyone who can control them.

Each faction has a quest chain with story dialogue and lore details, the completion of which results in victory. The quests can be disabled in the map generation menu if you want to just play a purely conquest driven game, but I recommend playing each faction's story at least once as they do a good job of representing the personality and nuances of each faction and are fairly good 40K stories in their own right.
Be cautious with the quests though as some parts of the quest chain will put you on a time limit to carry out a task or spawn armies and hostile bases that can create a sudden challenge, especially if you're already fighting an AI opponent.


The general design of units and faction mechanics takes a lot from the rules from the Tabletop, as well as a fair amount from the lore of the Warhammer 40K setting. Every faction has a range of units to deal with most situations while staying true to the core theme of the factions and each faction has a set of special Commander units or "heroes" to support and lead their armies.


I was going to give an overview of each faction but the review's wordcount is too restricted! So instead I'll just say:

As a fan of Warhammer 40K I think Gladius is absolutely fantastic, the way they capture each faction and the engaging wargame layout of unit design and combat has given me many dozens of hours of fun. If you're a fan of the likes of Dawn of War and have no problems with a turn based format I absolutely have to recommend it with glowing praise. Since its launch Gladius has been continually supported and is shaping up to be a more than worthy successor of the likes of Dawn of War.