Recent reviews by scaven

The game is nice, but has lots of bugs, at least one of it (the "end turn bug", which travels from title to title and was seen in Rome2 and Atilla) can ruin your play. The Warhammer 2 which uses same engine had fixes and many small improvements, but they were never backported to the first part (last patch is from 2017)

One of the easiest to see bugs - the battle difficulty slider doesn't work for enemy units in-game. Example, if you start VH campaign and later set battle to normal difficulty, your units won't have -5 leadership, but enemies will still have +10 leadership. This was reported 1.5 years before the last update, never fixed, you have to rely on mods to fix this.

The end turn bug probably surfaces if you don't have a city on the moment of chaos invasion.

Other bugs include strange AI behaviour, enemy units who suddenly heal fully after battle (no, not trolls), units ignoring your commands in battle, etc. Also WH2 features many small UI enhancements and balancing.

Still the WH1 has its charm.

Crashes of Iron III

in short: no

good story & mediocre gameplay - better just watch video playthrough

1: Vanilla game
Short: If you just want to see space marines story - play easy or normal. If you want tactics game - check infested planet game, as this one doesn`t have any tactics.

"Cheat wherever you can. A.I.s are handicapped. They need to cheat from time to time if they're going to close the gap... Never get caught cheating. Nothing ruins the illusion of a good A.I. like seeing how they're cheating."
— Jonny Ebert, lead designer of Dawn of War 2 on video game A.I.

As a game this thing is just a waste of time. It is not a good tactics nor a space marines game. At least for hard difficulty. The game design is just outright heresy & the code is full of bugs. Storywise is ok (though boring). Main campaign missions don`t really pose much challenge (except for boredom) while defence missions are just impossible - i couldn`t beat any of them except for the first one, and they only become harder with squads level. Must be due to a designer have ♥♥♥♥♥♥ up with balancing of enemy lvl to player lvl (btw leveling enemy with player is the filthiest game design mechanic). The gameplay (captain difficulty) mostly consists of "hit and run" or covert tactics, which is just a ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ for a space marines game. The working tactics is - put Cyrus in infiltrate mode somewhere in flanks take Tarkus, put him in superarmour advancement mode, taunt enemies, gallop Avitus somewhere there, when imbecile AI groups together, rocket jump Cap into there. In 10 secs some squad would be instakilled, take all survivors, tap X to run back to base like ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ (this is a space marines game, mind you), get Cyrus to raise someone in stealth mode, restore men, get back, until this group of enemies is dead. repeat. repeat. repeat for 30 hours.

After acquiring the terminator armor the difficulty suddenly dropped from hardcore to rather easy..

2: Chaos Rising
Well, they made much improvements here, changing the game from bad to mediocre. My captain difficulty game was imported as primarch (or at least I got the primarch achievment after I finished it - either way that`s a bug, one of hundreds). The action is a little more dynamic, the game is a little more fun, still boring though. It is a little hard in the beginning right till the moment when I could use my 3 terminator armor sets from vanilla game, after which the game became a cakewalk. The thing that I don`t understand the most in the game design - why my units have 200-500 hp (dreadnought - around 1000), while single chaos space marine has 25000 and more? The final boss had 2.5 millions. This just makes battles tedious, not interesting.

I think the best advice would be to play this game on sergeant, just to see the story, tactics-wise the game is nothing, as i said before.