This is a wonderfully realized vision of Warhammer 40,000. The atmosphere is positively dripping with its depiction of the Adeptus Mechanicus. Some people have decried the lack of a proper voiceover; however, I rather like the way the characters speak. They have the kind of foreboding, menacing, and altogether alien and ancient way of speaking that I would expect from beings of the Mechanicus. These people, despite being technically human, really aren't human in all the ways it counts and it shows in the way they speak and comport themselves. They may as well be as alien as the xenos they seek to exterminate. In fact, the only characters that actually do speak in English voiceovers are the Necrons and it actually sort of highlights to me how inhuman the humans really are. Beyond just the vocal depictions of the Mechanicus, the actual characters themselves and the world you inhabit are just terrific depictions of what I would expect from Warhammer. Rest assured, the people that made this game love the universe and it shows.

You choose from both randomly generated and story missions for your characters to undertake. These will advance the plot and/or be a good way to shore up resources, like getting new technology or investing blackstone, the main currency of the game, into your Tech-Priests. There is a branching storyline and depending on the missions you take, you will go down different paths of the story. And completing some story paths will lock you off from completing others, so to experience the game fully one must play it multiple times through.

During these missions, you go onto a strategic layer that your Tech-Priests and Skitarri navigate handling various events that expand upon the story, provide resources, or actually hinder you depending on how you go about them. All the while, you have to be conscious of "Awakening," which is a meter measuring the amount of awareness the enemy has of your actions. This mechanic has a dual purpose of pushing you towards the end game by making it so you can only do so many missions before the final encounter is thrust upon you. And it also plays out within the battle layer because the more awakening you have on a mission, the more dangerous the enemies will be. And the longer you take to complete a mission, the more dangerous it will become. It is possible to lower it within each individual mission, but ultimately it goes up.

The battle gameplay is just fantastic. At first, it seems simplistic, but the more you play and the more you learn about the mechanics and develop your Tech-Priests and Skitarri, the more options become available to you. Most actions performed by your characters in the tactical layer require a resource called "Cognition Points" to perform and you earn them through either actions in the strategy layer or within the tactical layer itself. The cool thing about CP is that it allows you to string together a lot of actions and movements with a single character. And that gives you a bevy of options for creating strategies to win battles. I love it and it is really fun seeing how many ways you can outwit and out-resource the AI. From what I have read, people have complained that the excess of CP you generate the later into the game you go, the more broken the difficulty becomes; however, as someone that would consider themselves average when it comes to these games, it has been a relief playing this and not getting constantly streamrolled. Also, there are a ton of options for making the game more difficult and you can adjust them on the fly should you so choose. So if you find the difficulty too much or too little, you can adjust it any time.

You can customize your Tech-Priests a ton and tailor their particular playstyle for any number of occasions. And they all reflect the various augments they receive on their avatar, so you end up with some utterly crazy looking characters that one would expect from Warhammer. I absolutely love it.

I received this from my Humble Bundly monthly and I'm so glad I did. I'm buying the expansion as soon as it comes out. And I really hope the developers release a ton more content and potential sequels/spin-offs in the Warhammer universe. They've created one of the best Warhammer games out there.