Warhammer 40,000: Gladius - Relics of War

Long Story short. A good Game with heavy lacking of Content. And then charging a cheeky 13$ for a race... Dont ever buy for full price.

I played the main campaign as Space Marines on medium difficulty and the next 20 hours were absolutely packed with intense back and forth battle lines, desperate last stands, retreats, panicked rebuilding and fortifying, counter attacks, exploration, mysteries and witnessing tragic last stands by my IG AI team member, (who got absolutely swamped by hundreds of Ork units an died as heroes for the emperor, only to buy me some time.) (setting up teams that outnumber you is the key here) The early game exploration part works well, mid game works well, and they even have an epic endgame showdown which worked really really well, imo. There is a bucketload of units, your heroes have psychic blast waves, massive force field shields, and and and. The AI did an impressive job by forming battle lines, pulling out their wounded units, and I even had them trick me, when I felt smart and sneaky and set up an ambush and it turned out they were waiting for me all along, concealed. hats off. All this might be a coincidence, cos i guess the AI is not that smart all in all, but the mechanics here work so well with the 40k lore. This game is brutal, desperate and epic. pros: + great unit animations, modelling and textures, + map is suitably warhammerish. + zero performace issues on a GTX670 (5 years old) + only one crash. cons: -no unit sounds! no voice over. nada. totally inacceptable. I dont buy the "this is not RTS" argument. at least a death comment or ANYTHING that makes them seem less "dead and static". And I dont buy the "its too expensive" argument either. I work in media myself; reasonable VO actors incl studio time and licensing cost less than one day for a designer freelancer. Whatever the reason this is missing: it must be added! - the elevation levels on the map are difficult to see. cliffs are a great strategic feature, but the map looks too flat. - a 40k game without chaos is also bordering absurd. I hope they throw this in soon. all in all: fantastic game! go get it :-)

The game is decent, but it doesn't really have that many hours in it. Too bad you need a 11 small DLC's to get a full game. I guess if it was the full game I'd give it 3 stars, because, that might up the replayability. As it is, I am not going to buy 11 DLC's just to get a full game and I can't give more than 2 stars for a core game that feels more like a demo, than a real game.

Pros: Good variety between factions, 40k looks, fun win condition if you follow the tasks given by the game Cons: Gameplay itself is not too deep, which reduces replayability drastically, research tree is more like a research line and it's just sad, neutrals on the map become irrelevant very fast, map terrain features are not many and it makes the map feel like just a grid sometimes. Additionally the game has horrendous stability issues and very annoying bugs, e.g. using some abilities crashes the game and using others does nothing other than the animation. Basically it's a fun little skirmish game in 40k with very limited replayability and a bunch of bugs, and I would even say it's somewhat overpriced.