Battlefleet Gothic: Armada 2 is really good, but it's also kind of a niche thing: Tactical capital ship combat in the 41st century isn't going to be everyone's cup of tea, after all. If you're not sure which side of that particular line you stand on, now you can find out for free.

From today until until 11 am PT/2 pm ET on August 26, Battlefleet Gothic: Armada 2 is free to play on Steam. Just go to the store page, click the "play now" button, and have at it. It's the full version of the game so you can dive as deeply into it as you can manage over a three-day stretch in solo, co-op, or versus multiplayer (although that might not be the best idea ever if you're just getting into it), but the Chaos Campaign expansion released in June is not included.

Battlefleet Gothic: Armada 2 is also on sale for 40 percent off during the free weekend, dropping it to $24/£21/€24. The Chaos Campaign expansion is also on sale, for $11/£10/€11.

It's hard to find any straight-up good guys in the Warhammer 40,000 universe, but Chaos are clearly the most evil of the whole bunch. Today, Battlefleet Gothic: Armada 2's Chaos Campaign expansion launches into the inky, war-ravaged blackness of the far future, and alongside it comes a fleet of free updates for the base game.

The expansion adds a brand new story charting the rise of Malos Vrykan, whose job it is to spread the influence and general unpleasantness of the Dark Gods throughout the galaxy. Chaos has its own unique map mechanics, and the new story provides a look at what habitable space would look like if Chaos gets its way. Plus, you get to pilot evil massive space cathedrals.

What's particularly nice, though, are the free upgrades coming to the base game's campaigns. Now you'll be able to field larger fleets, swap ships between them, and pursue secondary objectives. Tindalos has also added in new economy options and given enemy AI the ability to use faction-specific super powers. It's fleshing out an already meaty game, which you can read about in Tom Senior's review.

The expansion is available on Steam for $12.99/€12.99, and will unlock later today.

Battlefleet Gothic: Armada 2 will let you spread lots of jolly mayhem and destruction across the galaxy in the upcoming Chaos campaign. It's due later this month, letting you play as the tattoo and tentacle-loving minions of Chaos, wiping out the other factions sector by sector. Check out the teaser above. 

A Chaos campaign has been the most requested feature so far, according to developer Tindalos Interactive, and it will include a new story, missions and mechanics. Armada 2 already contains all 12 of the tabletop game's factions, but only the Tyranid, Necron and Imperium factions have grand campaigns.  

The Chaos campaign will be accompanied by an update that will be free for all players. Every campaign will get secondary objectives on each map, along with extra campaign settings that will let you tweak various elements, from changing the fleet size to turning it into a more narrative-focused game. More details on what's coming with the free update will appear on release day. 

Tom called the battles stupendous and spectacular in his Battlefleet Gothic: Armada 2 review, and it's those RTS scraps that are undoubtedly the highlight, but the campaigns provide a fun framework for the skirmishes. They're 4X-lite, really, but if you're a sucker for grimdark yarns and want a bit of context for your fights, you could do a lot worse. 

Battlefleet Gothic: Armada 2's Chaos campaign DLC will launch on Steam on June 24, and the free campaign update will be available on the same day. 

Battlefleet Gothic Armada 2's fleets are already larger than its predecessor's, but can you really every have too many giant space cathedrals? Of course not. So developer Tindalos Interactive has bumped up the points cap yet again, at least in the new Massive Fleets mode, giving you a hefty 4,000 points to spend. That's nearly four times the normal amount. 

As well as letting you field lots and lots of ships, the mode also unlocks special ships from the campaign, including the Imperial Phalanx and Tyranid Ancient One. So you get more ships and better ships. 

Watch the Massive Fleet mode in action in the video below. 

Don't expect it to be balanced. Balance still geared towards 1,200 battles, and Tindalos says it's "impossible" to keep track of all the potential strategies that admirals will be able to use with so many ships under their command. Also, it's going to be a bit more of a performance hog, so you might want to play around with your graphics settings. 

As someone who spends far too much money on Warhammer 40K models based purely on aesthetics and how jealous I'll make people, an extremely gratuitous, unbalanced mode sounds right up my street. 

The Massive Fleets mode is out now. 

In a blazing purple storm of energy, my capital ship emerges from the alternative universe that vessels use for faster-than-light travel in Battlefleet Gothic. To get anywhere fast in the 41st millennium, spaceships have to go to space-hell and back, risking eternal damnation with every jump. To use a jump to hop halfway across a map and nuke an enemy ship point-blank is audacious, even foolish, but it captures everything that’s good about Battlefleet Gothic: Armada 2. It’s an indulgent strategy game wrapped in preposterous, exciting space nonsense.

Armada 2 is a real time tactics game about giant spaceships clashing in the Warhammer 40,000 universe. Battles take place on a 2D plane populated by capture points and asteroid fields. The ships handle like cruise liners, and each vessel has a whole dashboard of special abilities. Smaller escorts can scan the map and identify enemy vessels. Cruisers and larger battleships can unleash fighter and bomber squadrons, torpedo barrages, laser attacks, and boarding actions.

In order to complete my bold jump attack I need to pause the fight. Then, after enjoying the spectacle for a moment and taking the screenshot at the top of this review, I give my flagship vessel some commands. You can give ships special manoeuvre orders like ‘all ahead full’ to burst forward quickly, but for this attack I need mobility. I select an order that essentially allows my city-sized capital ship to do a drifting turn. The Chaos ship fires boarding vessels directly into my flank as a last-ditch defensive measure, but it is certainly doomed. 

As the Chaos ship powers away I order my capital ship to fire a brace of torpedoes right up its tailpipe. The Chaos ship’s hull bar melts away. A series of small messages announce fires on board. Then the crew on board mutiny. As the enemy sails towards a nearby asteroid field I’m left to imagine the crew tearing itself apart, moments before a final catastrophic explosion ends them. 

Battles swing on these precise bursts of micromanagement, but Battlefleet Gothic 2 smartly blends directed automation and micromanagement to create a satisfying fleet commander simulator. An autopilot function orders ships to keep sensible range while firing. You can order enemy ships into a priority list that your fleet will strike ship-by-ship, and you can even target enemy subsystems to attack shields, crew, engines and weapons. That frees you up to manage special abilities and skillshot abilities like the plasma bomb, which procrastinates for ten seconds before erupting into a ball of deadly blue energy. 

I almost don’t need the three included campaigns to get the most out of the game, but they provide a fun framework for skirmishes. As the Imperium, the immortal robot Necrons, or the monstrous Tyranids you conquer sectors of the galaxy by shuffling fleets around turn-based sector maps. When you move into a sector occupied by the enemy, you launch a real time battle to decide who claims it. There are light building systems that let you develop planets to generate resources and buy more ships, but it isn’t too detailed. If you’re after a serious 4X game, this isn’t it, but there’s enough structure there to give battles context and create consequences for losing.

There are some pretty good directed missions (and be sure not to miss out on the glorious spectacle of the prologue campaign), but you’re frequently playing set scenarios that are a bit of a let down. Capture points spread wide across a map can create scattered and messy battles. There are minor presentation issues too. The vivid backgrounds can make battlefields hard to read, and interface icons aren’t distinct enough to be quickly readable to me, even now I’ve learned what they all are. 

In spite of the niggles, it’s an absorbing space strategy game, and we don’t get enough of them. The many featured factions as varied and characterful as you would expect from the 40K universe. Tyranids infect enemy vessels with swarms of hungry monsters, and latch onto enemies with long space tentacles. The Eldar are fast and near-invisible at the start of a fight. The Orks, well, they crash into stuff. If  you’re a fan of the universe there is even more to enjoy here. The voice acting sometimes goes full ham, but this is one of the most authentic attempts to capture the grandiosity of Warhammer 40,000. Emperor knows, many have tried.

Grimdark space tactics romp Battlefleet Gothic: Armada 2 tears out of the warp today, launching along with a trailer that you can watch above. It looks quite a bit beefier than it’s predecessor, with a trio of sandboxy grand campaigns and all 12 of the tabletop factions.

An update based on feedback from the second beta is also included, bringing with it balance tweaks and bug fixes. All three grand campaigns are now fully playable, and if you played in the beta, your campaign progress will carry over. There’s campaign co-op, too, though it’s still in development. It’s playable, however, so you a take it for a spin today. 

Take a look at the full patch notes here. 

Following the launch, developer Tindalos Interactive will continue to work on the co-op mode. New features are also on the docket, including a new game mode that will give players access to skirmishes with massive fleets and legendary ships. Another grand campaign is also in the works, with more details coming later this year. 

During the beta, only first part of the Imperial and Necron campaigns were playable, but Tom played some of Tyranid campaign and shared his impressions. They sound hungry. You can play them yourself today.  

Humanity can battle heresy and Chaos for millennia in the Warhammer 40,000 universe, but the last page of the book will just be a couple of lines that say ‘And then the Tyranids ate them all. THE END’. They’re a hive creature with a billion mouths that spreads across the galaxy, reducing worlds to alien soylent so it can make more mouths, and so on, until everything is consumed.

Space RTS Battlefleet Gothic: Armada 2 lets you roleplay the hungriest fleet in the galaxy in one of three singleplayer campaigns. The new campaign structure behaves like a pared-down 4X campaign. You move your ships between sectors and develop planets to create resources, which you then spend on ships. In the Tyranids' case the currency is biomass, and they get it by occupying a sector. It takes only three turns for them to kill and liquify everything in the vicinity.

The Imperium sends battleships to try and stop you, triggering real-time battles. Like the first game, engagements take place on a 2D plane (no Homeworld-style multi-directional laser parties here). You tend to have a few large vessels and a handful of escorts. The emphasis is on micromanaging each ship’s subsystems. Normal ships have special orders that let them boost speed, lock on to enemies, send out bombing runs, scan the area, and board enemy vessels.

Tyranid ships aren’t normal. It feels more like corralling a shoal of squid that wants to run into the nearest enemy vessel and start chewing. The ships are surrounded by swarms of smaller Tyranids that buzz around any enemies close enough. Some of them can spit out spore bombs that serve as ranged attacks, but more than anything they want to use their terrifying two-second speed boosts to get close, and then start boarding with ravenous hordes of genestealer troops.

It’s a chaotic way to play, and very bad news for other factions that need to get close to do damage (RIP Orks). You can do particularly gross things to vessels within a few ship lengths, like extend a sucker tentacle that latches onto the enemy and deals damage over time—it’s better not to think about how exactly that works. Smaller vessels can self destruct, leaving behind a damaging cloud of spores.

The hardest thing about playing as the Tyranids, apart from stopping your ships from crashing into each other as they charge in, is getting them close enough in the first place. They start an encounter stealthed, so there is scope for hiding them in asteroid fields—their adaptive trait means they don’t take damage from detritus like other ships do. You have to be opportunistic and a touch lucky to pull off the perfect Tyranid ambush, but it’s a fun way to play them. The last thing you want is a Chaos fleet popping your squids with artillery as you try to rush them head-first.

The campaigns look like sandboxes, but there’s plenty of story packed into between-mission chats and the occasional cutscene. The prologue mission is particularly heavy on spectacle, and overall the game does a great job of evoking the scale and pomp of the setting within the confines of the battlefields. In addition to the Tyranid campaign, you can also play as the Imperium and the Necrons (near-immortal regenerating robots).

I haven’t had chance to experiment with the Necrons yet, but the Imperial ships behave much as they did in the first game. The UI makes the game look a lot more complicated than it really is. Every ship has a sensible autopilot mode that does a lot of the manoeuvring. Most of the game is about picking targets and focusing them down with the right weapons. It gets complicated when there are a lot of ships involved, and certain matchups can be very challenging. I was thankful for the pause button at points. When space squids clash with Imperial floating cathedrals, things get hectic.

In a galaxy of dodgy Warhammer 40,000 games, the Battlefleet games really stand out. There are elements of the tabletop game that I’d like to see represented—galactic phenomena, gravity wells, and so on—but it’s a solid space RTS at a time when those are in short supply. We gave the first game an 80,  and I wonder if Armada 2 can do even better when it launches on January 24.

Battlefleet Gothic: Armada 2 seems to have grand strategy ambitions, judging by the new campaign trailer above. Where the first game features a single, Imperium-only campaign that linked the space battles together, Armada 2 boasts three ‘grand’ campaigns for five out of the 12 playable factions, full of systems and worlds waiting to be conquered before fuelling the endless war. 

The combined forces of the Imperium, the Necron Empire and the Tyranid Hive each get their own campaigns, stories and accompanying mechanics. The tyranids, for instance, can seed worlds with their gruesome spawn before invading them, laying the groundwork for their visit, and rather than settling worlds, they simply consume them. The galaxy is big buffet. 

On the grand strategy spectrum, it looks closer to Total War than Europa Universalis, with the main focus being building up fleets of warships and sending them into real-time space battles. There’s the hint of empire management, too, and you’ll need to think about where you’ll expand. Worlds have different attributes, including shipyards and research stations, while some might be hive worlds, agricultural worlds or some other type, each with different bonuses.

While the factions fight over territory, there’s another threat waiting in the wings. Not unlike Total War: Warhammer’s Chaos invasion, 40K’s own Chaos menace is gearing up to swallow the galaxy, so their arrival needs to be prepared for by fortifying worlds and recruiting new leaders to command an armada powerful enough to stop them. 

Focus also announced a second preorder beta, kicking off on January 15 and running until launch. It will feature the first sectors in the Imperium and Necron Empire storylines, as well as multiplayer and skirmish battles. 

Battlefleet Gothic: Armada 2 is due out on January 24.

Battlefleet Gothic: Armada 2’s space battles look absolutely ridiculous. This time, it’s living up to the name, letting you field a proper armada of cosmic cathedrals and grotesque alien hives, not just a few ships. The fights shown off in the latest video, then, are big, messy and teeming with ships. And explosions by the boatload. 

All 12 of the tabletop factions are duking it out this time, each with their own quirks. Their ships, movement, even how they sneak up on their foes differ depending on who you’re playing.   

“Be it unique ways of moving through space or weird, alien weaponry and ships, each faction feels distinct from its peers,” reads the post accompanying the video. “Even those that share similarities such as the Aeldari Corsairs and Asuryani Craftworlds or the Tau Protectorate Fleet and Merchant Fleet have differences in what they can field. This makes your faction selection, and choice of ships, armaments, admiral skills, and fleet upgrades totally customisable and massively impactful.”

It looks like a lot to manage, so I’m wondering how Tindalos Interactive has tweaked things like the pace, balance and UI to make up for the big jump in scale. It looks faster, but that might just be for the purposes of the video. I really enjoyed the first one, despite being once again disappointed that the Space Marines got top billing and their own campaign, so I’m looking forward to getting back in the admiral’s seat. Or throne of bones. 

A beta is coming next month, and Battlefleet Gothic: Armada 2 is due out on January 24.

The "pre-order beta" for Battlefleet Gothic: Armada 2, the Warhammer 40K spaceship RTS, starts early next month, and this week players were given a closer look at exactly how multiplayer and skirmish modes will work. 

The game will have 1v1 and 2v2 matches—both ranked and unranked—as well as skirmishes against the AI. In regular multiplayer and skirmishes, players will fight on a randomly-generated map with five capture points and various environmental effects, publisher Focus Home Interactive said in a blog post.

Some of those effects are the same as in the original Battlefleet Gothic: Armada, but many will be new—a fleet of space titans migrating through the area will deal damage to any nearby ship, for example, or pulsing solar radiation might render shields useless.

In skirmish and casual multiplayer you'll be able to customise the probability of each effect, the point totals of each fleet (basically how strong they are), and the victory conditions for capture points. 

For ranked 1v1 multiplayer, environmental effects are turned off and player fleets are set to a maximum of 1,200 points—for 2v2, it's 600 points per player. That's higher than in the first game, which should enable "larger, more action-packed battles". 

Capture point locations will be randomised "to make every battle different", plus logic under-the-hood will "ensure battles will never be unfair". You'll also be able to pick between pre-defined fleets that match different playstyles or build your own from scratch.

Lastly, publisher Focus Home Interactive said that the ranked-only progression system would give players both "cosmetics" and "new options for skills and fleet upgrades". This won't feel "like a power reward for playing more, but simply new options and ways to play", it added. We'll find out more in the beta. It will also have a campaign mode at launch.