Unconventional 4X Warhammer 40,000: Gladius welcomed the ravenous tyranids to the war over the titular planet this week. Boy are they hungry. They eat and kill, and that’s about it. But maybe they’re misunderstood! I dove into the DLC to find out if the tyranids really deserve their bad reputation. 

Yes, they absolutely do, it turns out. Tyranids are bad news. They exist to consume and destroy and spread their species. I’ve been giving the Aliens comics another read this week, so this is all very familiar stuff, but it doesn’t make the tyranids any less nightmarish. 

I mean, just give this description of a tyranid building a read. 

Gladius probably doesn’t get enough credit for its flavour. There's great grimdark writing nestled away in the lore and mission text, and the tyranid stuff is especially good. And by good I mean nauseatingly gruesome. Beyond the writing and some of the unit abilities, it can be a bit conservative, however. Tom called it bland in his Warhammer 40,000: Gladius review, and while I have a more favourable opinion, it's often too straightforward. But it also makes some big changes to the 4X formula. 

Gladius’ hook is that it’s as much a hexy tactics game as it is a 4X. It’s all-out war, no diplomacy, and you’ll spend most of your time moving armies across the map while fighting hostile fauna and other factions. It’s very aggressive and most of the systems are subservient to kicking the crap out of everyone else on the planet.

Welcome to the buffet

This fits the tyranids perfectly. Like all the factions, though, the tyranids have their own way of doing things. Biomass is what they’re all about. Infesting a world and gobbling up all of its biomass is their whole deal, and that’s the key to their economy in Gladius. Loyalty, research and so on still play a role, but biomass is what allows the tyranids to build their horrible alien armies.  

While tyranids can erect buildings that generate biomass, it’s only in tiny amounts, so the better option is to just go straight to the source. Biomass can be stripped away from a tile leaving it a useless chunk of wasteland, so as the tyranids expand, they start to literally destroy the world. And, appropriately for a 40K game, it encourages you to constantly move forwards, devouring everything—or at least every tile with a respectable amount of biomass—in your path to fuel your hive. 

So, yeah, the tyranids clearly deserve their reputation, but there’s one exception! The tyranids are really into recycling. When a tyranid stops being useful, it can go into the reclamation pool and be turned back into biomass. It’s the circle of life, and ain’t it lovely?  

There are a lot of different kinds of tyranid waiting to be spawned, though accessing them all requires a lot of construction and research first. They have hit points, morale and special abilities, just like their counterparts in the other factions, but many of them also have a serious limitation: they need to be near a hero or they suffer various debuffs, including losing health every turn or reduced movement. Some, like the tough tyranid warriors, are able to go it alone, but most of the hive will need to stay near a hero.  

Separation anxiety

Unfortunately, I don’t think it really has enough of an impact on the game to justify how annoying it can be. Ostensibly, it encourages players to move their units in armies, with heroes leading them, but that’s what I do already. It makes exploration a bit trickier, but you can send off individual units for several turns with minimal risk. In battle, it just becomes fiddly as you try to move units closer to the hero—they’ve got to be within a few hexes—which isn’t easy to do when there’s only one unit to a hex and you’re commanding an army. Ultimately, I just end up taking the hit because building a large army and pushing it across the map is still the most effective strategy. 

Even though it already leans into the tactical stuff quite a lot, I do wish it came to the fore a bit more. Units get all these modifiers from terrain, morale, other units and abilities, but big armies overcome most obstacles. Positioning and smart unit composition seems like it should be important, and certainly you’ll conquer the map faster if you take that approach, but it’s not necessary and so is easy to overlook.  

Otherwise, the adaptation of tyranid mechanics and traits from the lore and tabletop game are pretty successfully implemented. The tyranids feel authentically 40K but also very comfortable in this war-ravaged 4X. 

The more of Gladius I play, the more convinced I am that diplomacy should stop being a 4X mainstay. We need a break from it. I think Gladius could be even bolder, and the loss of diplomacy has created surprisingly few problems. It's solved some, in fact. And with the tyranids, it makes more sense than ever to cut out all the faffing around and get straight to the main course. 

Every Warhammer fan’s favorite army of biological horrors is coming to Warhammer 40,000: Gladius—Relics of War this week, releasing on January 15th. Tyranids are a swarm of devouring monsters, and play like them, with unique mechanics catered to that theme. Tyranids will apparently build up and expand by stripping biomass from their enemies, their own units, and the environment itself. Tyranid cities will strip their surroundings bare of resources. It sounds like an interesting, mobile play style focused on sprawling and adapting to the situation rather than digging in and building up defenses. They also don’t use the same resources as others, using a flexible biomass pool to build up rather than food and ore.

Gladius is a 4X strategy game set in the Warhammer 40,000 universe. At release, our Tom Senior called it “a solidly made strategy game, but a bland one” where most of the races didn’t have too much to differentiate them from one another aside from unity variety. You can read his review here. We’ll see if the Tyranids’ new mechanics can shake that up—you can read a post from the game’s developers here for more details. 

You can find Warhammer 40,000: Gladius—Relics of War and its Tyranids expansion on Steam. I’m hoping the all-devouring swarm manages to chew a few words out of the game’s title. 

Videogames really end whenever you stop playing them. If you love them, maybe that's after New Game + or a replay with every character option. If you hate them, maybe that's after half an hour of frustration and a checkpoint that's on the wrong side of an unskippable cutscene. That's how it should be anyway, but sometimes we just have to see the credits of a game we're not enjoying, whether out of sheer bloody-mindedness, or because we're reviewing it and feel obliged to, or we just have to know how bad it can really get.

Hate's a strong word to use, especially for a videogame. And yet, sometimes they really do shit us to tears. This week's PCG Q&A asks the question: What game did you finish despite hating every minute of it?

Samuel Roberts: Final Fantasy XIII-2

I finally beat this Square Enix RPG last weekend, after reaching the game's finale (and one of the many endings) when I reviewed it back in 2015. Hot damn, I did not like the last few hours of that game. I went to one area to grind for hours, then returned to the final stage, overcame some terrible platforming puzzles and killed the same boss four times. There are some clever systems in FFXIII-2, like the ability to level up monsters and have them fight alongside you, a little like Pokemon. But past a certain point, the game is all busywork. It's all collectables, experience points and backtracking. I wanted it to be over so bad, and now realise why it took me over three years to return to the damn game.

Now I'm deliberating whether I want to put myself through Lightning Returns, the final game of the trilogy. The problem with XIII-2 is its characters aren't endearing to me in the way that FFX's or XV's are. This was like playing bad anime. It wasn't all bad by any means, but the finale tested my patience.

Phil Savage: Kane & Lynch 2

OK, maybe I didn't hate every minute of it. In fact, I enjoyed IO's second Kane & Lynch for its first half an hour, thanks almost entirely to its distinct presentation. Pretty soon, though, I was just hate-playing—sticking around in the vague hope that it did anything worthwhile. It did not. My overriding memory of the game was an endless procession of cover shooting, with no pacing or variety or anything to hold your interest. Just hours of crouching behind walls, shooting people, broken up only by the occasional cutscene in which the two protagonists shout at each other. The very best thing about Kane & Lynch 2 is that it's only four hours long, and so at least the misery didn't persist for long.

There remains a dedicated cadre of game critics—Andy Kelly is one of them—convinced that Kane & Lynch 2 is good. And, assuming they're not just having a mass hallucination, maybe there's something I'm just not getting about four hours of shooting a gun and nothing else. At least there was a happy end: IO returned to Hitman, which was good.

Tom Senior: Warhammer 40,000 Gladius—Relics of War

If I hate a game I never tend to finish it unless, of course, I'm reviewing it. The last review I remember turning into a grueling slog was Warhammer 40,000 Gladius—Relics of War, a well-meaning attempt to turn the Warhammer 40K universe into a 4X strategy game. You do technically explore, expand, exploit and exterminate, but the combat focus was a poor fit for a hex-based game lacking in tactical depth. The units have stat differences, technically, but that didn't seem to translate into any meaningful battlefield dilemmas. I was just shepherding dozens of units around the map hex by hex, turn by turn, and any fun I was having in the beginning faded into a haze of repetitive drudgery. In the end, I was pretty happy to get it off my hard drive.

Jarred Walton: The Crew 2

I don't normally play games that I'm not enjoying, but after doing the performance analysis of The Crew 2 and ranting about the idiocy of framerate caps, rubberbanding, and social networking as a type of point system, I kept playing it. The driving mechanics are okay I guess, once you get used to them, but in general there are just so many things I didn't like. And the storyline was like a really bad movie where I couldn't stop watching, and every time I'd lead in a race only to be passed near the finish because of a small driving error, I'd yell at my PC and at the developers. The ending was as meaningless as I'd expected. "Hooray, you're the king of Motor City, USA" or something trite like that.

Probably the real impetus for my continued play was my 8-year-old son, who wanted me to unlock all the ultimate vehicles—especially the helicopter. Then he was very upset that I couldn't use the helicopter in any races, or upgrade its components. Get used to disappointment, son. Especially in mediocre games.

Jody Macgregor: VA-11 Hall-A: Cyberpunk Bartender Action

Even with the undocumented feature that lets you use keyboard instead of mouse controls, the bartending is boring. I could be generous and assume it's supposed to be, as a comment on how routine bar work is, but I don't feel generous because I didn't like the rest of the game any better—not the characters, or the writing. I stuck with it because people recommended it to me and I didn't want to let them down, but VA-11 Hall-A was really not for me. 

Intel is pushing out a new graphics driver for several of its integrated graphics options, and it contains performance optimizations for several games—Warhammer 40,000: Gladius - Relics of War, Defiance 2050, and Banner Saga 3.

"In addition, this driver is also ready for BlazBlue Cross Tag Battle, Lust for Darkness, and The Awesome Adventures of Captain Spirit with Intel Iris Pro Graphics or better," Intel states in its release notes.

We don't generally recommend running integrated graphics for gaming if you can afford a discrete GPU, but we like that Intel is getting in the habit of releasing updated drivers to coincide with new games. Intel recently assembled a graphics team led by former AMD Radeon Technologies Group boss Raja Koduri, and is planning to launch its first discrete GPU in 2020. It's not clear if that will be aimed at gamers, but even if it isn't, Intel has hinted at releasing a graphics card for gaming at some point.

Intel also maintains a gaming portal where you can plug in your CPU model and view the recommended settings for various games, based on whatever integrated graphics it's armed with.

As for the latest GPU driver (version 24.20.100.6194), in addition to game optimizations, it offers improved Thunderbolt stability, WebGL improvements in Chrome, security improvements, and a few bug fixes.

You can download the latest driver here.

In the grim dark future, there are only Warhammer 40,000 games. And today the world took one step closer to bringing that digital dystopia to life with the announcement of WH40K: Gladius – Relics of War, a planetary 4X strategy game with real-time multiplayer. 

Gladius will take place on the world of Gladius Prime, a planet of "archaeological interest" to Imperial scholars. "During its colonization ancient relics were found, revealing hints of a shrouded past. But it was more than relics. Something awakened, an unspeakable horror from an ancient past, and the citizens of Gladius found themselves trapped in a terrible war for survival," developer Slitherine said.

"Gladius Prime was once a planet of peace. Now there is only war." Funny how it always seems to work out that way. 

Gladius will "combine elements of 4X gameplay with a combat-focused system," with four playable factions: Orks and Space Marines, obviously, but also the less-commonly-seen Astra Militarum and Necrons. Each of them will develop, expand, and interact with one other in "dramatically different" ways, and there will also be major differences between the solo and multiplayer modes. 

"The deep storyline was created from scratch to allow players to explore an entire world and lead the expansion of an empire from the ground up. The discovery of ancient artifacts and the custom-crafted quests will reveal the secrets of the planet and its mysterious history as the story progresses," Slitherine said. "The real-time multiplayer system lets players build their own path to victory while fighting against live opponents, time and the natural perils that Gladius hides." 

Warhammer 40,000: Gladius – Relics of War is listed on Steam if you'd like to poke around a bit, although there's currently no pricing or option to pre-purchase. An "exclusive first look" at the game will take place at 11 am PT/2 pm ET on December 1, on Slitherine's Twitch channel.