The sad truth about Warhammer games is that it’s much easier to round the bad ones than it is the good—something we’ve already done here on PC Gamer. But don’t worry about that right now. We’re here to celebrate the games that enrich your obsession with Games Workshop; the titles that put the ‘fab’ in ‘Fabius’.

I’ve been ruthless. The dutifully average games lost in the warp between good and bad are nowhere to be found. Warhammer Quest is absent, as is Man o’ War: Corsair—a game as impossible to hate as it is to recommend. I’ve also left off the beautiful, doomed Warhammer: Age of Reckoning. It was decent while it lasted—the servers have long since been switched off -  but it deserves a mention for having the most enthusiastic dev interviews in the history of gaming. 

Sit back and scowl through this disappointingly brief list of the best Warhammer games on PC.

Total War: Warhammer 2

It’s nice to start with an easy one, isn’t it? After years in the 6/10 wilderness, Warhammer Fantasy fans were rewarded with two excellent Total War games in the space of two years. No more modding Medieval II. No more staring back wistfully at Shadow of the Horned Rat. This is the Warhammer world as it once was, brought to life with epic flair and a palpable love of the source material.

Whether or not you care about swirling magical vortexes, the second game deserves the nod because of its scale and ambition. Seeing that gigantic map crammed with warring Warhammer races is a dream for anyone who spent their youth thumbing through army books while listening to Slayer, wondering which dwarfs lived where. It’s so big, in fact, that Creative Assembly are almost out of factions with one game still to come, meaning it’s unlikely to get better than this. (Unless you’re really passionate about Chaos Dwarfs. Which you’re probably not.)

Warhammer: Vermintide 2

Total War: Warhammer does an incredible job of pulling the camera back and letting you see the Old World from a distance, but it can feel impersonal. Warhammer: Vermintide 2, however, lets you get so close to a place on the brink of destruction that you feel every shattered bone and can inhale the singed fur. Vermintide’s  tumbling cities and besieged farms are so perfectly imagined you sometimes wish the Skaven hordes would slink off and let you enjoy the scenery in peace. 

At least, you would if killing them didn’t feel so good. Smashing through swathes of rat men is a messy, ichor-spewing joy. It’s even better in the second game, thanks to the variety and threat that comes from the inclusion of Chaos and some gruelling new bosses. Few multiplayer games can hold your interest like Vermintide 2: every run is different and the loot grind is compelling enough to keep you playing forever. Add specialist classes for the five characters, and this is as detailed and loving an examination of Warhammer Fantasy you’ll get this side of painting your own Ironbreakers.

Blood Bowl 2

Perhaps it’s slightly disappointing that one of the best games on a Warhammer list is the comedic sporting spin-off—or perhaps that’s exactly as it should be. But Blood Bowl 2’s muscular, turn-based take on American Football is distracting fun, and an improvement over the slightly bewildering original. 

It also does a great job of highlighting the contrasts between the warring Warhammer Fantasy factions who, for reasons I daren’t explore, have decided to stop invading each other and play footy instead. Elves are all about swift runs and crisp passes, for example; whereas orcs just want to wreck everything. The result is an unusual, initially impenetrable game that looks great and improves the more you play. Unlike the Blood Bowl players themselves, who will probably end up crippled or dead. Touchdown!

Warhammer: Shadow of the Horned Rat

Back before we dared dream about orc siege towers rolling in real time towards the walls of Karaz-a-Karak., when Archeon was still known as Diederick to his mates, strategy fans had to make do with Shadow of the Horned Rat—a fine, story-driven strategy game that gave us a glimpse of what Creative Assembly would deliver on a massive scale 21 years later.

Playing as Morgan Bernhardt, you can follow the main quest and defend the Empire from orcs and skaven, or customise your missions in a quest for boundless wealth. It’s progressive stuff for the first ever adaptation of the tabletop game. It’s dated now, obviously, and the version of GOG.com is apparently has some technical issues when running on modern PCs, but get it to work and you’re essentially experiencing Warhammer RTS royalty.

Warhammer 40,000: Space Marine

Every Warhammer 40k fan, in the dark hours of restless nights, has laid awake wondering. ‘How do chainswords actually work? Are they like standard swords, but sharper? Or do they slowly slice through things like a normal chainsaw?’ Enter Space Marine, in clompy, size-40 boots, to answer your questions with an explosion of ork guts. (The answer is ‘both’, apparently.)

Space Marine received mixed reviews upon launch, but if you’re after relentless violence, grim darkness or eternal war—the Three Amigos of the 40k universe— there’s something here for you. Mark Strong is perfect as anvil-in-the-service-of-The-Emperor Titus, who slices, shoots and curbstomps his way through more orks than it’s conceivable to count, before the forces of Chaos turn up and characteristically ruin everything. It’s the perfect, mindless way to lose a Sunday afternoon: pop Space Marine on your Steam sale wishlist and suffer not the Xenos to live. It’s what Roboute Guilliman would have wanted.

Warhammer 40,000: Fire Warrior

Ahh, the Tau. The artisan burger yurt to the Space Marines’ Drive-Thru McDonalds. It doesn’t matter if you think they’re the greatest hope for peace in a galaxy, or another alien race to flatten; all you need to know is that they have lovely guns and firing them feels nice. 

If that sounds like faint praise, it’s because Warhammer 40,000: Fire Warrior is okay. A flighty, fun, by-the-numbers FPS that stands out because many of its fellow 40k games are deeply average and because any game featuring pulse rifles can’t be all bad. It’s also fascinating because it’s such an odd choice: the Tau are surprising heroes for a spin-off game—lovely guns aside—and pitting them against the Imperium of Man is a curious reminder that yes, the genetically-modified, systemically intolerant space racists with skulls on their shoulder pads probably are the baddies. Except, y’know, when they’re not.

Space Hulk

The original 1993 release of Space Hulk could probably be on this list, because it cleanly recreates the horror of being a walking man-tank trapped in a corridor full of monsters. But the 2013 update looks nicer, and crucially, is much easier to buy. In both cases, the games are worth your time because the original board game is so good—it’s asymmetrical strategy at its finest, with lumbering but powerful marines facing off against a highly mobile force of unknown numbers. 

It’s a generous game, too, with a meaty campaign and free updates released as a thank you to the fans. Does it compare to playing the original on the grimy carpet of a trusted, 40k-loving friend? Probably not. But it’s far simpler to track down, and the brutal genestealer AI will make you feel like you’re actually taking on a cerebral alien threat. Lovely.

Dawn of War 2

It’s madness that Dawn of War III somehow ended up on our list of worst-reviewed Warhammer games on Steam. But let’s not get into the reasons why, and instead agree that whatever you think of Dawn of War’s recalibrated trajectory, the second game is still worth celebrating.

There’s an absurd amount of content here, drawing in diverse races from the entire 40k universe. And it feels right; like your favourite miniatures brought to life before you. Forces hit with a satisfying wallop, and it’s as grim, dangerous and ultimately satisfying as the most hard-fought tabletop battle. While the multiplayer elements seem lightweight compared to its MOBA-influenced sequel, the single-player campaign is a notable improvement over the brilliant original.  If you enjoy the original Dawn of War 2, be sure to try Chaos Rising and the excellent Dawn of War 2: Retribution. The three-player Last Stand mode is immense if you can get some friends together. 

Captain Titus stands seven feet tall, clad in his holy armour. He has a pistol the size of most shotguns and a chainsaw for a sword. He has a rectangular head, the voice of Mark Strong and the chiselled chin of an Olympian, and he lives to kill Orks in their thousands.

Captain Titus is a man too big for the game he’s in. His blue and gold armour is designed to stand out among hordes of enemies on huge battlefields. He is genetically tailored for the front line of a huge war. He should be clearing out entire enemy mobs in the shadow of mountain-sized titan war machines, but here he is, in the third-person brawler Space Marine, clearing out some brown warehouses instead. 

He doesn’t care. There are dozens of Orks in these warehouses, and they explode in spectacular ways. They charge the space marine with endearing vigour, waving their axes and cleavers above their heads and yelling incoherently. Their animations and mannerisms almost perfectly communicate the ’ere we go ’ere we go Ork mentality. The idea that any of them could take a space marine captain is laughable, but they can’t resist a scrap. When Titus chops off a limb or crushes a head the victim is merely outraged. Beaten by a human? How could this be? They don’t understand that they have charged a god.

Deep in a fight, between bloody swings of a chain axe, the game transforms. The limited, repetitive environments are forgotten. There is no finesse to the combat system, but that doesn’t matter. You are mighty. You are a holy Roman centurion in the 41st millennium. There is no block button. There is no cover button. There is only stamping, slashing, and the crunching impact of a lightning hammer against a ribcage. Space Marine is a game about the joy of violence, and the fiction carefully shaves off the more uncomfortable aspects of that. Orks don’t really feel pain, and space marines famously know no fear. Orks lose blood and limbs at an alarming rate, and Titus takes hundreds of axe blows, but everyone’s happy to be involved. 

I keep playing Space Marine for those moments, and because there are few games that are show such curtailed ambition. In an alternate universe, Space Marine sold better, THQ didn’t collapse, and the sequels went on to supplant Gears of War and all other pretenders. In that universe Space Marine 3 puts you in drop pods and slams you into huge conflicts against hordes of aliens. In 2011 the resources simply weren’t there.

But Relic still found away to put a titan in the game. You fight around its enormous shoulders and use its gun-arm to blow up a space elevator. In another section you drop onto a moving train to chase down an Ork warboss. The game constantly tries to generate the spectacle you might expect from a Naughty Dog or Crystal Dynamics game. It only variably pulls it off. There are nods throughout the game for Warhammer 40K fans, but many—such as the sight of a Predator tank behind an impassable waist-high barrier, give the game the feel of a 40K wax museum where you get to see the legendary vehicles of the fiction, but only in dioramas you can't interact with. Nonetheless, I appreciate the intent, and the set-pieces successfully vary the pace for the first two-thirds of the game. 

The jetpack sections are the best. Space Marine’s assault pack fights let you boost high above the battlefield, and at the peak of your jump as you slow and start to fall, you can target the ground and crash down into combat. The impact stuns enemies who aren’t instantly reduced to bloody mist, which enables Titus to follow up with a series of executions. 

The first half of the game is better than the second. A new enemy army arrives and the squishy Orks are replaced by much tougher Chaos space marines and demons. Space Marine works best as a power fantasy about chopping through mobs, and the combat system isn’t geared to create interesting fights with more resilient foes, particularly when you have to tackle annoying airborne enemies at range. Space Marine’s guns can be fun when used to thin out a charging horde at mid-range, but long-range sniping doesn’t feel good, and works against the fantasy.

Though the game suffers from the introduction of Chaos towards the end, generally—whisper it—the story isn’t bad. It manages to capture some of the subtler elements of the fiction, while successfully joining the dots between boss fights and set-piece encounters. Notably, you get to meet the imperial guard. These are the ordinary human soldiers that hold the front of the Imperium. Compared to Titus they are fragile underdogs who regard the space marines with a mixture of reverence and fear. You’re the reason why the Imperial facilities they work in have huge arches, wide gantries and elevators that have to carry tons of weight. You’re a monster to them. Nonetheless, Titus respects the guard and shuts down his squadmates’ lofty attitudes toward them. Through these incidental interactions Titus shows his compassionate side. It would have been easy for Relic to make him a generic frothing warrior, but the writing, and Mark Strong’s fine performance, give him a strong sense of dignity, even nobility. 

Spoilers ahead, but the story also confronts the space marines’ key character flaws: fanaticism and dogmatic thinking. In this paranoid world, policed by inquisitors who can find corruption and heresy in a gesture or a misplaced word, Titus is doomed by his competence. After a very silly sequence in which he punches the head off a Chaos champion while falling 30,000 feet from an exploding platform, he is led away by the Inquisition, accused of heresy by his own squadmate. 

I always feel sad when the door closes on Titus for the last time, not because he’s about to be tortured in some horrible Imperial interrogation vault, but because that moment should mark the beginning of a series rather than the end of an experiment. If Space Marine was made today, it would have have skill trees, gear choices and other features that have become popular thanks to the cross-pollination between action and RPG genres. Going back now, it feels unusually pure. You occasionally have the chance to swap out weapons and guns, but all you really have to think about is living the fantasy of unending war in the 41st millennium. I love how simple and immediate that is, and I shall continue to play Space Marine over and over, whenever I feel the urge to put a big blue boot to some Orks.

Space Marine is a third person fighting game from Relic Entertainment, a studio best known for their fine RTS games. Space Marine was an attempt to break into new genres and find new audiences. Games Workshop's Warhammer 40,000 universe was the vehicle, and the opportunity to paste dozens of rampaging space Orks was the primary draw.

Space Marine commits completely to the core mission, and its realisation of 40K's exaggerated close combat weapons is unexpectedly good. The chain sword feels like a low-fi counterpoint to the common lightsaber archetype. Instead of the warm 'vrwooom' of plasma, the chain sword's gears roar with every swipe a brutal weapon for an uncivilised age.

The glowing power axe seems to deal damage more efficiently, but lacks the mechanical ferocity of the chain sword. You have to wait until you find a thunder hammer to access the full force of the Adeptus Astartes armoury. This two-handed electric war hammer tenderises enemies with sweeping blows and overhead strikes. The latter emit a thunderous shockwaves that leaves enemies open to execution attacks, which provide some of Space Marine's most violent and satisfying moments.

Weapon impacts are improved by the addition of slow motion, judicious particle effects and some outstanding weapon noises. But let's not underestimate the role that your dance partners play. Orks lope towards you in swarms and pop explosively on death, charging with the misguided enthusiasm you'd expect of creatures that love to fight and barely feel pain. In defeat, as a chain sword grinds through various important bits, their primary emotion is surprise and outrage. It's telling that the game slumps in the final chapters, when another force usurps the Orks as your primary foe.

I mention these details because Space Marine demonstrates how careful attention to combat audiovisual can mitigate wider problems. Space Marine's environments are grey and samey, struggling to realise spectacle that the story demands, and that 40K fans expect. Thunder hammers rare and mighty tools of the Emperor's finest can frequently be found resting on small crates in cramped rooms. Fans of the universe can take pleasure in some authentically modelled vehicles and units, but many lie static and unused in the background.

Nonetheless, I can't stop myself going back to pick up a thunder hammer, strap on an assault jetpack and take it to the Greenskins. Space Marine isn't a classic but it does hammers, chain swords and exploding enemies very well indeed and that's good enough for a Why I Love in my book. Well done, Space Marine, the primarchs would be proud.

The fantasy universes of games often have the advantage of feeling familiar before you re even done with the character creation screen plonk elves and wizards and orcs down in an approximation of medieval times and we re good to go. Then, once we re submerged in the water and comfortably backstroking, they can start showing off their unique twists on that formula. Games Workshop s Warhammer Fantasy setting is a perfect example of that: it looks as Tolkien as anything but then you find it s got Elric s cosmology and Blackadder s sense of humor and a heavy metal album cover s sense of subtlety.

In creating their sci-fi universe, Warhammer 40,000, Games Workshop pulled off the same trick a second time. Partly they did it by throwing elves and wizards and orcs in too renamed Eldar and psykers and, um, Orks but also by borrowing from popular sci-fi with a magpie s eye, taking from Aliens and Dune and 2000AD comics like Judge Dredd and Nemesis The Warlock. Among those borrowings are the Space Marines, which superficially fit the stereotype every designer who has read Starship Troopers puts in their games. At first glance they could just as easily be their equivalents from Halo or StarCraft or Doom: gruff men whose main job qualification is looking good in power armor and having jawlines you could chop wood with. But Warhammer 40,000 has been around for 28 years and, through multiple tabletop games, video games, novels, comics, audio dramas, and one terrible direct-to-DVD movie, accrued a rich background for every element of its setting, including the manly men of the Imperial Space Marines.

And every element of that background is weird as all get-out.

They shall know no fear, and also eat brains

Each Space Marine of the Adeptus Astartes has been genetically engineered and then modified further with surgery and hypnosis to be a post-human badass. They ve each got a bit of DNA in them that, without going too deep into the backstory, comes from someone who is on the borderline of being a god and is certainly worshiped as one. They re not so much soldiers as fanatical ubermensch warrior monks organized into themed chapters with names like Blood Angels or Imperial Fists, and to ordinary folk they re barely human.

The religious fervor regular people of the 41^st millennium associate these eight-foot tall supermen with occasionally comes across in the video games. In third-person action game Warhammer 40,000: Space Marine, Captain Titus walks down a corridor full of injured Imperial Guard who regard him with religious awe. I got to see a Space Marine before the end, one mutters. Their leader, an imposing woman named Second Lieutenant Mira, doesn t even come up to the meaty slab of his neck.

(Space Marines' height proved a tricky thing for games with FMV. Strategy game Final Liberation: Epic 40,000, recently re-released on GOG.com, looks like it has the actor playing a Marine in its gloriously cheesy live-action cutscenes standing on a box behind the ordinary human Commissar to get the scale about right.)

It s not just height and holiness that makes the Space Marines different. Each one has up to 19 new organs implanted into their tree-trunk bodies. If you ve ever seen the episode of Invader Zim where he tries to pass as an Earthling by ramming bits of people s guts inside himself it s basically that: More organs means more human! They have a secondary heart, replacement ears, an extra kidney, ribs fused together into a bulletproof mass, multi-lungs that allow them to breathe in low-oxygen atmospheres and underwater and these are just the start. Each chapter of Marines has different options from the pick-and-mix of new biological flavors, like the Betcher s Gland, which enables them to spit a blinding contact poison that s acidic enough to eat through metal, given time. Tragically, none of the video games have made use of that.

Oddest of all, a Marine s omophagea implant connects their brain and stomach so they can absorb genetic memories from living things they consume. It s the reason every second chapter has the word blood in its name and half the rest are called Soul Drinkers, Flesh Tearers, or just straight-up Flesh Eaters. In the novel Courage and Honour by Graham McNeill a Marine eats the brain of an alien Tau to gain the ability to pilot their skimmers past sentry towers, though he s not partial to the oily taste and rubbery texture. None of the video games about Marines have let me gain skills through cannibalism. There s a unique hook for an RPG going unused here.

The galaxy s toughest psychopaths

According to the first edition of the Warhammer 40,000 tabletop wargame Space Marine cadets are specially selected from amongst the galaxy s toughest psychopaths. Each chapter has a world they recruit from, choosing the young men who are best at killing and whisking them away. Those planets are never civilized places, they re feral murderworlds. The Space Wolves chapter recruit from Fenris, where literally everyone is a viking, and when they fly down and scoop up injured combatants who performed admirably in battle those warriors think they re being taken to Valhalla and a life of fighting among the stars, which is broadly true. Other chapters select kids from street gangs or warrior tribes but as it says right there in the rulebook: they re all psychopaths.

This is sort of reflected in Warhammer 40,000: Space Marine by the way Titus gets his health back. While he has a regenerating shield just like Master Chief the health underneath that doesn t return unless he executes his enemies. Titus feels better after gorily dispatching bad guys, stomping their heads into the ground or bisecting them with his chainsword. (Space Marines are guys who look at a chainsaw and think, That should be balanced for parrying. ) Their bloodthirstiness is sometimes their downfall, and the Dawn Of War real-time strategy games regularly depict this, with their Blood Raven chapter of Marines easily tempted into joining murdercults of the Chaos Blood God, Khorne, when they re not being manipulated into attacking potential allies because they ll happily kill anyone who looks different.

According to the Codex Space Marines (3^rd edition) they re are kept in line by a strict timeline of daily rituals that begins with morning prayer at 4 AM and continues through a full schedule of firing rites, battle practice, and tactical indoctrination before ending with free time a period that lasts for 15 minutes and is considered optional. When they re not flying across the galaxy to fight Orks, the Space Marines live strict monastic lives that are highly ritualized to keep them in line. According to Ian Watson s novel Space Marine these rituals includes testing the cadets by stripping them naked and branding their buttocks, in case the homoerotic subtext of these celibate orders of manly men living their entire lives together went past you. Somewhere out there I m convinced there s a Space Marine battlecruiser called the Tom Of Finland.

That religious lifestyle comes with some odd superstitions. In the 41^st millennium apparently we revert to a belief that technology is alive, possessed by machine spirits who can be placated through maintenance rituals using sacred oils. That s why in the Space Hulk games the Marines respond to weapon jams with prayers, and call hitting a gun to make it work again administering the holy sacrament. In Dawn Of War II: Retribution the techmarine has the ability to bless vehicles so they perform better, and whether he s simply taking remote control of them or using a latent psychic ability to inspire actual machine spirits is left up to the player to decide.

More Warhammer games than ever are being made right now, and as usual most of them focus on the easy sell of the Space Marines. (I d like to see their female counterparts the Sisters Of Battle get their own game; the war nuns have only shown up in a Dawn Of War expansion so far.) If we re going to have another dozen video games about the Space Marines it would be great to see more of those games engage with the fiction Games Workshop have built up around them, deeply strange as it is, rather than use them as generic spacemen with big guns. At least let them eat the occasional brain, that s all I m asking.