Pathologic 2, like the original, is a story told from three unique perspectives: The Haruspex, the Bachelor, and the Changeling, each of them trying to solve the mystery behind a strange plague that's devastated a strange small town. Today developer Ice-Pick Lodge announced that the game will be divided into separate parts for release, one for each character, so that it doesn't have to delay the launch any further. 

Developer Nikolay Dybowski explained in a video (thankfully dubbed in English) that there are several reasons for the extended development, including the economic crisis in Russia that caused a crucial investment deal to fall through. The team has been going "full-out" with far less funding than expected, and "the fact that we're this close to completion is an achievement in and of itself," he said. 

"And so we've made a tough decision to not prolong the wait even further, and release the game in parts. First, we'll publish the Harupsex's story, while the Bachelor and the Changeling will come out later." 

Dybowski acknowledged that some fans will be disappointed but said that Steam statistics show that the vast majority of players take the game slowly and methodically—"First one story, then the next, and much later, the third"—rather than powering through all three of them one right after the other. "We don't think it would be right to force into waiting the people who will play this game slowly, steadily, iteratively, step by step," he said. 

Another factor behind the decision is the fact that Pathologic 2 is the first game Ice-Pick Lodge has developed in the public eye, and that's changed how it approaches the process. Feedback has "seriously changed our understanding of how modern gamers approach videogames," he said: A large portion of players aren't prepared to sink as much time and energy into a single game as they were back in the day, and so new games "must become somewhat more comfortable to play than we'd like." 

As a result, Ice-Pick Lodge has decided to dial things back a bit on Pathologic 2. The game as it was planned was "back-breakingly hard," with an "unbearably steep" learning curve, but based on feedback the studio has decided to make it "slightly less obscure, more convenient to play, and accessible." 

"It does not mean we've abandoned our original vision. Not at all. It's still an experiment, still novel. We really hope you'll appreciate it when you play it and learn the underlying ideas. But we need to modify our approach to presentation a bit," Dybowski said. Releasing the Haruspex chapter first will with that by enabling Ice-Pick Lodge to see how people play and react to it, and then adjust the subsequent chapters accordingly. 

There's still no release date, but Ice Pick Lodge said in a "state of Pathologic 2" update that the Haruspex chapter will be out sometime between April 1 and June 1 of 2019.   

Artifact only launched yesterday, but it already has over 1500 negative Steam user reviews, earning itself a 'Mixed' status as of right now. Scrolling through the 'most helpful' negative reviews, a lot of them are focusing on the monetisation element of the game.

"An excellent card game, flawed by a terrible monetization scheme," says user Alixey in a review that has over 4400 helpful votes. "The gameplay and the mechanics are really good, which adds a breathe [sic] of fresh air to the genre, and the overall experience of the game itself. But the shady microtransaction practices prevent me to recommend it. The price of the purchase is not enough to fully enjoy it." You don't have to look that hard to find more reviews echoing those concerns. 

The most upvoted positive review as I write this, meanwhile, is this one: "And now it's time for me to play my strongest card :credit_card:" You get the idea. At time of writing the the game has over 2600 positive reviews, too. 

This isn't the first time concern has been expressed about Artifact's price beyond the $20 base game. Ville Kilkku broke down how much it'll cost to build a full collection last week, pre-launch, and found that $300 would 'comfortably' get you to a full collection (it's worth reading the piece for some in-depth analysis of how that's been figured out). 

"The value of a full collection can therefore be expected to be somewhere between $200 and $300 in a week or two after the launch—it can be higher in the first few days, those are always a bit crazy with people rushing to the market to pick up missing pieces for their collections and supply not catching up immediately. If this does prove the case, the situation compares favorably to Hearthstone’s cost of around $200 for a full expansion set for an active player—and in Artifact, you can also sell your cards if you no longer want them, whereas every penny spent on Hearthstone is gone for good." This was pre-marketplace, of course. We'll have a piece exploring how that's affecting the game in the very near future. 

In Will Bindloss's review-in-progress, he pointed out the possible problems created by the game's monetisation model. "I do have a few concerns about the monetisation model, though—if that purchase price doesn't deliver value, Valve could still have a mutiny on its hands. For now, I'll reserve judgement. In pure design terms, the potential for high-skill fun in Artifact is massive. And if the barrier to owning a competitive collection isn't prohibitively high, it should reach great heights." Expect a full scored review in the coming days. 

Review bombing or not, Artifact has still reached a peak player count of over 60,000 at launch. 

Thanks, PCGamesN. 

There are a lot of different ways to build a lance in BattleTech, especially now that the Flashpoint expansion has introduced three new types of mech. You might want a bunch of gunners that can take out the opposing team from afar, or you could throw in some light mechs to outmanoeuvre them, but I keep going for the classic Rock ‘Em Sock ‘Em Robots tactic: punch everything until it explodes. I feel very well catered for, then, because now I can fling a mech with a giant axe into these heavy metal brawls. 

My big, sweet Hatchetman is the most beloved of all my mechs. He's large, of course (though technically he's medium, according to his classification), and he's rather deft at hitting things, specifically with a big robo-axe. Look at him go!

I'm extremely proud. The Hatchetman is obviously a brawler, excelling at close range fights, and he's got some short-range weapons along with his nasty axe. Despite looking like a big bruiser, he's surprisingly light on his feet, which he needs to be, given that he's his armour can't stand much of a pounding. Still, I like to throw caution to the wind and launch him towards enemies with wild abandon. 

He's accompanied by the Crab and the Cyclops. The Crab's an extremely heat-efficient skirmisher, able to unleash its lasers on enemies without having to worry  about ammunition or taking breaks to manage its temperature. The very expensive Cyclops is, at 90 tonnes, a beefy boy with lots of armour, but he doesn't dole out the damage quite as much as other mechs in his weight class. There's still a very good reason to add him to your lance, however. The Cyclops has a battle computer that kicks everyone's initiative up a notch, letting you attack with your heaviest hitters a lot more quickly. 

Freelancer

Flashpoint has more of a sandbox spirit than vanilla BattleTech. With or without the expansion, you can flit around space, picking missions from a list of jobs—depending on your reputation and ability—while hiring new crew and building a whole host of mechanical monsters, but the story stops short of letting you be a proper free-wheeling mercenary. You’ve got debts, responsibilities and allegiances all tied to the plot. The titular flashpoint missions and a new career mode (which everyone gets as part of a free update) loosen the reins. 

Career mode removes the story and the pressures that come with it, letting you go where you want and take on whatever missions tickle your fancy. It’s BattleTech, but without the restrictions. And without the story missions to work towards, you’re free to build your mercenary company the way you want, rather than just making a lance that’s tough enough to tackle the next part of the campaign. 

Since the campaign doles out free mechs, big chunks of cash and gives you a clear path to follow, the career mode feels more appropriate for a second playthrough. BattleTech’s a tricky game, but the structure of the campaign eases you into it better than the career mode sandbox. If you’ve already completed the campaign and want an alternative challenge, however, it seems perfect. If you get the expansion, too, it pairs well with the flashpoint missions. 

Alongside the standard gigs where you’re just doing random odd jobs for pirates and noble houses, you’ll encounter special missions—sometimes bastard-hard—that come with all the conversation, plot and occasional choices that you might instead expect from the campaign. But since they’re self-contained and optional, there’s never any pressure to do them. You’re leading a bunch of mercenaries—nobody tells you when you have to go to work. So you get the benefit of the story and their fleeting but welcome characters, but you still get to feel like you’re charting your own course, not tied down by obligations to deposed monarchs.

The gauntlet

Flashpoint missions also appear in the regular campaign, so if you’re playing for the first time, or you don’t want to have to start fresh, you can still take them on. In particular, they benefit the end-game, giving you something to do with your battle-hardened mechs instead of the same old challenges. They’ve got big paydays, but they’re also risky. You might find yourself duking it out in consecutive battles without any time to repair or heal, so you’ll want to prepare and have plenty of beefy mechs and veteran pilots at the ready.

When you’re dealing with consecutive deployments, you can’t just shrug off losses, and even a mech just losing a limb could risk the success of subsequent battles. Consequences loom large over the battlefield, ramping up the tension even when things are going your way. A single bad turn can transform a walk in the park into a catastrophe in normal missions, but it’s so much more pronounced when you can’t just fix everything up on the Argo when you’re done. 

While the stories that play out during the flashpoints are self-contained, they contribute to a more cohesive galaxy. There’s more going on now, with more meaningful conflicts between factions. Rather than just being the weapon they use to win, you get to have a say in the outcome, nudging the story down one path or another. And they contribute to a tone—that free-wheeling mercenary life—that just fits so well with the BattleTech universe. Each is a full adventure that you can enjoy in one sitting, and then you’re off to the next one, or maybe some other kind of job. It’s almost episodic, not in the style of an episodic game, per se, but at least evocative of interstellar sci-fi TV like Battlestar Galactica or Firefly. 

There are a lot of ways to get into Flashpoint, but with its biggest features being geared more towards the end-game and second playthroughs, it’s not quite essential if you’re just starting out as a first-time mech commander. It should still absolutely be on your radar, and if you've been considering another round of robot brawling, Flashpoint is a great excuse. 

With its first DLC episode coming next week, Assassin's Creed Odyssey has received a major patch that adds a post-level 50 'Mastery' level to the game. This lets you spend ability points earned after that point on additional stat bonuses in a new menu screen, with each stat being linked to your three ability trees. It basically layers in more late game progression options, which I'm sure dedicated players will enjoy. Here's what that menu looks like: 

You also have the ability to fast travel to mythical creatures in the game now, and the PC version specifically has a new option that lets you set Alexios and Kassandra's walking speed. The other tweaks are more granular:

- Added an option to dismantle items directly at Blacksmiths.- Wearing the full set of a Legendary Armor now gives more powerful bonus than the version available for engraving.- Addressed a display issue that caused Stats upgrades to appear downgraded after Level 50.- The Child of Poseidon achievement/trophy will now unlock when conditions are met.

There's a whole host of other small fixes outlined on the Assassin's Creed subreddit. Assassin's Creed Odyssey's DLC is called Legacy of the First Blade, and the first episode arrives on December 4th, because the one thing this time sink of a game definitely needs right now is more content (I haven't quite found the time to finish Odyssey yet—each Assassin's usually takes me a few months of chipping away). 

We haven't heard from the WWII multiplayer FPS Hell Let Loose since October 2017, when it launched a $100,000 Kickstarter to help get it across the finish line. It ended up drawing in more than double that amount, and today the developers announced that it will launch on Steam Early Access in 2019.

Hell Let Loose is a "realistic platoon-based" shooter built around 50v50 battles, "in which players must coordinate to capture sectors and resources to beat the opposition into submission," publisher Team17 said. "Authenticity is key, and players will be able to experience history using a realistic period arsenal, with accurate weapon behavior." 

The trailer released today appears to reflect that approach. In contrast with the high-speed, over-the-top gameplay of Battlefield 5, the action in Hell Let Loose is slow, clunky, and ugly: You can't see a hell of a lot, and the kills in the trailer aren't the result of epic duels but of shooting guys in the back while their attention is focused elsewhere. "Realism" is a squishy concept in the context of videogames, but that seems pretty close to the mark as these things go. 

Hell Let Loose is listed on Steam, and there's a website up at hellletloose.com, although there's not a whole lot to see there right now. Developer Black Matter said that "a roadmap of key content drops" will be posted when the Early Access release is live. 

Update: The post originally stated that Hell Let Loose will be out in January 2019, but a release month hasn't actually been specified.

Mutant Year Zero: Road to Eden is the XCOM-style "tactical adventure" with the wisecracking duck and the angry pig. But they're not the only heavily-armed mutant animal weirdos in town. Funcom dropped a new trailer today that reveals the game's third fur-and-gun-bearing character, a stone cold fox who goes by the name Farrow. 

Farrow is literally a fox, but the "Silent Assassin" moniker feels a bit off the mark: The quietest thing she uses in the trailer is a shotgun. That's presumably more for cinematic effect than anything else, though, because even though she very clearly comes off as a heavy hitter in the video, the PR blurb says she specializes in "stealth and assassination … with skills and gear that make her adept at quickly and quietly dispatching her foes." 

Farrow won't be available at the start of the game, but can join your squad after she's been discovered in the Zone. And apparently she won't be the only one, as Funcon said she's "one of the recruitable characters" that players will encounter in their travels. 

Mutant Year Zero: Road to Eden comes out on December 4, and it looks very strange but also very good: Wes played a demo last month and described it as "fun, funny," and "challenging from the get-go." You can find out more at mutantyearzero.com. 

Earlier this month, Warframe launched its second open-world expansion that included a gorgeous frozen wasteland for players to explore. It is, without a doubt, Warframe's biggest expansion ever—adding all new features like being able to track and capture animals for conservation, customizable secondary weapons, and radical hoverboards to ride around on. But, as live operations and community director Rebecca Ford tells me, this is just the beginning. Before the end of the year, the Fortuna expansion is going to get a lot bigger—and a lot more deadly. 

Vox Solaris 

When Fortuna first launched on November 8, Ford tells me that update only contained about "80 percent" of the total planned expansion. As players first ventured out into Orb Vallis, a frozen hellscape patrolled by legions of Corpus soldiers and the indomitable Godzilla-sized robot spiders called Orb Mothers, they befriended the enslaved Solaris people. Forced into a vicious cycle of crippling debt, the Solaris live in an underground colony called Fortuna and spend their days laboring over the terraforming machines turning this slice of Venus into a winter wonderland. But they're not a passive people. A resistance group called Solaris United is working to overthrow their dictator, Nef Anyo, and restore freedom to the people.

But Nef Anyo won't go down without a fight, and that's the headlining feature of what Ford refers to as "Fortuna part two"—the second update due before the new year that will complete Fortuna as an expansion. Scattered across the mountains of Orb Vallis are three Orb Mothers (often just called Orbs), and these massive robo-spiders are the backbone of Nef Anyo's military power. "The biggest threat to the Solaris livelihood, other than the meta-threat of debt, is that Nef Anyo has Orb Vallis on lockdown because those Orbs can obliterate anything," Ford tells me. "The threat they pose is one of control, they're massive, they're engineered to destroy and protect wealth. And, ultimately, that's something [players] want to put an end to."

Right now, any player can go pick a fight with one but that effort would be futile. No one knows how to actually damage the damn things. That's what main characters like Eudico, The Business, and Little Duck are currently trying to figure out tucked away in Solaris United's secret headquarters.

It's a setup that mirrors Warframe's previous expansion, The Plains of Eidolon, which also featured war machines called Eidolons that roamed the landscape at night. Players had to form groups of four and work closely and skillfully to bring one down. But Ford is quick to clarify that the way players challenge the Eidolons and the way they'll attack the Orb Mothers couldn't be more different.

"The current design approach to this is going to involve more than engage, shoot, kill," Ford says. "What we're shooting for is Ocean's 11 with more action. I don't know what that ends up looking like on release, but that's what inspired it." As Ford explains, the idea is that taking down one of these three Orb Mothers should be a complex challenge with an emphasis on planning and strategy. That's why they're called "Heists"—though we don't know what exactly we're stealing yet, but I hope it involves taking control of the Orb Mothers themselves.

At the same time, Digital Extremes is paying careful attention to what the community wants to see in these upcoming boss battles and incorporating those ideas as well. "It's still in a bit of flux right now, and players have given us feedback on what they want the encounters to be," Ford says. "So even though we have our design, we also want to try to incorporate what they want." But if there's one thing that Ford is certain about, it's that these battles will be "very different from the Eidolon fights."

"Having a giant threat is great, but engaging it in the exact same way is, in our minds, not so great," Ford says. "Warframe is a lot of shooting minions, and when we have the opportunity to give you something different, we really want to focus on the different."

While Ford wasn't able to reveal specifics on how these battles will work, she did say that each Orb Mother has their own abilities, so the three fights won't necessarily be exactly the same. It's also unclear whether the three Orb Mothers will all become available to fight simultaneously or if each fight will be locked behind some kind of progress gate.

When Fortuna first launched, several players encountered a weird bug where an Orb Mother spawned inside of Fortuna, which is normally a safe zone for players. It made for some awesome videos, but was assumed to be little more than a bizarre glitch. However, Ford teased that a giant robot spider invading Fortuna could be a reality: "Maybe you'll see that for real one day is all I'll say," she laughs. "Maybe not in [Fortuna] part two, but maybe that particular theme—that idea—is something that we want to do." 

These Orb boss battles will also represent the next chapter of Fortuna's storyline, which took a weird turn weeks ago when players reached the maximum possible rank with the Solaris United faction and discovered a bizarre plot twist that baffled the community and raised a lot of questions about the nature of the Solaris people. Ford says that Fortuna's next update will help answer some of them, but players will have to search for them. "With The Plains of Eidolon, we included fragments [an in-game collectible] that players could find that told a story," Ford explains. "We didn't include those in part one of Fortuna, but they will be in part two. Most of the characters will have a new story players can discover to learn more about who they are, how they got to where they are, and what their goals are, what their past is, and what is their outlook on life." 

Save the animals 

Aside from the endgame Orb Mother battles, Ford says this second update will also expand just about every other feature added in Fortuna. Creature conservation, for example, will be getting three new species for players to track down and capture—which also means three new in-game floofs (cosmetic plushies you can showcase on your ship) to fawn over as well. "We're going to add a couple of flying creatures, so you can take your conservation hunt to the sky so instead of always looking at the ground you might have to analyze flight patterns so you can tranq birds, for example," Ford says.

The animal conservation minigame, which involves first finding animal poop, following a set of tracks, calling the animal using a special lure, and then tranquilizing it, is one of the most original features added in Fortuna. But, as many players have noted, it's also one of the least accessible for people with various vision impairments like color blindness. Ford says it's something that they're working on fixing soon. "We're running a couple of tools to make sure that we're getting every case of accessibility for that mechanic," she explains. "And we're still playing with the brightness, because that's what will let people see the tracks whether they have low visibility or color blindness, so that'll be something for a future release." 

K-Drives, the cool hoverboards players get after completing Fortuna's intro quest, will also be getting more cosmetic options and mods so players can further customize them to their liking. And those of you who prefer using them over the faster, flying Archwings can rest easy knowing that even more tricks are on the way too. And, just as exciting, Kit Guns will be expanded eventually to allow you to customize your own primary weapon instead of just a secondary one.

It's a lot to look forward to in what is already a stellar expansion to Warframe. Plains of Eidolon was Digital Extremes first attempt at building open-world zones and, as I wrote at the time of its release, there were a lot of issues that players had to overcome if they wanted to have fun with it. But Fortuna is different. It's more accessible, more diverse, and far less buggy. Similar to the way Warframe's concurrent player numbers on Steam continue to climb, Fortuna represents Warframe getting even bigger and better than it already is. 

This feature was originally published in PC Gamer magazine back in October. If you enjoy this feature, you can subscribe across print and digital.

Has any videogame story been told from more perspectives than Half-Life’s Black Mesa incident? 

Including expansions, the vanilla game offers three points of view alone, while countless mods have added to the Black Mesa lore, introducing new playable stories centring on lawyers, black ops assassins and even alien slaves. 

Half-Life: Echoes is the latest in this tradition of framing the Black Mesa disaster from a new angle, and it’s easily the best singleplayer mod for Half-Life in years, offering incredible level design, thrilling survival horror and blistering action. It also weaves itself into the broader Half-Life fiction in some clever ways. 

Created by first-time modder James Cockburn, Half-Life: Echoes puts players in the shoes of Candidate Twelve, another Black Mesa employee who arrives for a normal day at work when the resonance cascade transforms the facility into the world’s most technologically advanced abattoir. Like Freeman, Shepard and the rest, you must navigate and survive Black Mesa’s labyrinth, battering zombies and blasting marines while the G-Man observes it all. 

Familiar ground

What make Half-Life: Echoes stand out from other Black Mesa retellings is the sheer level of craft and ambition that has gone into it. To begin with, the mod’s 20-odd maps are enormous and stunningly detailed. Even the very first area you spawn in, an underground car park, impresses with its cavernous scale and moody lighting. 

As with the original Half-Life, Echoes commences with a peaceful tour of its own segment of the Black Mesa facility, though smartly it lets you explore on foot rather than confining you inside a train. When the cascade occurs, it does so at a distance, unfolding as a gradual infrastructural collapse rather than an instant demolition. Lights flicker and tremors shudder through the earth, while the scientists and security guards speculate on what’s going on. One of my favourite aspects of the mod is how smoothly it repurposes dialogue from the old games to assemble its own conversations and narratives. Even when the seams are visible, it’s beautifully done. 

Broadly, Echoes mimics the arc of Half-Life, but distils its key elements into more potent forms. The arrival of the marines, which in the original game is barely touched upon, is here given the kind of treatment you’d expect from a Call of Duty game, featuring a jet flyover and an almost parade-like column of solders, tanks, and twin-rotor helicopters. 

The first half of Echoes is almost pure survival horror, limiting your arsenal to just a few weapons and making clever use of scripted scenarios to surprise the player. In a splendid Alien-esque sequence, a strange sluglike monster hunts you through a tight cluster of corridors and vents as you desperately try to find a way out. Meanwhile, your personal resonance cascade comes in the form of a gargantuan monster, which traps you inside a train carriage alongside a bunch of other scientists before destroying everything in sight. That same monster hunts you throughout the mod’s running time, appearing at various points just to make your day that little bit more terrifying. 

Once Echoes starts doling out the heavier weapons, the mod ups the ante rapidly. Perhaps a little too rapidly, as the difficulty spikes with the intensity, resulting in several transitional combat encounters that are much tougher than anything either before or afterward. 

Fortunately, the last hour of Echoes moderates its tsunami of opponents with plentiful weapons and ammunition. The climactic battle happens on a scale that outclasses Half-Life’s infamous Surface Tension chapter, a fight that repeatedly escalates like a microcosm of the mod as a whole. Two decades on, Half-Life’s combat holds up, and Echoes makes fantastic use of its weapons and enemies. 

As the work of a single person, Echoes is a remarkable feat of design, while its detailed environment design and sharp pacing more than make up for the outdated visuals. That said, there are a few minor flaws. Although Echoes is vast in scope, in running time it is short, easily completable in a couple of hours. It also concludes in an abrupt sequence which, while an interesting addition to the overall Half-Life plot, feels artificially bolted onto the tail of the game.     

Lastly, and this isn’t really a flaw, but anyone coming to the mod hoping to see new features, such as weapons or enemies, will come away disappointed. Ultimately, these are tiny issues in what is essentially a fourth Half-Life expansion, playable for free. Echoes is that well made. 

The fantasy card battler Artifact is now live on Steam, a long-awaited moment that also brings us a new comic, Call to Arms, and a trailer that showcases flashy snippets of gameplay. 

"We hope all gamers enjoy Artifact, especially fans of Dota 2 and card gaming enthusiasts," Valve boss Gabe Newell said. "Working with Richard Garfield has been an incredible opportunity for everyone at Valve, and we look forward to expanding the game with him based upon feedback and input from the community."   

Call to Arms follows Prelude, released earlier this week, which introduced players to the House of the Cunning, whose members wield powerful magic that can change the course of history. And while barebones narrative frameworks are pretty much mandatory for digital card games these days, this tale promises more: Valve said that Call to Arms "sets the stage for a series of events that will transform the world of Dota," the setting that Artifact shares with with mega-MOBA Dota 2.  

"Working on Artifact has been fantastic—a digital card game which really leverages what is made possible by the medium rather than being limited by it," said Garfield, whose previous game creations include Magic: The Gathering. "That has been a long time dream of mine and Valve has been a terrific partner in the development."   

Artifact is available now on Steam for $20, and the Artifact Marketplace, where players can buy and sell cards, is now open as well. (It initially appeared to have only Common and Uncommon cards listed, but Rares are now available as well.) Find out more at playartifact.com, and for a closer look at what it's all about, be sure to catch up with our review-in-progress.

A few years ago, Games Workshop loosened their grip on the Warhammer 40,000 setting, and the result has been a glut of small budget games set in the grim darkness of the far future. The quality has been mixed, but every so often a game like Mechanicus comes along that uses that glut to explore a previously neglected corner of the Warhammer universe, and makes it all worthwhile.

The Adeptus Mechanicus are, in many ways, the perfect encapsulation of what Warhammer 40,000 is about, a bizarre gothic fusion of technology and religion. They are the chief scientists of the Empire, but they treat science like a religious cult, venerating tradition and dogma over invention and curiosity. Mechanicus translates this unusual faction into a turn based tactics game, and does so wonderfully, oozing character from every pore.

Mechanicus is written by Ben Counter, who has over forty Black Library (Warhammer’s official book line) novels to his name. This experience shows, and not just because the game casually drops the word “noosphere” in the opening sentence. 

The story is framed by a group of high-ranking tech priests who are constantly debating each mission. They’re all wonderfully quirky characters: Scaevola has removed so much of their humanity they new speak entirely in equations, and they’re excited to recover alien technology, while the devout Videx believes ignorance is strength and anything outside the Imperial dogma must be destroyed. Meanwhile their leader, Faustinius, has quarantined their emotions and only allows themselves to feel when appropriate. They’re Mechanicus’ great strength, and I came to truly treasure their bickering between missions.

The Adeptus Mechanicus are pitted again another of 40k’s weirder factions, the Necrons: slumbering Egyptian-themed terminators from the beginning of time who despise the living. The tech priest’s mission is to explore and investigate this tomb before the Necrons fully awaken, and a constant ticking clock reminds the player of this fact. The missions themselves consist of a series of raids into tombs. You explore these room by room, with little choose-your-own adventure vignettes popping up in each. This overmap stage is Mechanicus’ weakest aspect, the choices presented in these rooms are rarely interesting, and their outcomes seem largely arbitrary, and in the end they just become filler between each fight.

Things become much more interesting in battle. There’s no such thing as cover, which makes combat fast and lethal, initially for the tech priests and then later, after a few upgrades, for the Necrons. Combat revolves around a currency called cognition, which can be earned by scanning obelisks and corpses, as well as lots of other methods, and can be spent on things like extra movement or more powerful actions. 

One of my tech priests was equipped with an axe and a bunch of melee boosting equipment. He mostly spent his cognition on extra movement, sometimes racing the length of the map in order to thwack a robot in the face. Another wielded powerful energy weapons, which required me to spend cognition to fire them at all, meaning he often stood next to an obelisk to perpetually replenish the group’s cognition supply.

Another thing cognition can be used for is to summon troops. Unlike tech priests these units can’t be levelled up and customised: they get dropped on the battlefield mid-combat, and can only perform simple actions like moving and attacking. At first the only troops available are weak servitors that exist mostly to take hits for the tech priests, but later on more powerful variants are unlocked, all the way up to the enormous Kastelan robots. You can invest as heavily or as lightly into troops as you like. Personally I found myself gravitating towards ranged units like the Skitarii, who combined neatly with a support tech priest I’d built with the ability to let them fire a second time on his turn.

As you may have garnered from this, the tech priests themselves are incredibly customisable. Each one can attach various strange gizmos, robotic arms, weapons and other gear, and has six skill trees to mix and match as they see fit. I went heavily into Explorator (melee), Dominus (ranged) and Enginseer (healing), but there were plenty of other options available.

If anything, this customisation can get to be a bit too much. By the time the Necron awakening timer had hit as little as 30%, my tech priests had levelled up so much they were demolishing Necrons in one hit. This isn’t a huge problem—I was still having fun while winning, I’d just substituted trying for victory with striving for efficiency, as any true tech priest would. That, plus a love of bickering cyborgs, is what keeps me coming back to Warhammer 40,000: Mechanicus, and what puts it above the many middling Games Workshop-based games we've seen in recent years.