Warhammer 40,000: Battlesector (PlayStation 4) Review

Warhammer 40,000: Battlesector is a sci-fi, turn-based strategy that takes place in the far future where humanity is entangled in endless war. Luckily, there are genetic super soldiers and huge power armour that, for a typical break from the trend, is relatively over-powered compared to the aliens around, and other than facing down huge numbers of aliens, humans tend to tear through their enemies. Fighting their way through a 20 mission campaign across a desert planet, players slowly add new units and small upgrades to their army.

Battles take place on medium sized maps as you control upwards of 20 units at a time facing down hordes of 30 or more aliens. An interesting break from most other strategy games is that most units are actually composed of smaller individual men who make up the entire unit. As an example, a typical Marine unit will be composed of five guys with 50 HP each, who each attack individually. The consequence of this is that, depending on the various types of damage received, it has a far different impact of receiving five hits of 10 damage, compared to a single hit of 50 that knocks a unit out.

Combat revolves around a typical four move points and one action point. Each turn players move their units around to get better line of sight, range and damage ranges, while avoiding being surrounded or flanked. One of the best parts of the way damage is done is something really refreshing, and it would be great to see implemented in other strategy titles more *cough*X-COM*cough* and that is how it is done through high numbers of small groups. Therefore, when the marine unit fires, each shot has a 75% chance, and each man alive in the group fires 8 times each, so this shows all 40 shots spraying out complete with a bunch of misses, and hits of various damage. It is very fulfilling, and never once has the aggravation of missing a 95% shot with a machine gun.

The missions are always exclusively (and to the game's determent) a 'kill them all' type objective. Sure, every now and then there might be a switch or something that needs to be toggled, but it always changes to just kill everything still alive. This is unfortunate, because the game gets to be a little repetitive on the typical wide-open maps. While there is a little impetus to try to engage in melee combat with some small stat boosts, the pure range and power of the Blood Angels means players generally tear through the aliens at range with few casualties.

All the various units players get access to are pretty cool. There's are the basic infantry that can take a decent hit, and do some good basic damage at range. Others include the heavy infantry 'Aggressors' with grenade launchers, power fists, and machine guns/flamethrowers designed to handle swarms of small enemies. As this progresses you get access to mechs, tanks, snipers, even female 'Battle Sisters.' One of the fun parts is how the unit yells when selected or ordered. From the Aggressors "We are the walls…we are the guns!" to Death Company's "I WILL SLAY THEM ALL!" crazed berserker yells are enjoyable with each new unit.

Overall, this is somewhat of a mixed bag that largely trends towards the positive. There are just a lot of little issues that really hold it back unnecessarily. For example, music is largely non-existent. Among the biggest flaw is how slow units move, and while you can be moving onto the next unit it is irritating how slow walking occurs and a lag with assigning commands. The worst issue is how utterly (emphasis on utterly) small some of the text is. This includes important stats like damage or effects, and there were many times this reviewer had to stand up and move next to the TV just to see what it was saying.

As was stated a little earlier, most of the missions are pretty basic - it is a testament to the overall experience being fun that even just moving ahead and killing everything is mostly enjoyable. Two outright fun missions though, is one where the player starts pinned in the middle of aliens that can one-shot entire groups of men, and a second mission of trying to breach a fortress with withering enemy fire raining down from the walls. Missions like these are great fun because they get away from the 'attack-move' type simple gameplay that most missions turn into.

While it is easy to point out a lot of the flaws, and really, they would be easy to fix, this overall is pretty darn good, and this is coming from someone with no previous exposure to the lore. The small text, lack of clarity on a lot of things like equipment damage, lack of notable music, and a little bit of annoyances dealing with trying to speed up things all take it down a notch. However, there is just something really fun and engaging about having a wall of guns moving forward, cutting down xenos.