Burn, xenos scum! Muahahahahaha! For the Emperor! (and his various assorted mythology I can't be bothered to remember)
In terms of immersion, I'm fundamentally leery of "kitchen sink" fantasy settings like Warhammer 40,000 or Shadowrun. Plus, if I'm going to suffer such tedious all-purpose young-adult-grade bombast, I'd much rather be playing one of the interesting races instead of stoopid humies. Nevertheless, always on the lookout for turn-based strategy / tactics, I've resolved to try Gladius, Mechanicus and Sanctus Reach all in the next year or two. Plus, this one's got howling, so... y'know... I had to.
I was drawn to the title because of Slitherine's involvement. They'd previously published WH40K:Armageddon, which despite being 2D with no animated models (muzzle flashes aside) and an obviously painted-over WWII TBS with orks substituted for nazis, provided a surprisingly engaging campaign. Sanctus Reach does have rudimentary animations, 3D camera motion and other improvements to elevate its visuals to at least mid-2000s standards, but it seems to be actively trying to push customers away with its interface while simultaneously burying them in busywork.
Before you even get to fighting, you're put through the chore of deploying your troops in separate selection and placement phases. For a bonus, you'll want to drag-and-drop, because clicking units then selecting a new square prompts an utterly superfluous confirmation pop-up. (Comes of handling deployment through the attack interface.) For a bonus bonus, you can't just select your units from a list. They're automatically scattered around your half of the map, making you hunt around for your armor / AoE / sniper squads visually.
Mind you, this is all before you've even started playing.
Then you'll find you can't pan the map with arrow keys, inexplicably bound to the mousewheel zoom function and Q/E turning instead of WASD.
Can't rebind keys through the game interface. At all. Screwing around with .ini files (or whatever the modern equivalent) is one bit of '90s nostalgia I prefer not to relive.
Interface locked during animations, especially fun when enemies pop out of the fog of war to flank your squishies but you can't see what they're actually shooting at.
Unable to escape to the options menu while units act... for instance during the entire enemy turn, which will take a couple of minutes every time for larger battles. Thankfully you can at least speed up enemy animations... but not your own?
All this still isn't broaching the laughably inexplicable, like the upside down save list with new saves at the bottom. Or that attempting to escape out of a save/load confirmation pop-up instead closes the options menu behind it.
By itself, any one of these little interface wrangling chores would barely warrant a comedic aside. Taken together, they prompt the same reaction as O.R.B. or Dead State or Defense Grid 2: did you think I wanted to buy a video game from you, or an exciting, revolutionary new adventure in menu surfing?
I'd like to keep playing the Sanctus Reach campaign. Once you get into it, the combat makes good use of the usual armor / morale / cover / movespeed / AoE / range precepts of tactical combat.
However, most missions ("skirmishes") are built around randomized enemy groups which fail to cooperate, sitting back and letting you polish them off piecemeal in the worst old-school mob-farming fashion.
Randomization also seems minimal, and I'm getting bored of seeing the same one(1) artillery and two(2) support infantry per skirmish.
Giving experience for killing blows was an outdated mechanic twenty years ago and it hasn't aged well. Trying to get all my squads to level four makes a whole separate minigame unto itself, and it's already gotten old.
I can't decide whether the predetermined unit roster is too restrictive (a capitulation to the units' inherent imbalance) or just insulting hand-holding, but having their availability arbitrarily determined with each new mission outright prevents me from becoming at all invested in their individual fates.
Worst of all, even the campaign as a whole looks as padded for length as a freshman's term paper, scripting interspersed with randomization at the staggering rate of three mandatory auto-generated fights for every customized map.
There are upsides and downsides to playing games within a narrow niche like squad tactics. On one hand, developers know they're addressing an audience with higher expectations instead of merely marketing to the fast-fingered, slow-brained tween crowd who'll play whatever their Facebook list is into at the moment. On the other hand, they also know they're addressing an audience so starved for new content and validation of their hobby that they'll buy anything which ticks at least a few items on a checklist of superficialities. Sanctus Reach has space marines and generic macho 1980s "army guy" banter. Check. It has tiles and turns. Check. It has unit selection and upgrades. Check.
It fails to tie it all together.
Mate.
I'd be willing to suffer the amateurish interface if it overlay any substance, but seventeen missions into this I've yet to see a glimmer of inspiration.
However, its mediocrity does bring into question, once again, the validity of squad management as a genre unto itself. Is this really the best way to spew flamethrowers at orks?
For that I'll need to digress into role-playing games and AoW:Planetfall.
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