Adventures in Clicking: WH: 40K: Gladius: Relics: of: War:

"Good morning killer king you're a star
That's gorgeous hold it right where you are"

 

Amanda Palmer - Guitar Hero

 

 

Decided Sanctus Reach isn't worth even my worthless time (got as far as Goff Town before the tedium did me in) so with a sale on WH40K games I've moved on to Gladius, the recent 4X adaptation of the setting. So far it's... slightly better, I'll give it that, but a multifaceted summation will have to wait. For now, I just find the interface design lacking.

Just as WH40K:Armageddon was a cheaply reskinned WWII game with ork graphics substituted for nazis, Gladius is a reskinned version of Proxy Studios' old Alpha Centauri clone Pandora: First Contact. While I had numerous complaints about Pandora, the interface was not one of them, and even transposed to Gladius it remains fundamentally sleek, clean and efficient, unlike say Sanctus Reach's counterintuitive muddling. Hence my choice of wording: not "broken" but lacking. Take that screenshot above, where I tried clicking on a hex near my city only to have a notification icon automatically expand under the cursor. Why? The notification icons themselves would be perfectly clickable without occupying the whole space above your minimap.

 

Then there's animation speed, thankfully adjustable but badly proportioned, with overdrawn wind-up/down portions at the start and end of each action. Or the lack of CTRL+# bookmarks. Or that units cancel their movement orders if their destination's momentarily occupied, regardless of how many turns remain to said destination. Or this bullshit:

Can you tell me why my unit's pathing ten turns to move a single hex? Give up? Turns out he's standing atop a cliff. Do you see the cliff? Huh? Do ya? No? Yeah, me neither, and in a game which heavily encourages interdiction this sort of detail does not benefit from subtlety.

 

Most annoyingly though, Gladius seems aggressively opposed to the very idea of queuing actions. The lack of a research queue struck me first, as I prefer setting a progression sequence a hundred turns in advance in these games. Being unable to queue actions during an enemy turn is not unusual (though newer games have been letting you click some options and processing your order as soon as your turn starts) but in Gladius you can't even queue animations to take place before turn's end. The "end turn" button erases unprocessed orders. Even more perplexing, you can't rearrange production queues, a feature that's been standard in strategy genres for fifteen years. Topping even that, units can't be given waypoints.

I'd go easier on these idiots if not for Gladius heavily recycling Pandora's existing gameplay with repainted miniatures. You had SIX YEARS to polish this turd, and for all you've been passing Gladius off as your big ticket item with a big-name license attached, your customers can reasonably demand some quality of life features. Okay, fine, I can forgive, say, a lack of projected unit paths on mouse-over... but no waypoints? This is a 1990s issue. Did you at least figure out action hotkeys for yourselves or did your playtesters need to remind you of those?