WH40K: Mech Any Cuss

By the will of the Om-me-ssiah I declare this game middlin' tolerable!

 

Space-robo-zombies with railguns, taste my space-axe!

Warhammer's worst and best feature is its unsubtlety. If there is any plot to be found in Mechanicus' flavor text, it's blatantly laid out in the first ten lines of dialogue between your campaign's NPC quest-givers:

But while you do make a de facto choice between finishing Scaevola or Videx's last mission (easy choice for me - screw the reactionary, embrace new tech all the way, awww yeah baby, corrupt me like that) this is a squad tactical not an RPG and flavor text is just for flavor, focusing your decision-making almost entirely on strategy. To start with, Mechanicus appears the closest spiritual successor to Chaos Gate, a game remembered by surprisingly many for its very mediocrity... and the apple doesn't fall far from the tree.

Graphics sometimes bleed over each other or disappear, I've had mobs teleport over the map's edge inexplicably, but at least four years after release bugs are few, far between and of little impact. Worse are the misconceived design choices. The game's main conceit is that you find yourself on a planet of rapidly awakening enemy cyberzombies and must run missions as efficiently as possible to build up your forces before you need to fight the big boss. In practical terms, this means you're timed by a grand total of combat rounds, each five rounds spent adding up to a percent of "awakening" with plenty of leeway in cancelling out spent rounds or being penalized with extra rounds for making the wrong choices.

 

Forty-six missions are subdivided into one to three combats of several rounds, plus an overland map phase advancing a few interlinked nodes (at two rounds a move) and making dialogue choices in response to various events. I found these enjoyable enough, written with enough ambiguity to make you weigh basic strategy against your role as cult leader, with just enough randomness thrown in to remind you the universe hates you, but not so much as to turn it into a luck-based game. This can't be said for the other type of map node, glyphs, which just make you choose randomly between some abstract symbols with zero meaning to be discerned. You might decide to roleplay regular node decisions, but the glyphs seem put there just to make you reload for luck.

Overall, it's stretched just slightly thin. Albeit not nearly to the extent of Sanctus Reach, you will run into some redundancy (reused map layouts, only seven skill lines for six characters with two-and-change specializations each) and some balance issues. Just as with the campaign's timer, Mechanicus' devotion to arithmetic comes through in basic combat as well

Damage boosts and Taming the Machine Spirit (instantly fills all your weapons' rage bars for bonus effects) can let you mop up entire fights in the first round, or even just one shot. That Heavy Grav Cannon sure clears a room, provided the room's big enough for your team to stand out of boom-boom radius. Your greatest tactical challenge is managing your team's shared mana pool (a.k.a. "cognition") as a finite resource of 5-10 with no passive regeneration, gathered from your environment. I wholeheartedly applaud any return of resource management... if only they hadn't undercut their system by handing you full mana refills. By the end I was running 4/6 Lexmechanic for Overcharge (+2 Tech-Auxilium for free casts) making a joke not only out of trash mobs but the bosses, even the big boss Szaregon who got K.O.d in the opening round - and I wasn't even specifically slotted for it. Some players have custom-built groups and one-shotted him and his paltry hundred HP for shits and giggles. In other words, on "normal" difficulty this is an easy game (though you do get quite a few unusual difficulty sliders to spice things up, not only in terms of damage but movement speed or limiting your ability casts) and only sloppy design makes it more of a slog than it has to be.

I ended up skipping Videx' last three missions, because I spent half the campaign incurring far more awakening penalty than necessary for not realizing the "scan or destroy" descriptor in combat should read "scan, then destroy" letting you finish many missions at zero percent penalty without surrendering combat loot. Still, it throws more tactical challenges at you than the singleminded Scooby Doo repetition of Mutant Year Zero for instance; surrounded or facing off over a bridge, swarmed or swarming a boss, slow and steady or speeding to loot'n'scoot, etc. It also gives you far more freedom than old Chaos Gate did in choosing your path forward by half a dozen mission options, of varying difficulty and tantalizing rewards, at any one time.

So why am I not giving Mechanicus a heartier recommendation?

Interface timesinks.

As per current marketing dogma, Mechanicus strains to pad out its run length by any means possible. You might blame it on unoptimized code slowing everything down (and there are some inexplicably slow loads) until you notice the odd skill like Refractor Field Generator insta-casting with no fuss. No, the issue here is that every single possible action and interaction has an extra half second tacked on to both its beginning and end, a timer ticking down, resource by resource ticking up increment by increment, weapons charging, weapons discharging, abilities being prepared, text boxes opening and closing, text scrolling, abilities casting, map paths lighting up, pop-ups popping up, manually removing items from loadouts instead of replacing them with something else in one double-click, clicking through the huge unsorted canticles list one by one, even clicking "save game" makes you back out manually through three menus afterwards. At three hundred mouse clicks per mission compounded over fifty missions, eating at barest minimum four extra hours' of your customers' time simply by extending the time to click a mouse is pretty unforgivable, and ironic in a campaign revolving around managing time investment.

So why am I not giving Mechanicus a heartier condemnation?

Strategically, player directed mission progression and unit choice (you get some disposable mooks aside from your priests; yay ruststalker!) and variable investment in each mission by navigating nodes all add up to unassumingly solid TBS gameplay. But, this being a French game, its aesthetic side manages to stand out even with relatively little budget. As I said, the WH40K universe is an unsubtle one, and the only real way to own it is to play it to the hilt. Back in the '90s Warhammer's "grimdark" stylings were easily lost in all the witches, xenomorphs, Crows, Terminators, general goth craze and heavy metal's death rattle. Now though, slogging through pop culture's stagnant, rancid forced politeness, a bit of kill'em'all skulls'n'flames badassery comes as such a breath of fresh air, and Mechanicus plays it up in everything from gory descriptions of slaughtered troops to the NPCs' modem demonic simlish conversations. I certainly approve of Scaevola's transhumanist bent being treated as a valid end choice, and though the various talking heads' stock dialogue wears thin by repetition (yeah, Faustinius, you're compartmentalized, you're very compartmentalized, we get it, can't you compartmentalize reminding us of your compartmentalization?) they fill their roles well enough. Visually, the Necron temples fit their scifantasy Minas Morgul routine better than most such imitations. Seriously, look at their freaking combat transition screen!

Metal. As. Fuck. (Also, ahre you Sahrhah Cohnnor?)

But, as with Chaos Gate, everyone who talks about this game will mention the music. Where Chaos Gate's choral soundtrack simply fit the setting perfectly in a "so bad it's good" way, Mechanicus' industrial pipe organ is objectively great stuff with pretty much everyone praising Dance of the Cryptek. Maybe Bulwark Studios will move on to great things, maybe not... but I do think we'll be hearing more from Guillaume David.

 

It's rare to recommend a game as both worth your time and a waste of time at the same time.