Battlefleet Gothic: Armada

Ever since Dawn of War II: Retribution came out, it’s difficult to claim that we’ve received a proper Warhammer 40k title. With Battlefleet Gothic: Armada, Tindalos Interactive aims to do just that and, for the first time, take a PC Warhammer 40k title to space. I’ve dabbled in the game’s Open Beta a while and we’re going to find out what I discovered in the chunk of content that was available.

On the single-player side, three missions, alongside a preview of the campaign map were available. You get to play two scenarios that involve destroying and escaping from Chaos Fleets and a third, which has you protecting a transport against Orks. These scenarios are relatively short and provide merely a glimpse at what the campaign will hopefully be, but, from what is shown, there’s promise for a good single player campaign. The opening cinematics are quite good, having that typical Warhammer 40k awe-inspiring feeling to them and there seem to be enough planets to take care of alongside customizable fleets.  The single player will, however, allow us to play only as the Imperium, which, for a Chaos enthusiast such as myself is slightly disappointing.

Battlefleet Gothic: Armada’s beta was clearly oriented towards the multiplayer portion of the game. Two of the four planned factions were available: Chaos and the Imperium. The remaining two are represented by the Eldar and the Orks. The game asks you to create an admiral, giving you the possibility of having more than one for the same faction. This is, supposedly, so that you can specialize different fleets in different areas, given their limited upgrade slots. Matches use a matchmaking system that also determines the game mode you’ll play. I got the chance to play three of the available game modes.

Cruiser Clash is the typical deathmatch mode where you have to destroy or rout the enemy fleet. There was another mode that asked you to defend two points on the battlefield while the enemy tried to destroy them. It’s downright impossible to not have these points destroyed. The ships are fairly resilient and take time to be brought down and the enemy usually focuses straight on the target. However, they then actually need to escape the fight, either by warping out of combat or by reaching the designated area on the map. Once, when playing it, after having destroyed the objectives my opponent had managed to warp out one ship. Destroying the other one, however, rendered me victorious, which did strike me as odd. The third game mode revolved around transport ships. One player had to get them to the opposite end of the map while the other had to destroy the ships. This mode was relatively interesting as the transport ships had to be manually controlled manually, thus, adding another element to the mix.

Battles start with a deployment phase and continue with actual combat. Here, you need to guide your fleet through a relatively small and empty map. While the occasional asteroid, mine or gas field may pop up, most of the variety comes from the background which ends up looking a bit strange. You can set the range of fire which you want each ship to maintain and the preferred weaponry which is to be used (whether they be on the sides or at the front of the ship). The ship’s skills need to be micromanaged as well as, for example, manually activating thrusters can make you avoid incoming torpedoes or asteroids, saving some damage. The ship upgrading part is quite significant, offering passive bonuses and active skills that, while being mostly the same for both factions, do require you to plan out your fleet as you cannot acquire every upgrade on every ship.

Faction-wise, the Imperium seems to be much, much stronger than Chaos. In fact, their ships are more resilient, and, while the Chaos ships are supposed to have longer range, I’ve always found that, at least in Cruiser Clash, the Imperium is almost always the favored faction. While visually, the ships are detailed enough (a friendly tip would be to turn anti-aliasing to the lowest setting), the battles lack atmosphere. You’re supposed to take command over a fleet of gigantic ships with powerful cannons, yet the sound effects and the lack of animation on the cannons really work against it. In the beta, one could have two capital ships at most and, while it comes naturally for the combat to be relatively slow, the lack of proper atmosphere made it border on tedious at times. Certainly, you can spice things up with attempting to ram an unsuspecting opponent, but there were times when I felt disconnected from the fight, just looking at two ships firing shells in the same order at each other until one destroyed or routed the other one.

In order to avoid your ship getting destroyed (which does not remove it from your roster, instead just rendering it unavailable to use for a number of battles), you can attempt to warp out of the area. This blocks your ship in place and makes it unable to attack, but more often than not will succeed if you don’t wait until the very last moment. On top of that, apart from two skills which target specific areas of the ship, you cannot choose which parts of the enemy ship to attack. As certain systems and abilities are tied to certain parts of the ship, being allowed to choose, or at least somehow influence, the target of your attacks would be a very good addition. The beta had a few other problems aside from the ambiguous faction balancing. On any other setting than low, the anti-aliasing turns the ships into a blurry mess. The game crashed on me and my opponents on multiple occasions. In fact, I couldn’t play more than two matches in a row at any given time without having the game crash on me prior to the next one starting.

Battlefleet Gothic: Armada has the potential to be a good Warhammer 40k title. The push in release date from the 31^st or March to the 21^st of April is commendable.  With enough attention to the present issues and perhaps more variation or dynamic elements in the battles themselves, we could have a very good space RTS on our hands in less than a month’s time.

Bogdan Robert, NoobFeed
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