Nothing quite like a chainsword to the face

I became addicted to Warhammer 40k right before I left for Japan. I’d try to play here, but my folks haven’t gotten around to shipping me my army yet. While little has whet my appitite, the recent PSP demo for Warhammer 40k Squad Command is doing a good job thus far.

The game is actually turn based as opposed to real time which excites my Netherlands. Unlike most turn based strategy games, it lacks the “testing” phase of the order issuing. That is to say, when you tell a troop to do something, it does it and there’s no taking it back. While I’ve been prone to making mistakes, this also tends to make the playing a bit more fast paced and ‘raw’. Also leaves a lot of dead Space Marines at the end of some turns. That leads into my biggest complaint thus-far. Out of all the many races available in the 40k universe, only Space Marines and Chaos will be playable. Other than that, while in no way exactly like the table-top game, it retains enough to give a great experience.

In the given brief army construction menu it can already be seen that customization of your army will take place. In exchange for the “points” that are commonly used for playing 40k, beefing up your individual units causes a reduction in its available action points (AP) each turn. These are the points that are required for your moving and shooting. So, it is possible to double the ammo carried for a powerful gun, but setting the unit up for that perfect shot may take more time. Speaking of perfect shots, it seems that when you do take aim at your enemy, you can expend more AP to increase your chance of hitting. Spending these points doesn’t increase your damage, though, so it’s not worth it to unload a whole turn’s worth of AP into one shot.

I’ve played through the demo mission five times already, and I still feel like I can get fun out of it. I did manage to make it crash once when I ended my turn with no visible enemies on the screen, but since that it’s been cool. I’ve now placed a pre-order on Play Asia. Thirty five American bones with free shipping on top. It comes out sometime in November, so that’ll be a nice treat. Hopefully I get it before the Dragon Quest IV remake hits, though, as I’m sure that will suck a lot of my Winter gaming.

Did I forget to mention anything? Hrm, oh yeah, the environments are destructible. It’s pretty badass to blow a hole in the wall the enemy are standing behind, resulting in a couple of gas tanks taking enough damage to blow them bitches to kingdom come. The camera system is pretty assy though. Would have much preferred a rotation system instead of only the tilting they let you do right now.