Recent reviews by Codex_of_Memory

Taking the role of the Ultramarines in this DLC you are given control of the most iconic of all Space Marine chapters, these boys in blue might be the generic but theoretically this is their strength, they can do everything really well and to an extend this felt true throughout the DLC. If you read my other reviews of the DLC for this game you will probably note that I have a certain solution to all problems in them called “Throw a Dreadnaught at it” and this exist to a certain extent but not nearly as prevalent as in the other DLCs.

First let is consider what makes the Ultramarine from Blood Angels and Salamanders; Blood Angels are assault troops revealing in close combat with vicious Death Company elites leading the way (with Dreadnaughts to deal with anything tough), next is the Salamanders who have burner units galore, nothing in cover is safe which is really good up close and personal (with Dreadnaughts to deal with anything tough). This all boils down to Salamanders and Blood Angels being two flavours who does exactly the same thing, The Ultramarine are not assault troops, while far far superior to Imperial Guard they fall short compared to the other space marines, instead they excel in laying down mass fire with defence in depth using heavy bolters, whirlwinds and Land Raiders with Helios standing right next to the front line making any attack on the Ultramarine lines a bloodbath for the attacker.

With this in mind you would think that Ultramarines are truly great at countering the Orks who likes melee and for the most part this is true, any enemy who dares engage you will be dealt with swiftly however there are several missions where the Orks will just sit in their buildings and that is here the Ultramarine toolkit falls apart. This is the challenge of this DLC not to get bogged down with units taking defensive positions and the answer? Dreadnaughts, especially the Hellfire Dreadnaught was the star of any team.

The missions feel more diverse than the base game and the number of turns you have is (for me anyway) a bit too tight, this gives a serious difficulty increase compared to the base game, so beware of this and if you were struggling in the base game consider lower the difficulty a bit. A lot of the maps are quite large with some very defined and narrow lanes, which is great for when you need to hold against and onslaught to obtain your goal and a challenge when your gun lines has to assault well dug in Orks.

The enemy targeting is better than in the base game, but also to some extend frustrating as it will often ignore your strongest units completely and go for whatever you have in the backline. You could say it is smart, but what it mostly does is slow you down instead of causing a full defeat. So you will have to closely manage keeping your vulnerable units (infantry and tanks) safe and in cover and do your best to expose your tankier units (Dreadnaughts) to enemy fire.
The other downside to the enemy targeting priority is that bikes, land speeders, flies etc. have very little place in your battleline, these units are fragile and easily destroyed but have a high cost. This is a shame as there are some very interesting options, but they die far far too easily for the cost and it will be a serious challenge to keep them alive long enough to be truly experienced.

Finally let us talk about Dreadnaughts, this is the first time I didn’t feel these were the answer to all problems, but they are the only real answer to anything truly tanky, so you will use them extensively against all forms for vehicles, tanks, walkers etc. This is not the entire story, since much of the game is about assault objectives in ruins, cities etc you will need infantry and artillery to grab the objects and deal with dug in Orks once the Dreadnaughts have softened them up a bit. Dreadnaughts also have problems quickly eliminating large mobs of Orks, so for this you will need your gunlines to do serious work to have any chance of achieving your objectives. All of this is a good thing, for once it didn’t feel like the only answer was a Dreadnaught even if it is always part of the answer. A nice change of pace.

The immersion in this one is someone less, there missions seem mostly like the side show to the more important stuff happening elsewhere and of course there is no voice acting for the mission briefing which would have elevated the story quite a bit.

Overall, the missions felt tight, more balanced than earlier, less flavourful but more varied and less impact full for the story of Armageddon. If the key point for you is the tactical combat you should get this DLC, it is fun and interesting and you will have to make some hard choices about which units you will sacrifice and which you wouldn’t.

And now the final score.

Art: 6 (nothing new under the sun)
Combat: 7 (fast paced, most of the time, however sometimes it can bog down)
Interface: 5 (it's the same, so no change).
Level design: 9 (Soo close to perfect, for the sheer variety).

Mars War Logs is an interesting RPG, with a surprising depth to the characters in the story, whether they are enemy or friends and many of the decisions are steeped in shades of grey.

However it is hardly a perfect game either, first of all the story is rather short the campaign barely feels like it has gotten started before it is over and the cast of characters are rather small and quite a few of them seems a bit random. As does the random encounters which are quite hard in fact most of the "big" fights are in fact easier than the random ones. Also the amount of equipment in the game seems rather limited and has very little to do with modern much less sci-fi concepts I spend most of the game running around with a metal pipe with what was basically a nail through it. Finally the biggest flaw of the game is it tends to forget to teach the player the consequences of using ingame mechanics, apparantly to be "good" in the game you shouldn't kill (do forget that we knocked the guy down with a barrage of 7 inch nail darts and several massive blows to the skull), however if you do kill you gain more money, when this mechanic is introduced it isn't explained that you just knocked everyone senseless up to know (except animals which you apparantly kill).

On the up side the game autosaes quite often before fights so you can redo them, the dialogues are fully voiced and feel more natural than most RPG dialogues and the dialogue choices actually fit well with what is being said (I am looking disapproving at you mass effect) and there are sometimes everal different ways to handle a situation. the combat mechanics are solid and doesn't change wildly from one fight to the next with two exceptions, other than that the enemies mostly stay the same in terms of tactics while you gain new combat skills and improve your old ones.

All in all I will give this game a 7 out of 10.

This game is a joyful little trip to a post apocalypotic world.

In Angels of Death we focus on the Blood Angels, red space marines whom are not nearly as addicted to fire as the Salamanders, however they spot a nice wide range of units with a gameplay that is more balanced than the Salamanders from Vulcan's Wrath. The mission design this time focuses far more on infantry fighting and there are great hordes of orc infantry units ready to be mowed down by bolter fire from your space marines and the flow of battle have improved greatly this time around.

Everything that was new to the game in Vulcan's Wrath is still around this time, so I will not dwell into that and overall I didn't feel there was a whole lot of new under the sun mechanical in this DLC except the mission scripting is improved and what secondary missions are has become far more obscure.

One of the thing that for me differ from the previous releases is that the maps felt far better designed and quite enganging, the game also manages to present us with many differnet styles of maps with focus on different styles of play which is very pleasing.

The enemies this time is have shifted to a far more infantry based mixed, something the Salamanders would have loved and that the Blood Angels are seemingly expects in as well. The good thing is that the game can present you with far more units without slowing the flow down to a halt trying to wear down a screen full of heavy army units and overal, I found this very enjoyable, however one issue is that different units fail to shine as much as they have earlier, most is dealt with in a similar fashion and that is a bit of a shame.

Blood Angel units and ... Dreadnoughts, honestly again the dreadnoughts are the foundation of any units their only real downsides are that there is a few pieces of terrain they can't enter and they are not exactly fast other than that they are the best of the best. Looking beyond the dreads the Blood Angel army in this DLC have plenty of requsition and in my play time regular space marines and tactical marines never once saw battle, the cheapest unit I bought at any time was the blackguard space marines which can deal deadly blows to anything on the battlefield, other than that the range of vehicle and infantry include options for supporting fire which seems to be the mainstay of the Blood Angels, making them a nearly immovable object on the enemies turn and the dreads and high value units makes something close to an unstoppable force on your turn, when you get this formular down this DLC will have by far the easiest to date.

The missions varies greatly from claim X number of victory hexen, destroy all enemy units (which I should mention did not have a single lone unit somewhere you had to spend way to many turns to find, excellent job guys!) to by far my favorite escorting a bunch of chimera armoured personal carriers, which made them highly entertaining and challanging and at no point did it feel repetative, something the base game and Vulcan's Wrath didn't completely escape.

In a somewhat strange turn around I didn't feel deployment was as important in this DLC as it was in the rest of the game as long as my forces were build around a standard strategy, armoured spear head, support fire back up, and infantry on the same and preferably a leader in the back (not a very WH40kish place for them ohh well).

I think the only downsides are that the meeting with the Orc warlord was the least memorable of all the content so far, maybe it was simply my setup but he attacked my units and was annihilated same round not even grinding my advance to a halt. It was... anticlimatic. The other downside is that hover and flyers are far far too weak to really have a place in the game this goes for both hostile and allied units they can seemingly be destroyed with impunity by anything they face leaving them no spot in the army at all and their inability to fly over "tall trees" or buildings made them little more than vehicles that could potentially travel across water. AA fire is pointless, whatever they attack will almost or entirely kill them.

My final thoughts are that I loved the DLC, and the Blood Angels were great fun to play and their mutual supporting structure was far more evident than Steel Legion (imperial guard) or the Salamanders (space marines) making them an easier army to learn to use well. All the missions were fun and II had completed them before I knew it, however I really really still miss the voice acting of the NPCs it gave so much more depth to the missions and the stories. I will recommend this to anyone whom liked the gase game and to some extend I would recommend you play this one before Vulcan's Wrath.


Art: 6 (The maps seemed more pleasing to look at but not enough to change my score from the base game score.)
Combat: 8 (Combat was excellent and so is the flow, perhaps a little easy but other than that excellent!)
Interface: 5 (it's the same, so no change).
Voice acting: 0 (The base game had it and it could have added so much more)
Level design: 9 (again much mjuch improved slightly better than Vulcan's Wraith).

Overall: 6 (same as Vulcan's Wrath but for slightly different reasons, honestlly I recommend this DLC, it is well worth it).

This DLC focus on the actions of the Salamanders, meaning this is all about the (green) space marines whom are quite in love with fire. The missions are far more hectic are overall much better designed than the missions in the basic game where everything tended to bunch up, here there is more of a flow to it and the enemies' targetting priority seems slightly improvedthis is a good thing! less big mass of enemies cluttering up the entire screen, more a surge. Also there are a few other new additions:

First of all the enemy can and will reinforce often, making it an absolutely necessity to ffocus overwhelming firepower against a single target, the good news is that there are quite a few hard hitting Salamanders the bad part is that most of them are melee, meaning you will have to choose the right moment when the morale is sufficiently low to engage in melee... or just have a dreadnought do it.

second: gretchins have gotten some serious reinforcement and averages around 80 in a unit, but may be as many as 150 are they can and will abosrb everything you can throw at them for a considerable time, delaying your forces. This is a quite interesting twist that changes the flow of battle quite a bit. Meeting a massive unit like that forces hard decisions, like outrun them, spend a ton of time burning them down (remember these guys love fire) or leave a unit behind to tie up the tanking unit and hopefully it will survive.

third: the missions here are far far more time critical meaning you can't do the slow pondering advance from the main game, but have to push forward and that makes things more messy making things much harder.

there are several other changes but these are the most important, though an honourabl mention for me goes to the fact several of the mission are claim a certain number of objectives and not just all of them, which usually leave you with a far more interesting choice of deciding how to deploy and what what strategy you need to claim what you need fast enough. However all is just well in this DLC there are few annoying things from my perpective:

Let's start out with that the game starts by instructing you that Salamander space marines are all about a rapid offense ala blitzkrieg and then gives you several missions where all you do is static defense that was more than mildly annoying, in fact at the time I felt very cheated since I was looking forward to blazing across the battlefield and instead we had some trentch warfare.

There are not all that many different maps in this one, which meanings you will be faced with the same map, while with a new problem set, it lessens once more the feel of the Salamanders proclaimed rapid advance forté.

Third the problem to almost every situation in this DLC is solved by throwing more dreadnoughts at it, these units are way way to effective for their lown good, it's not so much their damage output (which isn't bad!) but their survivability, more than once I had gargants (you know orc titans) go down to a single venerable dreadnought, which it didn't survive unscatched the hardness of the armor plating of these feels a bit lobsided.

This time my honorable mention goes to the voice acting as in unlike the first one there isn't any making the game feel even more outdated. Frankly I think it was a poor choice on their part, however I am sure some will disagree with me.

Overall I like the DLC and it's certainly long enough for the practice tag even if it doesn't bring a whole lot of new units etc to the table. Just be aware that it is harder and each missions takes even longer to complere.

and now for my favorite thing assigning the DLC a score.

Art: 6 (nothing new really so same as the base game.)
Combat: 8 (even more options and hard choices to make good job!)
Interface: 5 (it's the same, so no change).
Voice acting: 0 (The base game had it this one should have had it as well)
Level design: 9 (Much imrpoved level design giving you some serious challenges to overcome, together with mission design it makes for an interesting experience and a few minor times when you need marines rather than dreadnoughts).

Overall: 6 (5.6 - the lack of voice acting was for me a huge loss even with some of the other improvements)

I have a great personal love for the warhammer game and the ideas behind the races, for quite a few years I played the warhammer 40k epic game and this game certainly bring sback a lot of the same things as WH40KEpic does and if you are a fan of warhammer 40k and turn based strategy I would highly recommend this game.

The good:

- A large variaty of units all different (to a greater or lesser degree).
- Each unit has a different role on the battlefield.
- There is a storyline and you get to pick a few responses allowing you to become more immersed.
- Each move of a unit have meaning.
- Pre-battle deployment is very important.
- selecting the right mix of unit is important and there is a need to get more than one kind.

The bad:

- The amount of men/vehicles in each unit is displayed by a number rather than each member visible on the screen.
- The AI seem to enjoy just mass assault and not much else, this sadly makes most of the battles not very varied.
- The AI have no clue how to effective use of it's unit and will often go for a low value soft target as oppose to letting the big guns slowly wear down the big heavily armored units. The downside is that heavy units usually gets really good and you can annihilate the enemy by throwing cannon fooder at the AI, however basic units will rarely survive for long.
- Each mission have a limit over how many units you can own/deploy, this means that the game quickly becomes about massed armored assaults whyere infantry have little real purpose except standing behind the armor and grabbing the objectives.
- Most of the battles is about grabbing X amount of objective spots, I found that a little dull. Especially since they are usually placed that it means you also have to annihilate the entire opposing force.
- Enemy command units while tough have a nasty habit of parking themsleves in the open on the front line to be fairly easily desposed off. With grand commanders like no wonder the AI have such poor tactics.
- Killing the enemy commander have no real effect on the battle.
- Enemy commanders fail to have significant impact on the battle. Yes I am really annoyed at the pointlessness of them.
- Each battle is LONG so if you want a full battle beware it will take probably between 1 hour and 1h 30m to play one battle.
- Some unit variants seem to have no purpose.
- It is not always clear what effect a tile will have on a unit.
- each weapon have a ton of statistic, but little to enable you to decide if it is a good or a bad unit when you are starting out.
- a minor point but I was really sadden that there was no option to customize your titans considering how many options other units has this seems like and oversight.


Overall the experience despite the flaws is overall good and very engaging, I have played several games like this over the years and this is in many ways one of the better ones and overall really well designed. The only real issue I have is that it doesn't feel (visually and mechanically) like a recent game, but rather as a game that could easily have been made 10+ years ago.

(and because I like the idea of scores!)

Art: 6 (it's good and fits but it isn't impressive)
Combat: 7 (lots of option everythign feels meaningful, however the AI and focus on heavy units brings the game down a bit)
Interface: 5 (clear and with a lot of options right at your fingers, as long as you already knows what everything means)
Story: 7 (it's a warhammer 40k story it's about war, fits well but could use a bit more... life).
Voice acting: 8 (surprisingly good)
Level design: 7 (excellent level design with interesting challenges to overcome, only downside it is a design that mostly make things difficult rather than enabling certain units to really shine).

Overall: 7 (or 6.7 if you want to be exact)

The story is quite interesting, but so far it doesn't go any places you haven't seen before nor are there any big surprises in it, but it is fairly well written and it moves along at a good pace. It's biggest problem is that it is really the introduction of what is to come. So I will give the story a 7.

The character interaction is fairly classic romance comedy manga/anime however the story luckily doesn't linger long enough for the interaction to get "forced" in an attempt to obey the tropes, however this also means it doesn't linger long enough for the character to step outside this confine and develop to more unique characters. There is pretty much just one character we see any real development with, even though a few of the others seems ready to develop they fail to do so. So the interaction I will give a 6, its good but it doesn't lift the story any higher.

The combat are fairly straight forward but quite hard and a few of the missions are almost impossible, but on the up side it gives you a lot of option in what you want to do and how to expend your resources. For turned based combat it is actually really good at what it does, so I will give combat an 9.

The upgrade system is a bit of a mess frankly, while it is easy to see what you upgrae some iof the upgrades are meaningless in the increments they are in and otehrs are too expensive for the boost they do give. I feel this system needs a lot of adjusting or an overhaul, luckily you can "reclaim" all the money you spend to fiddle around with what works best. So since it still seems somewhat incomplete I will give it a 4.

The artwork is good, and to me seems very macross/robotech inspired for the msot parts the only thing that really got on my bad side was the use of "school uniform" outfit rather than uniforms or similar off duty clothes. So I will give this an 9.

The game itself can be unresponsive at times and be slow to react or because it is so slow to process where you click it makes you take an unintended action, this is very bad in the battles as these are really hard as they are already. So to play this game you need to saddle yourself with patience to make sure the game knows what you just pushed before moving on. Also the "target" places on the units you can select to affect with the action does not dictate if you select the right target rather their unit graphic (ryder or ship) does, this means a tall unit can partially cover for the above unit causing you to select the wrong one. Anyway I will give the "system" a 3, it is not unplayable, but it is very frustrating.

So overall I will give this game a 6, it has a lot of good qualities but a few glaring problems that in the current form needs to be fixed.