Developed by Every Single Soldier and published by Slitherine Games/Matrix Games, Afghanistan '11 is the new version of a unique game formula first utilized in Vietnam '65. In both games, combat is only a means to an end: winning the hearts and minds of a nation. In Afghanistan '11 (A11) the player must deal with multiple new layers of strategy in order to achieve that goal. To get a look at the flow of the gameplay, check out my two part AAR. 

Part 1 and Part 2. 

Dealing with an insurgency is one of the most frustrating problems for modern military forces. Fighting a enemy that appears from among the civilian population, and then fades away again, makes conventional tactics far less effective. All the tanks and fighter jets in the world won't help you defeat an ideology, if the local people support it. This leads us to the key to victory in A11, winning over the local population to your cause. 

The strategic overview screen helps you keep track of the big picture.

Players in A11 will certainly spend a lot of time sending troops into battle, ordering airstrikes, and deploying special forces via helicopters. However, most of these actions will be done in support of more strategic objectives like clearing IED's from highways, connecting isolated villages with roads, and sending supplies to those villages to earn their cooperation. To keep operations running smoothly, the player will also need to consider logistics. Every unit in the field only has enough rations/fuel to operate for around four or five turns before it needs return to base or be resupplied. Supplies can be delivered by truck, helicopter, or emergency drops. To really be effective, the player will need to build Forward Operating Bases (FOB's) in order to project their power further out from HQ. 

A supply convoy moves south  as Taliban forces descend on FOB Bravo.

There is another important factor the player must consider at all times: Political Points (PP). Every new unit brought into the theater, every casualty sustained, and even every movement a unit makes will cost you PP. Defeating enemy forces and clearing away opium fields, among other actions, will bump this number up. The player is also able to influence the occasional election of a new president of Afghanistan using these points. A more friendly government will make your life easier, while a pro-Taliban leader will make life miserable. 

Pick who you will support and if you will spend PP to help him win.

As you can see, A11 mimics the troubles of the real conflict on several levels. Simply running around fighting the militia and Taliban groups active on the map will get you nowhere. These enemy forces have no base that you can destroy, and will never stop coming at you. Instead, the player must keep those foes at bay with one hand, while building up infrastructure and civilian relationships with the other.

A11 is a turn based game in which each of your units has a specific number of action points they can use to move, fight or perform other actions each turn. There are about a dozen different unit types, each with an important role to play in your strategy. Infantry units can go into villages to collect intel, sweep an area around themselves for IED's, and of course fight the enemy head on. Husky mine sweeping vehicles are crucial for keeping roads and highways clear of IED's so that you can move convoys of supplies and troops around the map quickly. Don't leave home without one, seriously! Transport trucks are a cheap way to resupply FOB's and take UN aid to villages, while the far more expensive Chinook helicopter does the same job with the advantage of zipping around through the air. There are also Blackhawk helicopters, MRAP transports, special forces squads, artillery, and engineers to build things. If you have the PP available, you can call in Stryker APC's and Apache gunships to add some serious firepower to the battle. 


The game has an effective series of tutorial missions which teach you about all the different units and how to use them. The tutorial covers the basic strategic concepts needed for victory, but it will still very much be a trial by fire when you take on your first real mission. This is because the gameplay is open ended and lets you as the commander approach a mission in whatever way you see fit. Will you build up a network of FOB's and roads to create a permanent presence all over the map, or will you bring in numerous helicopters to move everything by air. Likely you will need a mixture depending on the the local terrain and distribution of villages.

There are two different ways to play the game, either the 18 mission campaign based on real world events, or the randomized skirmish mode. The scenarios take the core gameplay and add a few twists, but the skirmish mode alone will keep any player busy. 

Let's take a spin through what a typical skirmish match entails. You will begin the game with an HQ and nothing else. Looking out across the randomly generated map you will see a highway, some roads, mountains, deserts, maybe a river, and the key feature that the game revolves around: villages. Each village has a flag indicating its current political leaning. Keep the villages leaning towards the government or coalition and you will have smooth sailing. Let a village slip into the grasp of the local militia, or even the Taliban, and that area of the map becomes more dangerous.

Not a good neighborhood.

There are several actions you can take to get those villages on your side. Using your engineer units to connect those villages to the main highway and build a water supply is the most permanent way to accomplish this. However, it requires a significant investment of PP and time. Additionally, that new infrastructure then becomes a target for your enemy and forces you stretch your forces even further. You can also win hearts and minds by delivering UN aid to the villages using either supply trucks or Chinooks. This is an especially good way to influence the more remote villages that you may not be able to reach otherwise. Clearing IED's and destroying enemy units will also boost support in your favor. 

The sum of your efforts will be shown in the hearts and minds score, always visible at the top of the screen. Your goal in a skirmish is to get this number past a certain threshold and keep it there until the final turn. Keeping it high will help with the presidential elections which occur a few times during a typical match. Getting a more favorable candidate in office will often make your actions cheaper and enemy actions less frequent. Let that score lapse and your PP will start slipping away. If your political position back home gets too abysmal the game will end prematurely. 

Now, while you are working to win the people over to your side, what is the enemy doing? Enemy forces come in two flavors, numerous yet weak militia and the more resilient Taliban. The militia forces will pop up all over the map, and then attempt to place IED's and cause other trouble for you. One hit from any of your combat units will either destroy them or send them scattering in every direction. Taliban units will initially only appear along the eastern edge of the map, representing Pakistan, and then move in to try and influence villages and cause other problems. These Taliban groups take two hits to destroy. Hit them only once and they will flee momentarily, only to regroup and continue with their mission. If a village falls completely into the grasp of the Taliban, they will then begin spawning nearby.

Combat in A11 is simple on the surface. Select a combat unit and mouse over an enemy to see your percentage chance of winning. Click to carry out the attack and hope for the best. The strategy comes in deciding which units to use for combat and when. It is always favorable to destroy the enemy by using artillery, airstrikes, or gunships, because sending in ground forces carries the risk that they will take casualties or even be destroyed. Losing a unit this way is a real one-two punch, since you lose political points immediately and must spend more to replace that unit. FOB's come with a free mortar unit for defense, but it has limited ammunition. More ammo must be brought in from HQ to keep the shells flying. Heavy artillery guns can also be brought in to an upgraded FOB if you need serious defense. 

Funding cuts can make a difficult situation even worse.

This is a good time to discuss upgrading FOB's. When a FOB is initially placed, it serves as a safe harbor in the field for your units. Units resting there will be slowly resupplied, but cannot replace their losses. You can choose to add on to a FOB with a field hospital, vehicle repair yard, and/or heavy artillery pit. These upgrades are expensive, so you must decide which FOB's are worth upgrading, and to what extent. A fully upgraded and supplied FOB can allow you to maintain a powerful force far away from your HQ. The logistics of keeping that FOB manned and supplied is something you will need to plan ahead of time.

Another item you must consider as part of your long term strategy is the training of the Afghanistan National Army (ANA). On specific turns you will be expected to have achieved a certain ratio of ANA to coalition combat units in theater. Towards the end of a match you will be forced to hand complete control over to the ANA, so you need to have stabilized the area by that point if you don't want to watch all of your hard work be wiped away. Training the ANA is one of the jobs of your extremely useful special forces units. While stationed at your HQ, these units can train ANA artillery, APC, and helicopter units. Move them out to a FOB and they can begin training ANA infantry. The ANA troops are not as good in combat as the American forces, but are better for visiting villages.

An ideal result!

Did I mention the part about visiting villages yet? Like I said at the beginning, this game has a lot of strategic layers happening all at once, which made it difficult to find a logical flow for this review! Anyway, each village has a campfire in it that will begin to burn whenever new intelligence is potentially available. You will need to send in an infantry unit to visit with the village elders and see what they can learn. Sometimes your men will come up empty, but other times the location of an IED, opium field, or enemy unit will be revealed on the map. An exposed enemy unit makes easy prey for an airstrike. Getting eyes on the enemy is always the trickiest part of combat in this game, so revealing units in this way is very helpful.  The availability of intel in a village will refresh over time, so you will want to be constantly sending out patrols to keep the information flowing. This means that your units can't just sit around in their FOB's, they must be constantly moving around the map. Again, this is where logistical planning early on can pay dividends later.

That is a lot of IED's. Remember, always bring your minesweeper on any ground expeditions.

That point, long term planning and logistics, is really what makes this game compelling in my eyes. It's not a game where clever tactical maneuvering of your forces matters much, and it's not a game where putting the biggest weapons in the field will bring you victory. This is a game where thoughtful planning of a strategy requires thinking through how you will keep that strategy in motion. Ultimately, supply trucks and engineers are more critical to your mission than Apache gunships. Of course, that Apache might need to be on hand to save those supply trucks from a surprise ambush!

I find it difficult to come up with anything I greatly disliked about this game. The combat could perhaps be more interesting, especially in terms of infantry combat, but that is not really the true focus of the game.  The game can be very frustrating at times, but that is a direct result of the mechanics imitating the real conflict, and not an issue with the game itself. One problem I had with Vietnam '65 was that you essentially played the same scenario every time, with only the terrain changing. A11 addresses this issue with its lengthy campaign of hand crafted scenarios, each with unique goals added in to the standard game loop.

Afghanistan '11 is a significant step up from Vietnam '65, improving on that formula in every way to create a much richer experience that draws fresh ideas from its setting. I give this game a strong recommendation with my usual caveat that it won't be for everyone. If your groove is tactically maneuvering units to achieve fire superiority and outflank your foes, you won't find that here. However, if you enjoy big picture strategy and careful planning, this game has it in spades. There are so many factors pulling for your attention that you will have some sort of interesting decision to make every turn. I look forward to seeing where they take this series next, and how they will top this experience.

Afghanistan '11 releases March 23rd and is available directly from Matrix Games or on Steam.


- Joe Beard

 

Battle Academy 2: Eastern Front from Slitherine is a perfect example of how to take a winning formula and crank it up a few notches. The game, released in 2014, is the follow on to the original Battle Academy, a title which set the bar for this type of accessible, yet surprisingly deep tactical World War 2 gameplay style. 

In Battle Academy 2 (BA2) the player takes control of either the Germans or Russians in a series of scenarios fought out using turn-based combat on a map broken into a grid of squares. Locales vary from dense urban centers to wild forests and pastoral villages. Many of the maps are very detailed, with networks of roads and wheat fields, marshes and rivers, and other terrain types generating intriguing choices about how to formulate your strategy.

Although at first glance the graphics may appear fairly simple, there is actually a great amount of detail to the unit models, especially the vehicles. All of your favorites are here, from Tigers and T-34's to a smattering of half-tracks and AT guns. In the realm of infantry, there are riflemen, sappers, commandos, militia, mortars, machine guns, snipers, and more. For a title that some might initially deem to be a more casual wargame, there is a actually a lot of content.

Campaigns from several phases of the war are available, as well as a tutorial to get you started.

In the base game of BA2, there are four campaigns to choose from, two each for the Germans and Russians. These cover several time periods throughout the war, from Barbarossa forward. The Kursk expansion adds another two campaigns covering that massive battle, with the twist that units can be carried forward from one battle to the next. This was big plus for me, as I really like the idea of having a "core" force that I can try to keep alive through a series of battles. On the other hand, the base game campaigns are able to offer a wide variety of interesting scenarios, since they are all independent of one another, other than being set during a certain time period.

The scenario design of BA2 is probably some of the best I have seen in any wargame available. Many of them present you with a unique situation to work through. In one mission you have to deal with an immobilized, yet deadly enemy tank in a mostly open field. You only have infantry and a couple of light AT guns to work with. In another you are ambushing an enemy convoy at night with a force made up of partisans. In each scenario, there are primary objectives that you must complete, and secondary objectives that serve as special achievements. This adds a lot of replayability to the scenarios, since getting all of the extra objectives can be a challenge.  These objectives are often things like holding particularly difficult victory points, or minimizing losses of certain units. Some are more interesting, like finding and knocking out a hidden enemy outpost, or exiting units off the map mid-battle.

German motorized troops, and an awesome little Stug, arrive to press the attack.

BA2 controls quite well, using a simple interface to offer a multitude of options. Simply click on a unit and you will see how far it can move via lit up squares. Click on a space, or the unit itself, and a list of symbols will pop up showing you the options relevant to that space. For example, units can move quickly, or move less distance at a more deliberate pace. This is important, since (among other variables) tanks will have lower accuracy after moving fast, while infantry are less likely to be spotted when moving slow. There are many other options as well, including telling a unit to hold fire, having engineers throw smoke grenades, or ordering a unit to observe the area around it, extending its sight range for the round. Clicking an enemy unit will show the odds for whatever type of attack you can make. This is critical to tank duels, since you can see your chances both of scoring a hit, and scoring a kill. 

The tank combat in BA2 can be quick and deadly, or turn into a drawn out slugfest, depending on the situation and vehicles involved. Maneuvering to get at the flanks or rear of a heavy enemy tank can greatly increase your chances of knocking it out. At the same time, you want to keep your forward armor facing the enemy if at all possible. Even the most imposing steel beasts can be taken down by single lucky shot, or they might shrug off a dozen hits and keep rolling. Maximizing your odds is the key to winning tank battles. Usually you have enough forces that losing any one unit won't cost you the battle.

A potent force prepares to face the Ruskies.

Infantry units require tactical finesse to use effectively. Rush them forward mindlessly and they will get slaughtered. Use covering fire to suppress an enemy, then send in assault troops to overrun the enemy position and you can win with few casualties. Infantry are also highly effective against tanks and other vehicles in close terrain. They can disappear into almost any terrain feature on the map. Sending a half-track or tank on a long move through a village you have not cleared will lead to certain destruction.

You will usually have some special abilities on tap in any given scenario. These use a cooldown timer, so you must be careful about when you use them, but not so cautious that you miss openings while waiting for the perfect moment. These abilities include basic items like healing an infantry squad, promoting a unit, or dropping supplies. Sometimes you also get more explosive options, like calling for artillery and air strikes.

Several turns later, my heavy tanks wipe out enemy vehicles while Flammpanzers keep the infantry at bay.

While fighting, units can be promoted, gaining better stats and becoming more effective. Units that reach the highest rank can even get an extra attack each turn, which is very useful. Other special abilities can also be unlocked, like AT guns using more effective anti-tank rounds or infantry squads gaining a sniper shot.

Right at first, BA2 can be a somewhat frustrating game until you find the rhythm of how to play it. It demands a more deliberate approach to combat than one might presume. Once you figure out the finer points of line of sight, the ranges of different units, and the importance of paying attention to unit morale, the game becomes much more enjoyable. In my first playthrough of some missions I took heavy losses and wondered how in the world I was supposed to win. After playing further into the game, I can go back to those same scenarios and conquer them easily.

Did I mention the huge variety of units available? Here we see everything from partisans to Valentines.

The game offers a couple more ways to play outside of the campaign scenarios. You can also play semi-random skirmishes where you pick out a force and go against an AI force on one of the many different maps. The AI can almost always put up a decent fight, since it knows how to hide units in cover and will attack aggressively wherever you are weak. However, for a truly clever opponent you must go online. Fortunately, BA2 uses Slitherine's PBEM++ multiplayer model, which sets the standard for this type of turn based wargame with its asynchronous play. Once you join battle with another player, you simply play your turn and then go back to the multiplayer menu. If the other player isn't online, you are free to then join another match and play a turn in it. You can have several matches going in this manner, and you will receive a notification or email when it is your turn to play again. This is great for bigger battles especially, since you can play a little at a time, instead of sitting at the computer for two hours straight. If you don't want to fight another human, you can also team up against the AI in several cooperative scenarios.  Even though the game has been out for years, there are still quite a few people playing online, so you shouldn't have trouble finding a match.

I found that playing the game online was quite addictive. The co-op scenarios force you to communicate and use teamwork, while the larger PvP skirmishes give you a lot of freedom in terms of force composition and strategy. You never know what kind of units your enemy will be fielding, or how they will use them. Although the single player game is good, the online play is where the game really shines. Especially so because it is so easy to get a match going against any willing opponent. Compare to, say, Combat Mission, where you have to arrange a match outside the game, and need a third party tool to automate sending new turns back and forth.

Soviet infantry prepare to hold against the onslaught, while a improvised tank creeps forward to assist.

The game also comes with an easy to use editor, which other players have used to create a large number of custom maps and scenarios. This new content can be easily acquired from within BA2 itself. You just click on and download whatever suits your fancy, right there within the game. There are only a few single player scenarios available, but thanks to the efforts of a few community members, there are a couple dozen additional multiplayer maps to try out.

Something should also be said about the sound in the game. There are very good sound effects for every different type of weapon in the game, including big crunchy artillery shells and roaring flamethrower blasts.  Tank engines rev up and infantry shout in German or Russian as they are victorious in a fight, or find themselves running for their lives.

All in all, BA2 is a polished experience with no major flaws that I could uncover. I tried to think of something to criticize about the game, but really there is nothing bad to say about it, unless you are looking for a more realistic experience. This is not Combat Mission or a Graviteam Tactics type of game. Units tend to have arbitrary ranges that they can engage at, and even shorter ranges at which they are actually effective, which takes some time to adjust to. You'll also note the relative lack of artillery, in a warzone that was well known for massive amounts of it. It is treated more like a special ability than a regular part of your force. Along those lines, there's nothing realistic about being able to call in pin-point airstrikes anywhere you want to make an enemy go boom. However, realistic is not what this game sets out to do. It gives you all the different units you could want, and sets them loose in tactical combat that is just deep enough to make things very interesting, without bogging you down in unnecessary detail.

If you are looking for a fun tactical combat game set on the Eastern Front, that is accessible and comes with a ton of content, look no further than Battle Academy 2. If you want even more toys, and especially the linked campaigns, pick up the Kursk expansion.  


- Joe Beard


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Sovereignty: Crown of Kings, published by Slitherine and developed by The Lordz Game Studio, is an interesting new take on the grand strategy genre. If a fantasy version of Europa Universalis with hex-and-counter tactical combat sounds like something you might enjoy, come see what this title has to offer. 

Sovereignty is a fascinating mix of ideas that I have not seen put together quite this way in any other game out there. The game takes place in a well developed fantasy world where 35(!) unique realms are available for the player to choose from. You take the lead of one of these realms and attempt to achieve a specific set of objectives. Your options as leader include engaging in diplomacy, managing the economy, developing spells, and of course building armies and taking them to the battlefield. I'll explore all of these in detail separately later.

Sovereignty takes place in a detailed and complex fantasy world.

The first thing you will realize when trying to decide on a realm to play is that each one has a fairly detailed back story, and that many of them are interlinked. By reading these different backstories you can get a feel for the world. There are two major human empires rivaling for power in the south, orc realms threatening on the borders, and various flavors of elves that are separated at the start, but can seek reunification. There are also human barbarian tribes in the north, a colony of pirates in the south, and swamp full of undead in the middle. There is certainly something for everyone, and every realm has a different set of goals to pursue.

I found these unique goals to be one of the game's most interesting features. Unlike the open ended gameplay of most other 4X titles, here you begin each campaign with a specific set of objectives to achieve. For example, in my first (disastrous) campaign I played the High Elves of Sonneneve. Their goal is to form a powerful alliance with the other two elven realms, the Wood Elves and Dark Elves. These other elven realms are a fair distance away, have different alignments (realms can be good, evil, or neutral) and if either one is destroyed, you lose. So right out of the gate, I can see that diplomacy will be important for this campaign, as well as having a military force capable of getting me closer to those realms and aiding them in inevitable conflict. If you go play as those other elven realms, your objectives will be similar but distinctly different in one case, and completely different in the other. 

Some of the especially unique victory conditions include searching for clues to a hidden treasure (the aforementioned pirate realm), capturing a bunch of prisoners (the ice realm of the Winter Witch), and taking complete control of the seas (an England-like island realm). There are trade focused campaigns, campaigns focused on specific political rivalries, and of course several that require simple conquest of particular provinces. You can also choose to play each realm with more generic objectives like conquering the entire world, or taking out a particular rival. 

For my second, much more successful, campaign, I decided to be the Germanic barbarian themed Vessoi realm. Now my goal was to control the four "totems" so I could call the Horde to sweep across the land. I also had to ally with two of my northern neighbors. The twist here is that in order to control all of the totems, I would have to attack and conquer land from one of those neighbors, and use diplomacy to cozy up to the other, which was led by the isolationist and kinda spooky Winter Witch.

Once you have settled on a realm to play, the game begins. Gameplay is split between the strategic layer and the tactical combat layer, both being turn based. You spend your time between battles on the strategic layer, purchasing units and buildings, making trades, and moving armies around. When one of your armies encounters an enemy army, the combat takes place on a more detailed map using a hex-grid. 

My soldiers form a line and await the undead hordes.

First, let's talk about the strategic layer. In a world where Europa Universalis IV exists, any game that occupies the same niche is going up against some serious competition. I don't think there is any game development studio out there that is going to top the sort of excessive options and extreme detail found in a Paradox grand strategy game, so I won't fault Sovereignty for coming up short in a direct comparison. It's not that Sovereignty does a bad job of giving you information and options for how to shape your realm, but, overall, it can't help but feel a bit crude in the shadow of Europa Universalis IV. For example, every other realm has a relationship with you ranging from friend to enemy, but why the rating is what it is, and what variables are influencing it, is not readily apparent, compared with EU where you get a detailed breakdown of your relations and how they are changing over time.

Diplomacy and trade in Sovereignty is handled in a manner that will immediately be familiar to any experienced 4X gamer. Deals can be made for resources, gold, treaties, and so on. What makes Sovereignty a bit different is that you are limited by how many "agents" you have available for assignment. Several turns are required to complete trades with realms that are further away, and your agent cannot be used for anything else in that time. Some nations have several agents available and can constantly be wheeling and dealing, while others may have only a single agent to work with. In that case, you must try to make every exchange count, since these agents are also needed for spying and influencing diplomatic relations. I was pleased to find that the AI in Sovereignty was actually willing to make fair deals with me. Too often in other 4X games I don't even bother with negotiations, since the AI usually wants an arm and a leg for even the least valuable resources. Here you can usually expect to make a deal that is both reasonable and beneficial. 

There are about a dozen or more resources like iron, gems, and beer to be found in Sovereignty, and acquiring access to them through trade or conquest is a critical part of the game. Any non-basic unit, and almost all province upgrades, require one or two of these resources to build. The resources are produced by specific provinces scattered across the map, which generate one unit of that resource per turn. This means that the amount of a given resource in the game world at any time is finite, making them quite valuable. 

At the start of the game you will often only have direct access to a couple of the resources, and will need to acquire the others somehow. There are a few ways to do this. Negotiating for a couple units of iron is simple, but inefficient, since you will immediately use them up and need more. Going to war with a neighbor in order to conquer their resource producing provinces could be a lengthy and costly endeavor, but will get you unlimited access to that resource. The third option is something that should have been a great feature in the game, but currently feels incomplete: the stock market. The market lets you sell resources for cash, or buy resources that other realms have sold. The price of the resources is supposed to depend on supply and demand.  Unfortunately, the market didn't seem to work quite like it should in theory. All prices are exactly the same at the start of the game, and in my experience playing they never budged one way or the other. On most of your turns there will only be one resource available to purchase, if any. This should be a lively and interesting part of the game, but in the current iteration it is not.


Besides specific resources, the most important part of your realm's economy is gold. You begin the game with a healthy income, and your primary expenses will be buying new units and paying maintenance on existing ones. There is little reason to stockpile cash on hand, so you will always want to keep your income-expense ratio pretty tight by building the biggest and best army you can afford. You can invest in upgrades to provinces to make them produce more, so you will want to keep that in mind while setting your budget as well. The more income you have, the bigger an army you can field.

Another important money sink is the magic system. Every realm has a set of spells available to them, but these spells must be earned over time by gathering research points. The points can be generated by specific provinces and buildings, and can be purchased each turn in exchange for gold, with the cost per point being different for each realm. Once you have enough points, you can either unlock a new spell, or open up a new tier of spells. This is the closest the game has to a tech tree, and while the options are somewhat limited, the spells available are quite useful. Some give you a strategic layer bonus of some sort, while others can upgrade a specific unit. Higher tier spells can make powerful, and sometimes permanent, changes to provinces and units. I really enjoyed this system, since every realm had a unique array of spells available, and there was always something useful to work towards.

The final way to spend your funds is the most fun, building an army. While diplomacy and trade are features of the game, make no mistake, you will need to have a large army in the field at almost all times. Units are broken down into six categories: infantry, irregulars, archers, cavalry, siege units, and naval units. Within each category you will have usually have two or three choices. The exceptions being naval units, which are not available at all to some realms, and siege units which usually have fewer options when available.

The unit production screen. This dwarven realm has a lot of infantry options, but no cavalry.

Now, you might be thinking that only a couple of options for infantry and cavalry sounds limited, but this is another area where the game offers a ton of variety between its 35 realms. While some units in different realms may share the same art, they all have unique names and stats. In addition to their stats, many units have attributes which further shape their role on the battlefield. Some can move across difficult terrain types with ease, others can resist cavalry charges, some strike fear into enemy units, while others can offer a morale boost to the entire army, or give you a scouting bonus on the strategic map. There are a ton of different attributes in the game, and individual units can even gain more as they survive battles and level up. The armies of most realms have some kind of theme, and these attributes go along with it. The better units require specific resources, as mentioned previously. At the start of the game you have access to all of your possible units, but not the resources needed to build them.

One thing that disappointed me about the units was that they have no accompanying description or flavor text. There is a box for it on the unit purchase screen, but for every unit it is either blank or contains a quote from a real world historical figure like Sun-Tzu or Otto von Bismark. It's a bit odd that these descriptions are absent, since there was clearly a lot of effort put into giving each army a distinct style and interesting units. A user mod on the Steam Workshop is available to rectify this, but I would prefer official descriptions.

In addition to regular units, you can recruit heroes to lead your forces. These heroes do not appear in the battle, but instead give you one-shot abilities that can be used to turn the tide in your favor. As your heroes lead battles, they can level up, at which point you get to choose a new ability for their arsenal. There is a lot of variety in these abilities. Since you can only use each one once per battle, you will want to time it carefully to maximize the effect. This adds an interesting wrinkle or two to each fight, and makes your individual armies feel more distinct, even if they contain the same list of units.

That covers all of the elements of the strategic layer, so let's take a look at what happens when two armies collide. You are first given the option to fight it out manually or auto-resolve. I really liked the auto-resolve feature in Sovereignty compared to games like Total War. Instead of simply clicking and getting a result, here the auto-resolve is broken into three phases, offering you multiple chances to retreat or press the fight. There is also more suspense, as you watch the unit icons smack each other around one at a time until one side retreats or is annihilated.

In most cases though, the best result will be gained by taking direct control of your forces. This option takes you to the tactical battlefield, where all the abilities discussed before come into play as you maneuver units around a hex-based grid depicting the local province. This phase of the game handles much like Panzer General and similar titles, so will be easy to jump into for most strategy gamers. I found this portion of the game to be surprisingly good. It offers a light wargame feel where the unique attributes of your various units really shine. Terrain plays a major role in the battles, and the home team will often have some kind of advantage in this regard. Attacking across a river can be especially tricky. Common sense tactics, like forming a solid line of infantry backed by archers, will give your forces the edge. Cavalry must have flat ground and open attack lanes to fully maximize their charges, which are more powerful the further away they start from the target. Archers can deal a lot of damage at range, but are helpless if melee units reach them. You will want to keep units alive, since they can level up and gain better stats or special abilities. These experienced units can make short work of freshly recruited foes later in the game.

While the early game battles feature mostly standard units slugging it out, the fighting only get more interesting as more exotic options become available. You are limited to four each of your "elite" units, and they can take many turns to build, but once you get them on the field they really light things up. In my Vessoi campaign I was always excited to get my Shapeshifters (think werewolves) into the action, where they made mince meat of most foes. Other higher tier units include dragons, unicorns, walking trees, undead nightmare creatures, and all sorts of other fantasy genre highlights.

The primary downside here is that the AI is not the best. Every battle involves the attacker trying to occupy two or three cities while the defender holds them off for X turns. A human player can often trick the AI into maneuvering its forces poorly, and either seizing the objectives when attacking or distracting the AI long enough to run out the clock when defending. This assuming your forces aren't strong enough to simply crush the AI army in direct battle. That isn't to say I won every battle against the AI, because I certainly got my rear end handed to me a few times.

So, between all of these interesting pieces, how does the whole stack up? For me, the game somewhat remains a diamond in the rough, even after almost two years in early access. There are a lot of things here I really like, and I love the concept of the game. However, it still feels not quite finished in some ways, as I mentioned earlier. There are reports of bugs from other players, and I experienced a few myself. I also found that the UI was at times clunky, with one open window covering another, or not displaying the information I expected it to display as I moused over various parts of the screen.

Despite those issues, I do really like what The Lordz Game Studio is doing here. The game is a one of a kind experience, letting you jump into something like a basic version of Europa Universalis set in a fantasy world of dwarves and orcs and elves. Unlike EU, here you get to take direct control of your forces in battle and lead them to victory or defeat, instead of watching some numbers tick as the invisible dice roll. While there are other fantasy 4X's out there, none offer such a detailed and ready made world to explore. The world of Sovereignty feels like it has history, and the events that unfold during the game add to that story. Every time I started a new campaign I was confronted with a very different set of circumstances, and few games can make that claim. Fewer still can do so while offering thirty-five different choices of nations to lead. Considering the game's very reasonable price of $25, I think anyone interested in a strategy game with a fresh take on things should give it a shot. With a touch more polish and elbow grease, this game could rise above it's current shortcomings and become a great game that stands alone in style and substance.


Joe Beard

Follow us on Twitter @_AWNT_


Sovereignty: Crown of Kings is available directly from Matrix Games/Slitherine, and on Steam.

I love board games and tabletop wargames, the problem is finding someone else who shares an interest in the hobby, and then finding the time to play against them. My wife is my only regular gaming partner, but, understandably, her tastes in theme are a bit more limited than mine. Tactical wargaming just isn’t her thing. Or on the flip side, it might be exactly her thing and bring out her extremely competitive side, getting me in trouble if my Sherman scored a lucky hit on her Tiger. Either way, it’s just not a good fit. That’s why I’m always excited when I hear about a good wargame going digital, now I too can get in on the fun. 

Tank on Tank, from Lock ‘n Load Publishing, is the latest such title to come to my attention. I had heard about the tabletop version several times in the past, and found it a tempting purchase. By all accounts it was a very accessible wargame with a limited scope, but a large fun factor. With the arrival of the digital version, I can play any time against the AI or go online to find a human opponent.

The game features a long list of scenarios depicting armor and infantry fighting across the battlefields of Europe. The “full” game bundle includes both East and West front action, but you can purchase just one front if you prefer. The units take the form of counters representing infantry, AT Guns, vehicles, and, of course, a wide array of tanks. These units move around relatively small hex-based maps trying to destroy each other and control objective locations. The scale is at a sort of abstract tactical level. It isn’t exactly clear how many units a counter represents, but it doesn’t really matter. All you need to know is that units have movement, range, and defense values, be aware of a couple twists for using them efficiently, understand how each turn works, all of which can be learned via a five minute read through the in-game manual, and you are good to go. That said, there is an intriguing amount of depth to how you use your units and their limited actions each turn.

The limited actions each turn is really where the game forces some hard decisions on you, since you often get extra activations, in addition to the default two, but sometimes you don’t. You have to take a moment to consider what your highest priority is, since you might only be able to do one effective movement/attack on that turn. Grouping your units around HQ’s must be a part of your plans, since this lets you activate several units at once. On the flip side, concentrating your units together reduces your overall operational flexibility. Scenarios always have a limited number of turns, and multiple objectives, so when on the offensive you often need to cover a lot of ground in a hurry.

Combat results in the game are calculated by rolling two six-sided dice, adding or subtracting some modifiers, and then comparing to the target’s defense value. Counters are either undamaged or completely destroyed by the result, as there are no “steps” to be found here. This can result in some very wild swings in luck at times. You might attack with four units at once and fail to knock out that pesky AT Gun, but then on your next turn you take a shot at it with a single counter and destroy it. One of my early battles was particularly frustrating, as I watched a lone enemy infantry unit knock out three of my tank counters, one after the other. Of course, it was my rookie leadership that left those tanks vulnerable to attack in the first place.

One must approach this game with the proper mindset to get the most enjoyable result. This is not a game attempting to accurately depict WW2 combined arms warfare, this is a game that wants you to push some counter around a board and watch them blow each other up. Which isn’t to say that there is no strategy involved, since there are plenty of things you can do to increase your chances of winning. Just don’t go in looking for a game where careful positioning and realistic tactics will always win the day, since the dice might not be on your side that battle. If you take the game for what it is, you can have plenty of fun quickly playing a scenario or two or three, and you will find that the luck factor evens out over time.

Replaying scenarios is encouraged by the individual high score charts for each one. Victory is determined by which side scores the most points, earned by controlling objectives and destroying enemy units. More than once I found myself immediately restarting a scenario that I just won, simply to see if I could win by a greater margin. This also reinforces the idea that this game is meant to be simple and fun. You can blaze through a scenario, making some mistakes, and then play it again and do better, all in one lunch sized gaming session. This makes Tank on Tank an ideal game for wargamers like me who usually have small windows for gaming each day. I can hop in, turn some tanks into smoldering wrecks, then get back to real life. I kept track of time while playing several scenarios in a row, and found that many could easily be played in less than ten minutes.

Graphics and sound in Tank on Tank are relatively simple, but nicely done considering the transition from physical to digital. Tank counters throw up dust trails as their engines rev and the counter moves about, each attack features a shell being lobbed through the air and exploding, and air attacks are visualized by a fighter buzzing across the screen. There are snowflakes that fall on “snow” turns, a condition which also has important effects on the gameplay. The sound effects are all nicely done, with music that is pleasant and never distracting. The UI is clear and readily displays all of the information you need to play the game, with big buttons that are satisfying to click on, especially the fire button!

The AI will give you a good fight in pretty much every scenario. Early on I found that it bested me repeatedly, but once I nailed down the game mechanics the battles tended to be close run wins more often than not. I actually watched what the AI did at times to figure out how best to play the game as I was learning the ropes. The relatively simple structure of the scenarios and combat mechanics means that if the AI does make a major mistake, it won’t hamper your fun at all.

The game also features a multiplayer mode, where one can play out many of the same scenarios against a real live opponent. Unfortunately, I was never able to find a public match, despite waiting for an opponent to join my game for 30+ minutes as I wrote this review. It would be nice if there was some kind of indicator showing if anyone else was even in the multiplayer lobby. I can only assume the game would be great fun to play online, especially with friends.

A recent patch added the ability to create your own scenarios and campaigns, if you digest everything the game has and want some additional variety. However, doing so will require an extra bit of dedication, since units and their initial positioning must be done by writing some lines of “code” in notepad. Nothing too difficult really, but don’t expect to just click the map in the game and add units. Perhaps that kind of functionality will be added in later. It does not seem that you can create or modify the actual maps in the game. It would be nice if you could do so, since there are only a limited number of maps available, and many are simple variations of just a few unique maps. I suppose these are the same maps available in the physical version of the game, but it seems a waste to not take advantage of going digital by offering a wider selection, or letting players create their own.

Whether this game is worth your gaming dollars depends on what you are wanting it to be. For $40, one can get much meatier wargaming fare, but maybe meaty isn’t what you are looking for. If you are seeking a well polished game that lets you load it up and get into the action in a matter of mere seconds, then this could very well be worth the price. You can get your wargaming fix in fifteen minutes or less, no muss, no fuss. However, if you are averse to random rolls of the dice winning or losing a battle, steer clear. You will have the occasional match where absolutely nothing goes your way, despite making all the right decisions. This is a game that is meant to be quick, simple, and fun, and it succeeds in checking all of those boxes. I see myself playing bite sized bursts of this game for a long time. The icon is always there on the edge of my PC desktop, taunting me to go back for one more round.





- Joe Beard


Follow us on Twitter @_AWNT_




Tank on Tank for Windows (Mac version in the works) is available directly from LnL Publishing at http://store.lnlpublishing.com/

In the grim dark future of the 41st millennium, there is only war. That war now spreads to the Knight world of Alaric Prime as the Red Waaagh! led by Grukk Face-rippa invades the planet. Only the Space Wolves, the Norse themed chapter of the Space Marines, stand ready to defeat the hordes of Orks pouring across the surface. Sanctus Reach is a turn based tactical game depicting the campaigns fought in that war, at the scale of individual squads, vehicles, and weapons teams.

Sanctus Reach is the latest strategy title from veteran wargame publisher Slitherine, however, the developer is the rookie studio Straylight Entertainment. While I'm not privy to exactly how the Slitherine development process works, it is clear that Sanctus Reach draws heavily from other recent Slitherine productions. Fans of Battle Academy 1+2, Pike and Shot, or Sengoku Jidai will immediately feel at home in this game, as the controls and interface are very similar. Notably, this is the second Warhammer 40k title from Slitherine, with the first being WH 40k: Armageddon, which drew a great deal of its design influence from Panzer Corps, as opposed to Battle Academy. Now, enough with the pedigree, let's kill some xenos scum!

Space Wolves vs Orks. There will be blood, lots of it.

One thing is immediately apparent upon playing Sanctus Reach for the first time: this is, by a mile, the best looking 3D game that Slitherine has ever published. The units are highly detailed and smoothly animated, rivaling or besting those seen in screenshots for the upcoming Dawn of War 3. While the units will spend most of their time standing around waiting for their turn to fight, they will look fantastic doing it. The combat is also far bloodier than one might expect from Slitherine. Blood gushes out of units with each hit, and Orks often explode into chunks of meat when killed, accompanied by appropriately gruesome splattering sound effects. Think chunks of wet meat being thrown against a wall.

Speaking of getting into the fight, let's jump right into the meat of the game, the combat itself.  While there have been many recent titles set in the Warhammer 40k universe, none have really come close to depicted the table top game itself. No doubt Games Workshop is leery of letting a PC game exist which mimics the exact gameplay of their flagship product. Why would anyone spend a small fortune on models, paint, and rule books when they could just fire up a PC game that gave them the same experience? Having never played the table top game myself, I won't attempt to make a direct comparison, but certainly Sanctus Reach comes closer than anything else seen before. If the game spawns a series of DLC and expansions like Armageddon has, we could be looking at the go-to game for Warhammer 40k fans seeking a digital turn-based fix.

The combat in Sanctus Reach takes place on a square-based grid which stretches across bleak and ugly (in a good way) locales dotted with ancient ruins, dead forests, human military bases, industrial centers, and Ork encampments. Terrain can play a key role in strategy, as many objects provide cover from ranged fire, while others block line of sight entirely. With each faction fielding many melee focused units, careful positioning around various objects is critical to holding the line and keeping the squishier ranged units safe. Each side in this conflict actually has 30 different units available, each with a distinct role to play on the battlefield. On your turn, every unit can be activated in whatever order you choose. Each unit can attack twice, move a certain number of squares, and in some cases utilize a special ability. Once all of your units have been exhausted, your opponent gets a chance to go. This style of gameplay is a tried and true one, and it gets a few new tricks in Sanctus Reach. The facing of every unit can be adjusted before ending your turn, and you will want to do this carefully, as each combatant gets one free reaction shot against enemy units moving into its line of fire during the opposing player's turn. On your turn, you will be warned about these reaction shots by seeing the movement grid turn red in spaces where the enemy could get a free shot. Facing is even more important for vehicles, as their armor is usually weaker on the sides and rear. Helpfully, the facing of the hull and turret can be set independently for some vehicles.

Unit morale is a factor in the combat as well. An important early tactic for keeping the swarms of weaker Ork units at bay is to hit them with the flamethrower unit, which does good damage across a wide area but more importantly causes a massive drop in morale for any units caught in the flames. This makes it easy for your other units to mop up without much fear of reprisal. Morale matters less for the Space Marines themselves, however, since they will almost always die fighting long before they panic and run. I expect if there is an Imperial Guard campaign in the future, the player will have to pay much more attention to this value.

The Orks have all sorts of nasty toys on hand.

With all of the different unit types available for you and the enemy, you must be deliberate with each decision. Rushing a unit forward to finish off a foe could leave it vulnerable to being surrounded on the enemy's turn. On the other hand, setting up an ambush, with multiple units' reaction fire targeting a likely approach, could net you a free kill. You must always consider strengths and weaknesses of unit types as well. Meltagun infantry are awesome at taking down armored units and vehicles, but are completely useless in a close up brawl. Flamethrower units can send packs of Orks running, but hardly scratch even the lighter Ork vehicles. This is one of the most enjoyable parts of Sanctus Reach, fielding a balanced mix of units and utilizing them in the most efficient way possible. You will need to be efficient, because the Orks vastly outnumber the Space Marines in every scenario. Against these mobs of greenskins, sloppy tactics will get your force wiped out in a matter of a few turns. More than once I saw the first wave of the enemy approaching and thought that there was no way my little army of Space Marines would survive.  However, by employing solid tactics I could (usually) scrape out a victory or even turn the tide and mercilessly slaughter the fleeing Orks. The larger battles are particularly engaging, as you are often forced to spread your forces out to different hot spots at the same time. Choosing where to send your best units is always a challenging decision. Scouting units even manage to play an important role at times. Getting a couple of turns warning to shift your defenses, or knowing exactly how many units you will need to take a victory point, is always useful and could make the difference between victory and defeat.

This game achieves one thing in particular, something that is important in any strategy game, and that is feeling a sense of satisfaction when your forces are pulling ahead in the fight. In almost every mission of Sanctus Reach, you will be faced with large groups of greenskin units rushing at your brave Space Marines. There is tension and a sense of imminent peril in these moments. However, make the right choices, put your men in the right places, and you will be turning green Orks into red chunks left and right. What was once a deadly horde is now scattered and fleeing before your soldiers, and it feels great.

The game's AI does a good enough job leading its forces most of the time. That's not saying much considering the lore accurate tactics for Orks is to simply have them attack, attack, attack. However, you will find that the AI can give you a good run for your money if you aren't paying attention. It will focus on an exposed unit, or ignore a unit it can't really damage to rush past towards one that it can. At other times though, the AI seemed indecisive, and would have a few units uselessly meander around at the edge of a battle.

I found that there were a few balance issues in the build I was playing, but the developer notes indicated that they were still tweaking things, so I won't knock the game for that. In particular, the Ork Battlewagons seemed grossly overpowered, able to often kill entire Space Marine squads in one turn from a long distance, while being almost indestructible. I also encountered a few bugs and minor annoyances like the camera not being able to pan far enough to see the entire field at certain zoom levels and other minor UI glitches. These all seemed like small issues which could be cleaned up in short order. At no point did the game crash or show signs of anything less than silky smooth performance.

On the whole, I think this engine fits Warhammer 40k quite nicely. The combat is at that sweet spot of squad-level maneuvering where you get a bit of that X-COM tactical feel, but on such a scale that every battle feels like an important struggle. It also is granular enough for it to make sense that your hero units are running around on their own, using special abilities and taking on entire Ork squads alone. The system definitely has the flexibility to allow for the other factions of the 40k universe to make an appearance in the future. Other factions will necessitate different tactics, which will only enrich the experience on offer here. While Space Marines can hold their ground against most any Ork unit, an Imperial Guard army would need a lot more artillery backing up their lines of numerous, yet weak troopers. An Eldar army could be especially interesting to play, using hit and run tactics to pick off exposed units, without the need for the frantic mouse clicking and micro-management of an RTS. There are a lot of possibilities to be explored here. I expect that this game already has an extensive list of DLC and expansions lined up for production, and I think it will do well in the long run, but there are some rough edges that need smoothing out in the meantime.

The Space Wolves prepare to attack.

There were many instances in this game where I felt like a feature was done well in one way, but fell short in another. For example, when your Dreadnought units move, each step causes the camera to rattle just a bit, adding some real weight to the footfalls, but, those steps don't leave any kind of footprint on the ground or kick up dust. Many objects like walls and barriers can be destroyed by manually targeting them, but not even your flamethrowers can get rid of a dead tree blocking your line of sight. Melee combat has some impressive gore effects and Ork heads rolling on the ground, but the actual attack animations don't have that much variety to them. I realize this is an effort from a smaller studio, but everyone knows the fun of Warhammer 40k is 50% about the spectacle of over the top carnage. The ranged attack animations and effects are generally better, especially for the flamethrowers and explosives. Also, did I mention how good the blood and gore is in this game? It's really good, and you will see it often. Sound is certainly a mixed bag as well. Some weapons, like the missile launchers and flamethrowers, sound great, while others, like the meltagun or bolters, sound downright puny. There were also a couple of sound effects which seemed to be completely missing. The music is adequate, dark and moody, but as far as I could tell there were only a couple of tracks, or they all sounded exactly same.

There is one major feature of the game that I feel falls into this mixed bag category as well. The campaign structure itself. On the one hand, you get two lengthy campaigns with a lot of missions, but many of those missions are just random skirmishes. These skirmishes have no flavor to them really, which isn't that bad on it's own, but you are forced to grind through three of them between each story mission. I feel like there was so much more they could have done with these missions. Perhaps have the player choose two out of three missions, with each one offering some kind of bonus for the coming set-piece battle, or adding a unique unit to the available roster. Or, throw in some kind of gameplay altering rule change or unit limitation in a skirmish to force a change in tactics. As it stands, these missions are simply filler, there to lengthen the campaign and not much else. The unique story missions are much more interesting. These have you fighting through some kind of specific scenario, such as assaulting a fortress, escorting transports, or fending off an Ork ambush. Later in each campaign you get the chance to take on the big baddies of the Waaagh!

Actual screenshot from my PC. These are some good looking Space Marines!

One cool aspect of the campaign is that your units persist from mission to mission and gain experience. When they level up they become more powerful and can gain new abilities. This of course gives you an incentive to keep them alive and get as many kills as possible. I also liked how every unit has an individual name, letting you grow more attached to them over time as they purge xenos and live to tell the tale. As units grow in abilities, you gain a lot more options in how to fight. There are all sorts of grenades and other items that put different effects on enemy units, like stunning them or dropping morale. Units can also get buffs to attacking particular enemy unit types, like vehicles. As you face larger groups of enemies, using these abilities to the max becomes critical to your survival.

Now I must come to my single greatest letdown with this game: There is not nearly enough "fluff" for my tastes. You know, that part of any Warhammer 40k game or book where the characters talk about purging and cleansing and dying for the Emperor? You get only just a whiff of it here. The story is told through mission briefings that are, at best, one paragraph long, and seem to assume that you already know who the characters are and what they are doing. For example, the description for the first campaign describes your unit commander impatiently launching his forces towards battle on the planet below, then picking up a distress signal on the way down. Great, sounds interesting! Then you launch the first scenario, which has your forces defending a crashed Thunderhawk, with the objective to capture a nearby communications tower. How did we get here? I guess the ship was shot down, the game doesn't take time to explain. Why do we need to reach that communications tower? Because the mission briefing says so. Oh, okay, I guess. Do we get an explanation of the situation once the mission is completed? Nope, nothing at all. This pattern continues through each campaign. It feels like there is a story going on, but it is told through the briefest of dialogue snippets. Don't forget the three skirmishes between each unique scenario, which have no specific context at all, and spread the 40k butter far too thin.

The level design of the "set-piece" battles is often interesting, and the scale ramps up until you are fielding massive forces and wreaking havoc on the Ork horde with all sorts of fun toys, but, rarely does it seem to have much of an overarching purpose. I have to compare this with Warhammer 40k: Armageddon. As mentioned, this was another title published by Slitherine that came out a couple of years ago. One of the most well regarded features of that game was the lengthy and well voice-acted dialogue that occurred before and during missions. The tutorial campaign alone in that game was five missions long and used that time to introduce and develop various important characters, while building up tension towards the start of the actual campaign. Events would routinely occur in the middle of missions, potentially changing your objectives, with characters popping in to comment on what was happening, and sometimes even offering you a choice in how to proceed with the story. There are characters in Sanctus Reach, there is the extensive lore of the Space Wolves, and there is some kind of ongoing story about the battle for Alaric Prime, but it is all referenced in the barest of detail. In Armageddon, you really felt like your forces were fighting in a grim war to save the planet, with the story dictating your goals from mission to mission. I did not get that feeling from Sanctus Reach. The actual gameplay within the missions was fun, but at the end of each one you simply get a screen saying you won, with no narrative follow-up at all, then it's straight back to the mission selection screen. It's a very anti-climatic way to end even the most exciting of battles. Armageddon did it so much better, and any future campaigns for Sanctus Reach or its sequels should take a note from that playbook.

Okay, with that done, I would like to hit on a couple positive notes before wrapping up.

The Imperial Knight in its natural habitat, knee deep in Ork corpses and wreckage.

Multiplayer. I wasn't able to get in a multiplayer match of Sanctus Reach, but it works exactly the same as Battle Academy, which I have played online quite a few times. The game uses Slitherine's excellent automated PBEM system, which allows players to play without needing to both be on at the same time. You can set up a game and then wait for someone else to come along and accept your challenge. Then you take your turn and wait for the other player to take theirs, without needing to keep the game running if you aren't both playing at the same time. This means you can even have multiple games going simultaneously. Just log on at your convenience, play your turn for two or three or more matches, then log off and come back later.  In multiplayer you will get the chance to try out the Orks for yourself, which should offer a sharp change of pace from how the Space Marines handle. I really look forward to seeing how future content will expand this area of the game. Hopefully we will eventually get access to a few more factions like the Imperial Guard or other Space Marine chapters at the very least. The potential is there to some day have a game using this engine where the Tau, Tyranids, Eldar, Orks, Chaos, and more can face off in online turn-based matches. This could be the "killer app" for Slitherine if that happens.

Editor and Mods. It's hard to say at this point what people will make, but if Battle Academy is any indication, you can expect to see a lot of new maps for multiplayer and single player becoming available over time. On the mod side of things, even though modding is mentioned in the manual as being supported, I can't imagine that Games Workshop would allow people to run wild here. Too much freedom would let people create rules closer to the tabletop experience, or even add in new factions. I'm not sure what will be possible, but I look forward to seeing what people create.

Ultimately, what we have here is a very good game that forms a solid foundation to build upon. The bar has been set with excellent graphics and animations, the combat engine is a proven one that is flexible enough to handle everything the 40k universe can throw at it, and the publisher Slitherine has a well-earned reputation for supporting titles long after release.  Despite the disappointing campaign narrative (or lack thereof), I found that the tactical combat itself continued to grow on me the more I played.The multiplayer combat has the potential to be a serious draw for many players, especially as more units and factions are added to the game. Sanctus Reach is right there on the edge of being a runaway hit series if they can fill in just a few gaps.

- Joe Beard
Follow me @JBB33


(Note: This review was mostly based on the final beta version available before release, this was the version sent to me for review. The night before release, the Day 1 patch went live and I played a couple of missions with it. Although it did not radically change any of my opinions, it included a lot of small updates that polished the overall presentation, and gave a bit more OOMPH to some attack effects. Always a good thing in Warhammer! The balance also felt better. Two thumbs up for the first patch.)