Space Hulk Review: Something Of A Proto-XCOM

Games Workshop are notoriously protective of their brand. They are very specific about licensing out their products to developers and are exceptionally strict with how their character likenesses are maintained, making sure that new iterations don’t stray a centimeter away from their original design principles.

The company have had a hand in how the characters animate in Space Hulk. You can tell. With a choice, no developer would willingly have characters move so sluggishly as to detract from the player enjoyment.

Space Hulk is something of a proto-XCOM. A squad-based tactical game with grid movement and character classes. It’s based on a board game of the same name, set in the 40K universe. The titular “Space Hulk” is a massive graveyard of abandoned spaceships which have fused together. Your objective within this machinery changes from level to level, but for the most part you’re there because the place is overrun with Alien Genestealers who need to be eradicated.

Controlling your team of Blood Angels is simple enough. They’re placed in formation at the start of a level, each have four action points per turn they can spend to move, shoot, defend or go into an “overwatch” state. You’re also permitted a few universal points that can be used by anyone for an extra few actions. From there you try to get a VIP to the other end of the map, destroy specific targets or just try to wipe out all the enemies.

Genestealers move faster than you, quickly outnumber you and can almost always kill a unit in one hit, so half of your job is thinning them out so that you aren’t overrun, while positioning units in the best spots to blockade them for as long as possible. Space Hulk is about making controlled risks, knowing that it’s only so long until your luck runs out and making preparations for when it eventually does.

Because this is a video game translation of a board game it’s great about automating the rules of movement and combat, which is much less fiddly and bogged down, but it’s confusingly not clear about some of the rules that it’s hiding behind die-rolls. There’s not really an attempt to explain how the systems governing chance to hit and such work, you just perform actions and hope for the best.

Though there are distinct differences to some of the character classes, you’re never quite sure which is technically best suited for specific tasks. As another downside of all the statistics being hidden you don’t get a sense of whether or not a unit is technically better at defending or shooting when they have a different weapon. There’s a unit-type with a massive chain gun that seems no more effective than the regular unit class, but has the downside of having to reload every 10 shots. It’s obviously better, but there’s nothing present that easily conveys how or why.

The aforementioned sluggish movement is infuriating. It’s obviously intended to convey the bulkiness and weight of the armour that your marines are wearing, but it means that every turn your units take massive stretches of time to act out their orders. This is terrible in a translation of a game where you just pick up pieces and put them wherever they’re needed immediately. It’s made worse by an action camera system that never quite finds the right angle to display events from and is best turned off immediately.

Space Hulk is very dull when everything is going well. The fun comes from pulling through at odds, but at the start of most missions you feel for a long while that you can see the objective and you’re just wading slowly toward completing it. It’s only when tension ramps up toward the end of a mission that there’s any real enjoyment, and given the laboured pace getting to that position, you might lose interest long before that starts.

The original board game was influential on a lot of our understanding of turn based strategy games, but the genre has made unimpeded strides since then. The flavour of the 40K world has been fully realised and implemented here, but theres too much restricting the experience from being all that enjoyable.

Final verdict

5 out of 10

A copy of the game was provided by the publisher for the purpose of this review.