Last Week's Games: Fire Warrior, Hotline Miami, Shinobi 3, Golden Axe, Takenoko

I’ve missed the last few weeks of this! Sorry about that…

In the last few weeks, I’ve played and beaten a couple of games. One of them was Fire Warrior on the PC, and I’ve posted the review for it here. I have a few additional remarks to make here: Many of you will have noticed by now that I really enjoy games based in the Warhammer / Warhammer 40K universe. However, I rarely make the argument that they’re good games, and Fire Warrior is no exception. A lot of what eventually became first person shooters were being standardised during the period where Fire Warrior was released, and in many respects, the game fell short of the mark.

Wouldn't it be great to order one of
your squad-mates to cover you?

It is also worth remembering that the Tau were in their infancy in the 40K universe when this game was released, and with almost two decades under their belt, they have become quite a distinctive force in their own right, rather than the “new kids on the block,” so to speak. I don’t know how well they work in the most recent edition of Warhammer 40K, but certainly as far as 7^th edition, they relied on their squads working together more than almost any other army in the game. That got me thinking: What if a 40K game was made with Tau as the player characters, but instead of a standard FPS game, it became more of a squad-based game like SOCOM and Star Wars: Republic Commando? A rather odd comparison for me to make, since I’ve played neither, but I understand the general premise of those games and having an FPS game with a team of Fire Warriors with different abilities could be something very special indeed. Could it happen? Let’s hope so…

Get used to the game telling you you're dead
'cause you'll be seeing it a lot!

I also played Hotline Miami on the PC, getting to the end of it. I’ve got a review for that coming out on Friday, but I might as well tell you now, I really enjoyed the game. It takes a certain rhythm to get into it but once you have, you can have a lot of fun with the trial-and-error gameplay – as long as you don’t take it too seriously. There’s a lot to be said for being good at what you do. By the time I reached the end of the game, I was still having fun and wasn’t quite ready to get off my crazy horse quite yet, so I downloaded Hotline Miami 2 and I’m playing my way through that now.

These will go down in one hit if you
know what you're doing...

On the Xbox 360, I’ve been once again getting some enjoyment out of the Sega Megadrive Ultimate Collection. I’ve often spoken about my fondness for Streets of Rage 2, but funnily enough I didn’t even touch that this time. I came back to my old sparring partner Shinobi 3, running, chopping and, er, shuriken-ing my way though the seven stages, and even though some of the platforming is frustratingly difficult, it is always a fun game to play. The furthest I managed was the final level on the flying airship, because as with many platforming games I died to falling off it more than anything else!

The platform sections of Golden Axe
were never great...

I also played Golden Axe with my daughter. This is one of the first games I ever played on the Megadrive, and some of you may remember I beat it several years ago. I had no intention to return to it, but I thought it was a simple-enough game to explain to Jessie, so we gave it a go! It went reasonably well until Jess forgot what button she had to press to continue the game when she died and locked herself out of the game. I managed to reach the end of the game but lost to the final boss.

Everyone loves cute pandas.

Finally, me and Kirsty played Takenoko – a board game where you must grow a garden and feed a hungry panda. Kirsty will play just about anything with cute animals in it, and she managed to win it this time by taking a lot of the panda-feeding cards and scoring points that way. It’s a great little game, about the right balance of luck and skill for us, and I’m sure we’ll come back to it again soon!

Backlog Beatdown: Setting Warriors on Fire with Warhammer 40000: Fire Warrior

Warhammer 40000: Fire Warrior was a game I owned many years ago on the PlayStation 2. I enjoyed it at the time, but I got to a certain point and got stuck, never played it again and then foolishly traded it in. When I saw it was available on GOG, I bought it and I have finally gotten around to beating it…

Near the start of the game in a typical
war-torn 40K battleground...

Fire Warrior is a first-person shooter set in the Warhammer 40000 universe, where you control the titular Fire Warrior – a Tau soldier of the Fire Caste. On your first active mission, you are aiming to rescue an Ethereal from an Imperial governor, but later you get caught up in a plot to unleash the forces of Chaos upon the unsuspecting galaxy once more. Throughout your journey, you engage in a ship battle, make uneasy alliances with the Space Marines, blow up a Titan and confront the forces of Chaos in their rawest form...

The muzzle flare from the Autogun takes up
more or less the whole field of view...

So, is Fire Warrior any good? Sort of. It was entertaining enough. But arguably the most interesting part of the game is comparing it to what was happening with First-Person Shooters at the time. Gaming was in its sixth generation of consoles, and with that came some smatterings of competence in 3D gaming after a wonky start on the previous generation. Controls for FPS games were on their way to being standardised, multiplayer functionality was creeping in (though it was far from usual for the PS2 in the UK, since broadband was only just starting to be used domestically,) and even the Sci-fi games were aiming for the more realistically proportioned arsenal of only two weapons at a time, rather than whatever you could carry. Leading the charge was Microsoft’s Halo: Combat Evolved, and many of the mechanics of that game were borrowed for Fire Warrior, including the limited weapons, and a personal shield that would protect you for a short while and recharge if you could avoid fire for a few seconds. In that respect, Fire Warrior was definitely chasing trends rather than setting them, but Kuju chose the right part of the 40K lore to make the game from – the Tau. At that point, the Tau were new to the 40K universe, having been released not even two years before, so there was no reason to suggest they could not use the shield, or pick up other weapons and use them if they so choose – they had a blank canvas to design the mechanics of the game. It looked like it could potentially be a contender to Microsoft’s sci-fi shooter.

It had multiplayer as well, but let's not pretend
that's worth talking about nearly two decades later...

Well, that didn’t happen, largely because Fire Warrior is nowhere near as good as Halo. The plot fit the 40K lore well enough but was of no surprise to anyone who had been following the universe for any length of time. The shooting was OK at best, but the Imperial Guard (as they were at the time) took far too many hits before going down, and the Space Marines and Chaos forces were brutally hard to deal with. The guns did what they were supposed to do, though with a surprising lack of punch from the Tau weapons, and the Bolter which handled more like a rocket launcher than anything else. The graphics were lacklustre, even for the time, though the sound was handled surprisingly well. And the level design, while functional for the most part, had some wild variations in checkpoint placement and areas of cheap deaths. Additionally, the version I played on PC was not without a few bugs.

With that having been said, I enjoyed the game. I’ve always enjoyed the 40K universe so I’m usually willing to give the flaws in any game that represents it a free pass. It’s short enough that it doesn’t outstay its welcome, and the difficulty of the enemies can make for some truly thrilling battles in the right places. It’s an entertaining game to play, to experience the shooters of the time and their evolution into what we know now – but with Fire Warrior’s contemporaries outdistancing it, and many developments improving quality of life since then, I would struggle to recommend this to all but the most curious of 40K-based video game collectors.

Final Score: 2/5: If you're sure.

Last Week's Games: Legions, Final Fantasy VII, Crazy Taxi, Painting Chaos Cultists

A busy, but enjoyable week…

I don't think it's true that he can't be stunned anymore...

I downloaded The Horus Heresy: Legions on to my phone, and after syncing my account with the account I created on my computer, I could play the game anywhere I was in range of a router (I don’t have a huge data plan.) This has made things a lot more straightforward in terms of logging in every day and getting a few games in. Apart from that, the most significant development for me in terms of progress is that I managed to save up enough gems to buy a new Warlord: Ezekyle Abbadon for the Sons of Horus. This was none too soon, as I found I was losing a lot of games simply because the three Warlords I had prior (Loken, Tarvitz and Eherlen) just didn’t have enough staying power to compete with a lot of the decks being thrown at me. Abbadon’s ability is pretty basic (3 damage to an enemy troop) but his slightly higher defence means I can last a bit longer and I’ve been winning a few more games. Of course, knowing that he later becomes Abbadon the Despoiler in 40K lore helps provide the additional context; I didn’t read all of the Horus Heresy books (about the first 11 out of currently 52) and I’m not always sure who some of the Warlords are!

An odd choice of photo I grant you, but it's just to remind
myself that I'm going to have to do breed one at some point.

I kept on with Final Fantasy VII as well. I got to the part where Cloud has explained his past and Sephiroth to the others in Kalm, and I now need to find a Chocobo so that I can cross the marshlands. I spent some time grinding for Gil (money) more than anything else so that I could buy all the weapons and different materia; it’s nice to have the time to do that! This is through a combination of playing it on a handheld console, and also not playing it on PC which, the first time I tried, made illegal operation messages come up every so often.

Get out the way you pillock, I'll flatten you!

Having my head tied up in numbers with Legions, and going through a long-form RPG in Final Fantasy, I found myself wanting a little light relief so I had a go with Crazy Taxi, a game I’ve talked about before having downloaded it for free off Xbox Live: Games with Gold. I had been aiming for the achievement points, which for a large part includes getting all the ranks on Arcade and Original mode (the only difference between the two that I can see is the somewhat different maps.) This is quite difficult to do using Arcade rules, because you’re on a timer that is quite tight and only increases when you make successful passenger runs. But getting the achievements is a lot more straightforward when you have the option to set a certain number of minutes of game time – at that point it’s all about prioritising the customers based on how much time you have (The green ones have a smaller catchment detector but pay more for a longer journey.) Less straightforward are the Crazy Box challenges, which involve Crazy Dash and Crazy Drift manoeuvres which don’t lend themselves too well to playing the game with the controller. I’ll keep at it but I don’t want the game to become more work than fun!

Not the best photo, but the light's not that easy to manage.

Finally, I finished painting a set of models I’d started earlier in the year – my Chaos Cultists. I painted the vast majority of them in Warhammer: Dudley last Monday, and completed them today – the first models I’ve painted in my flat. It’s not my best work; I’ve painted more accurately than this in the past but they are cultists and will get shot to pieces anyway so I’m not going to worry about it. The next stage is to paint a Dark Apostle, which I don’t really know where I’m going with at this point – he’s the Chaos equivalent of the Space Marine Chaplain, which would tend to be in black whatever the chapter, but I have seen certain versions of the model painted to fit the legion he’s attached to. As my legion is Word Bearers and the difference is quite stark, I want to make sure I get it right!

Backlog Beatdown: Killing the King with Warhammer 40000: Regicide

I bought Warhammer 40,000: Regicide last Summer when I was on a Games Workshop kick. It was my intention to go for a complete collection of all the Games Workshop licensed games, and Regicide had the added benefit of me having seen some coverage on it from TotalBiscuit. It looked more of an oddity than anything else, but I managed to see it through to the end.

On this level, you have to kill, not capture, the enemy...

The game is essentially Chess set in the 40K universe, using the Space Marines and Orks as chess pieces to simulate the battles.  How Regicide differs from Chess is that once you have moved, you can use abilities of your pieces on an Initiative Points system to attack your opponent. This works on a percentile mechanic, and usually amounts to shooting them, or attacking them in close combat if you’re in an adjacent square. It takes longer to eliminate a piece using this method, but if you focus enough attacks in one place, you can take out entire armies without having to capture anything; the usual method for Chess. This is augmented by additional abilities from the various pieces: Devastators (Bishops) have the ability to focus their attacks to do more damage at the expense of being able to move, Assault Marines (Knights) have increased attack power after they move and can also throw Krak (anti-armour) grenades, and so on. This creates an additional strategic layer to the game and sets it apart from either Chess or 40K in a way that, for the most part, works reasonably well.

The game is presented well enough; the graphics are fine and the sound is good. The music is thematic, and loops in a way that runs just underneath your attention level and doesn’t distract. And the sound effects are all in the right places; the guns have a nice kick to them and the close combat attacks sound nice and meaty. The voice acting is competently-performed, and has no surprises for anybody familiar with the 40K universe; tough hulking warriors for the Space Marines, and barely-intelligent growling from the Orks.

The takedown animations are suitably brutal...

The bulk of the game revolves around the Campaign; a series of 50 levels that put the Blood Angels against the Orks in various different deployments and scenarios. There are primary objectives that you need to achieve to beat the level: Eliminate a certain piece, move one of your pieces to a certain square, use a certain ability on a specific piece. There also are secondary objectives that you can complete to achieve a higher score, and these tend to be more specific: Capturing a piece rather than killing it, don’t lose any of your pieces, use a certain ability in a specific place. Depending on the mission these can be very tough, but they make for a fun challenge! However, the level design isn’t always on point. Granted, there is only so much you can do with an 8x8 board, but some of the objectives are designed in such a way that the only way to achieve it is to replay the level over and over again until the AI makes a mistake. That, coupled with the random number generation, means that some of the later missions in particular are won more through luck than judgement.

Sadly, this is all the game really has to offer in its current state. Skirmish games of Regicide – as close to chess as the game gets – is probably enjoyable against a live opponent but the servers are almost completely dead and it’s all but impossible to get a game. If you’re going to play ‘Hotseat’ (both players on the same computer,) you might as well just play chess or 40K. As the points you acquire from the campaign are used to unlock customisation options like different skins and weapons for use in the Skirmish mode, there’s not much incentive to get those either. The single player can be fun, but the sometimes unfair difficulty and RNG makes it frustrating more often than not, and renders the game very difficult to recommend on that basis. I enjoyed it, but it’s a 40K game; I was always going to like it. I don’t necessarily know if anyone else will.

Final Score: 2/5. If you’re sure.

Last Week's Games: Regicide (I beat it!) and Murder in the Alps

For the second time in as many weeks I find myself apologising for being late with this blog. I wanted to beat the final level on Regicide before I wrote it, so that I could write about beating Regicide! But by the time I eventually did, it was far too late in the night to write anything meaningful about it and I had work the following day. But I’m here now, and I finally managed to beat Warhammer 40K: Regicide.

Well you're about to die, sonflower...

If you’ve been following my comments on this game you’ll know that Regicide can be a bit hit-and-miss with its level design. Some of them were great, but some of the levels and secondary objectives were designed so that it was only possible to do it if the A.I. made a mistake. Thankfully, the final level of Regicide was an absolute beauty. The Space Marine’s objective is to take down the Warboss (King,) with the secondary objective of eliminating all of the Orks. The Orks have the advantage in numbers (they have two more pawns than normal and the Space Marines have two fewer,) and the placement of the terrain makes them difficult to deal with. It took many, many attempts; I found myself taking out as many of the Shoota Boyz (pawns) as possible to stop them throwing Stik Bombs at my Librarian and Captain (Queen and King,) as they do a surprising amount of damage if you ignore them. The Weirdboy (Queen) is always a messy piece to contend with, the Lootaz (Bishops) are brutal in surprise attacks and the Stormboyz (Knights) can be lethal if you forget about their movement patterns. The Meganobz (Rooks) are very hard to take down, thankfully I managed to capture them both. But even after all that, the Warboss is a very tough opponent; he doesn’t take much damage no matter what you’re firing at him, and can call in a shield every few turns. The only way I found to beat him was to use my Terminator (Rook) and Librarian to force him to the back of the board and into a Checkmate position, but even then there was always the risk of him using his bombardment move to attack my Captain from a distance!

Nonetheless, I managed to beat a game that I’ve put roughly 60 hours into. The ending was… well, thematically, it fitted. But the set-up from the intro video and some of the cut-scenes promised a lot more than it delivered. There was a potential set-up for a sequel, but Hammerfall Publishing are not an active presence right now and unless someone else picks up the rights, I can’t see it happening. I’ll try and have a review out by the end of the week!

I’ve also been playing Murder in the Alps, the first Hidden Object game I’ve played. This purports to be a murder mystery, and you solve puzzles and clues in order to progress through the game. It looks great, with a graphic novel-type vibe, and the script is well-performed if not particularly well-written. The hidden object sequences, while far from the most exhilarating gameplay mechanics around, nonetheless give a nice sense of accomplishment if you manage to get through them without help. I’ve found myself pleasantly engaged!

Who dunnit? Probably not the girl in the middle
since that's who you play as.

However, the game is let down by incredibly poor pacing with its payment model. It works, as many free-to-play mobile games do, on an “energy” system, whereby anything you do in the game takes up a certain amount of energy and you have to either buy more, or wait until it recharges naturally to keep playing. The trouble is you’ll only get about 10 minutes of play out of the game before you run out of energy, and because it has a very slow recharge rate, you’ll be waiting for almost a day before you can play again. When I was playing I discovered I had the option to speed this up by watching advertising videos, but I don’t remember it being there when I first started the game!

I don’t know what will happen next week, as most of my free time has been taken up by this week’s content, but we’ll see what happens!

Last Week's Games: Kingdom Hearts and Regicide

One rather prevalent theme running through this blog lately is not having time to play many games these days. It’s becoming somewhat cliché now, but it’s true; between everything and everyone I’m supposed to be dividing my attention between, I basically get Monday afternoons to sit down and play some games. And not always then! Last Monday I spent the vast majority of that time shopping, ironing, sorting washing out, doing a couple of bits and pieces for work that need doing, and of course writing this blog.

Some people didn't like the Gummi sequences.
I love them!

What didn’t help was that the game I chose to play was Kingdom Hearts 1.5 + 2.5 Remix on the PS4. Not that the game itself is bad – quite the reverse, actually. But because it was a recent acquisition for me and I hadn’t played it yet, I felt compelled to wait for the game to download before I could play it. I actually had the option to jump straight into the game, but from what I understand from others who have done this with all sorts of games, this rarely amounts to more than a title screen, and as I was talking to someone on Facebook Messenger at the time I thought I’d stick with that, for what turned out to be roughly three quarters of an hour for a 4.5 gig download. I know that waiting for games to download onto the modern consoles is a thing that happens now and shouldn’t be news to anybody really, but I’m not used to it yet! I’ve heard it said that it’s to do with the structure of the PS4; no matter how fast your internet connection is, it can’t receive more than a few megabytes at a time. Given that my laptop would have done that download in about a third of the time, I have no trouble believing that!

The upshot of all this was that by the time I’d got through it, I had about an hour to play the game on Monday night. But it’s always nice to play a game and enjoy every moment of it! Kingdom Hearts is an absolute joy to play; a successful integration of familiar characters if you’re a fan of the Final Fantasy games, and a lovely bit of fan-fiction if you like Disney characters. The version I’m playing at the moment is Final Mix, and I’m not entirely sure what the differences were supposed to be but the only one I’ve noticed so far is that the sounds on the background music was slightly different. The composition was the same but the instruments had been… improved? I don’t know. I like it for now, but I had it tested in Traverse Town. I’ve got a lot of investment in that theme; that gorgeous clarinet melody over the piano accompaniment is potentially the most welcoming, yet hauntingly lonely 16 bars of music I think I’ve ever heard and I didn’t want that messed with. It turns out there’s an extra keyboard (I think) sound added above the melody; I was sceptical at first but in the end I decided it adds to it more than not.

I was actually looking for a picture of the Death Company.
Had to make do with this instead.

When I had some spare time with my laptop I played Regicide for a while, the 40K chess game. I’ve been stuck on a level for a while now, where I have to eliminate three Ork Stormboyz (Knights) and one Meganob (Rook) with three Tactical Marines, (pawns,) Three Assault marines (Knights) and a Librarian (Queen.) The problem I am running in to is that I’m going for the secondary objectives as well, in which none of my pieces are allowed to fall. If you lose the Librarian, you fail the mission, but if you lose anything else you won’t achieve your secondary objectives. Maybe I’m doing something wrong but I’ve run in to a few missions like this where the only hope I have of achieving those objectives is to wait for the A.I. to make a mistake, and take the win from there. I’ve said in the past that games need to have a solid process and a satisfying outcome; you rarely get either when you rely on luck!

See you all again next week.

Last Week's Games: Hand of Fate, OlliOlli, Pokemon Leaf Green, Assassin's Creed 2, Painting Chaos Cultists

It’s been quite an eventful week for me in terms of playing games! I had a couple of highlights, not the least of them finally getting to the end of Hand of Fate after owning the game for nearly two years. You can read my full review here, but I’d like to re-iterate how much it adds to the game that there’s no real plot to speak of, no Jacobean tragedy of characters to keep track of and no need to restart the game in order to remember what in the world was going on. It’s just you and The Dealer, and even though none of it gets explained by the end of the game, I feel it would have ruined it the game if it had tried to resolve it. It is a hugely fun experience, worth more than the sum of its parts, and one that I would more than recommend giving a go.

My new game for this week was OlliOlli; a 2D skating game. I’m finding this one very difficult to get to grips with because the system for tricks and landings is completely different from what I’ve come to expect from the 5/6^th generation Tony Hawk-style games. With those games, the face buttons combined with the directions handled the vast majority of the tricks, and landing was as simple as pointing the skateboard the right way when you hit the floor. With OlliOlli, the tricks are done almost entirely off the left thumb stick, and the A button (on the Steam controller) handles the landing. It’s taking some getting used to, but then, so did Tony Hawk, so I might come back and give it another go if I’ve got a few minutes.

I carried on with Pokémon Leaf Green for a while, getting to the other side of Moon Mountain and into Cerulean City. I haven’t done anything there yet because I didn’t play the game for very long this week, but I’ll keep going at it whenever it’s convenient.

I also carried on with Assassin’s Creed 2, arriving at the point where you have the option to spend some money to rebuild the town. It does require a certain suspension of disbelief to accept that roughly two years have passed between arriving at the villa and the game’s plot progressing, and I’m not sure to what end you are re-building the town. Some of the buildings have obvious benefits, but for the rest of them, I’m not sure what the purpose is unless there comes a point later in the game where you have to spend a lot of money! I’m having a pretty decent time with it, but while it does seem to take control of its own plot more than the previous game, it appears to be less open than Assassin’s Creed as well for that reason.

Finally I spend some time in Warlords ‘n’ Wizards in Netherton painting Chaos Cultists. I enjoyed painting them a lot more once I’d got the block colours done on the clothes, because at that point they started to look quite good. I probably put a little more effort in to them than was necessary for rank-and-file models that will die if my opponent so much as breathes on them too hard, but hey, it’s not like I’m in a hurry to complete the army!

I had a look at some of the options for building my Word Bearers army, and found that with the addition of 20 cultists and a Dark Apostle, I could build a Battalion formation in a 500 point army. This would give me six command points to spend on Stratagems, and I found a couple of interesting ones that relate to the army I’m trying to build. I could, potentially, remove a unit of cultists from the board and bring it back at full strength on any of the board edges I like; this is a bit of a gamble but it might pay off in objective-based games. Also the Stratagem that relates to the Word Bearers take some of the risk away from summoning Daemons, I will see how this effects the composition of the army as it grows.

Finally Finished my Khorne Bezerker Army...

One of the ways I manage to keep myself engaged with hobby games after well over half my lifetime is the variety of models that I get to paint. I rarely stick with one army or faction, preferring to flit between one system, or army, and another. That way, I get a different challenge each time I paint; I get to paint different models, different scales, and different colours. It keeps me interested, but it also means that I rarely have a so-called ‘full-sized’ army.

This is something of an abstract concept, so for those of you who don’t know: Each game has a ‘standard’ size, usually measured in points or the system’s equivalent. With Warhammer 40K, that’s usually 1500 points. With Warhammer, it’s 2000, though that has changed with the advent of Age of Sigmar, not sure what the standard size is here. With Lord of the Rings, it’s something like 700 points, and with Batman Miniatures Game I think it’s 300.

The Red Fury, in its full glory.

So it’s no surprise to anybody who knows my approach to hobby gaming that even though I’m well into my 17^th year of doing it, I’ve only managed to create a full-sized army 3 times.

This is the third: The Red Fury.

An army of Khorne Bezerkers, why not? I came up with the idea for the army around halfway through 2011, when I wanted to build up a force to take to every Games Workshop in the country and play a game with it. I intended to build it up a lot more quickly than I did, and it really was my first army where I’d planned it out from the start; I knew where I was going with it, what models I wanted, and what strategies I wanted the army to achieve. Here’s the army list:

	Components	Points	Total Points	Total Army
HQ	Chaos Lord	65	130	1496
	Aura of Dark Glory	15
	Axe of Blind Fury	35
	Veterans of the Long War	5
	Mark of Khorne	10
Troops	Khorne Bezerkers (8)	162	284
	Chainaxe (4)	12
	Gift of Mutation	10
	Veterans of the Long War	8
	Icon of Wrath	15
	Power Weapon	15
	Plasma Pistol	15
	Chaos Rhino	35
	Havoc Launcher	12
	Khorne Bezerkers (8)	162	284
	Chainaxe (4)	12
	Gift of Mutation	10
	Veterans of the Long War	8
	Icon of Wrath	15
	Power Weapon	15
	Plasma Pistol	15
	Chaos Rhino	35
	Havoc Launcher	12
	Khorne Bezerkers (8)	162	284
	Chainaxe (4)	12
	Gift of Mutation	10
	Veterans of the Long War	8
	Icon of Wrath	15
	Power Weapon	15
	Plasma Pistol	15
	Chaos Rhino	35
	Havoc Launcher	12
Heavy Support	Chaos Defiler	195	200
	Havoc Launcher	5
	Chaos Vindicator	120	157
	Siege Shield	10
	Havoc Launcher	12
	Daemonic Possession	15
	Chaos Vindicator	120	157
	Siege Shield	10
	Havoc Launcher	12
	Daemonic Possession	15

 

The heavy vehicles pound the enemy from a distance...

So the concept was simple: Pound the opponent from a distance with three 5-inch blast templates per turn, and destroy whatever was left in close combat afterwards. The Rhinos add to the firepower with their Havoc Launchers, and the Daemonic Possession on the tanks protected them from being stun-locked out of combat.

Unfortunately, I designed the army while 5^th Edition 40K was still in full swing, and while upgrades to the Bezerkers sorted out the discrepancy in points, I still completed it four years and two editions after the fact. It’s got no way of dealing with Fliers, for example, and since most armies these days have at least some form of flier it can cause problems. With the introduction of Hull Points in 6^th edition, tanks became much easier to destroy. And of course the idea of relying on blast templates and close combat weapons is something of a departure from the fact that the most damage I ever do to anything in 40K is with small-arms fire.

While the Bezerkers wait to eviscerate anything that gets too close.

Nonetheless, the Defilers and Vindicators do their jobs well as destruction machines and are absolute magnets for bullets. Oddly for an army that relies on close combat, I play a defensive game and allow the opponent to take the fight to me. I enjoy hiding my Bezerkers in ruins, out of line of sight. This forces my opponents to approach me if they want to win, because if they don’t, I can use the tanks to blast them from a distance.

This isn’t a strong army, by any stretch of the imagination. A hardcore tournament player would take me to pieces in moments. But it does what it does well enough, and hopefully proves a beyond-beginner level of challenge for most people. If Chaos are getting a new codex for 7^th edition, I’ll be interested to see what changes it will bring and how it will affect the dynamic of an army like this. Until then, I’ll try and get some games in, and see what happens when an unstoppable force whoops an immovable object’s ass.

Lead by this beast of a warrior (Games Day 2009 model)

You may also notice a difference in the painting of some of the models; this is again due to the changing editions of the paints. The Bezerkers started off being painted Mechrite Red, but by the time I got around to painting the last squad, two of the Rhinos and the two Vindicators, that colour had been replaced by Mephiston Red which is a little brighter. I was a bit miffed about that, but I wanted to see this army through to the end so I tried not to worry about it too much.