This game is short and sweet but it could have been so much more.
This game looks good and controls great but thats where the good things end.
Each mission you get to take 6 predetermined units into battle. These can be scouts, space marines, TERMINATORS, land speeders, Predator tanks, Dreadnaughts and some other stuff. Terminators are my favorite looking unit in Warhammer 40k. Each type of unit comes with a default weapon thats usually a piece of crap that cant kill anything but they have infinite ammo. You can also choose a secondary weapon that can kill and blown up stuff real good but these carry a limited supply of ammo. You can increase the ammo but it will give your soldiers less AP.
This is the first part where the developers dropped the ball. You should have been able to choose your own units at this point but that doesnt happen.
The game only has 15 missions which makes it extremely short. The first half of the game is extremely easy and lets you walk right through everything. Im on mission 10 or so now and I've started getting my butt handed to me my first time through. However there is a total lack of offline randon battles. You are stuck replaying missions with specific force if you play solo. There is an online/wireless mode but whoop t do.
Battlefields are really cool. Warhammer 40k has cool archetecture almost always and this game is no exception. The cool part is all the buildings and terrain can be blown up. High walls can be turned into rubble which creates low walls that you can hide behind and shoot over but those can be blown up to and create new paths of movement or expose positions. For the most part its awesome but you can occasionally run into an enemy who is behind a building and no matter what you do you can not see him in order to shoot at him. It would have been nice to be able to rotate the camera but I just nuke that area and knock down the walls.
Anyways the battlefields are awesome and provide several paths and places to fight. Its possable to try and flank or even come up from behind enemy positions on most maps. You could run your forces into a corner and lay waste to the surrounding terrain to create a killing field if you wanted to. There is a degree of freedom which is nice. Blowing up terrain sounds cool but its not easy. It usually require ammo based weapons and although its cool to have a guy chainsword his way through a wall, standing next to destroyed terrain usually injures people lol, only a little.
One of the really bad things about this game is the AI. The enemy cheats. It knows where you are for the most part and how much AP you have and if you have people on overwatch. If you have people on overwatch they might try to send one guy through but the rest will stay back. Worse than that though is the ability the enemy has to get into a position to shoot at you and then still have AP's left to get back into cover or out of sight.
Oh man another thing I hate about this game is that the camera is under your control on the enemie's turn. The camera should have locked onto an active enemy and showed you what they were shooting at. Instead you just see a ton of red dots moving and gunfire and you dont get to see any of the action unless you happen to know who is going to be getting shot at.
You usually have to move a little bit before you see an enemy and then you usually have to blow all your AP's take out cover or just killing the people you see and you are left with no AP's and your out in the open exposed. Its the Computer gets twice as much AP as you do.
They should have totally scrapped mission based gameplay and just created a more thorough random battle system. I think Tom Clancy's EndWar game will revolutionize these types of games. They give you points on the map to fight over and control. That would have been awesome in this game. They have those in the table-top games. Being able to pick your own forces and gain experience would have been nice too.
Thier is a PC game called Epic Warhammer 40k: Total Annihilation and its a more large scale version of what this game was. It would be hella sick if they fused the two games. You would have epic and soldier based battles each turn.
I would say this game is only a rental but there arent that many places that let you rent handheld games. You definately should not buy this game. Its to short and lacks replay value unless you have friends with DS's or can play online. it is worth playing though. Theres just no way in hell its worth 30$.
Man a full complete versions of Games Workshop games would be so killer. I just want to see a Warhammer game with a fat massive budget and a killer dev team.