Unfortunately the last three weeks have been very busy and I have not been able to sit down and play Space Hulk: Ascension at all yet. I have my regular play session day coming up later this week so I'll just do double duty playing Ascension as well as the next game on my list.
I'll edit this post to write my experiences, I just want to get it published so I don't break my post order. Thank you for your understanding.
Ugh. Half an hour in, I've failed the third tutorial mission, and it's clear to me that I will not like this game.
Space Hulk Ascension is a turn-based strategy game set in the Warhammer 40,000 universe where you play as a squad of Space Marines infiltrating a Space Hulk--a giant mass of derelict starships, asteroids, and other debris--in order to cleanse it of Tyranid Genestealers. It is based off of the tabletop board game Space Hulk originally released in 1989 which in turn was influenced by the movies Alien, and Aliens.
It's the "influenced by Alien and Aliens" part that I really don't like, though turn-based strategy has never appealed to me outside of Age of Empires and some weird obsession I had for playing StarCraft through to the end shortly after it was published, might have been Sarah Kerrigan's story.
Anyway, the game is incredibly claustrophobic with most corridors being one unit wide and the maps having mostly right angle intersections which means that your squad members have to split up in order for one guy to down a specific hallway. It doesn't help that there are Genestealer entry points dotted around the map and there seems to be just one more than you have squad members so you can't block them all at once, forcing you to leave one side of your group vulnerable.
That forced vulnerability is incredibly frustrating. Like, in the tutorial mission I just failed I'm supposed to guide a squad of five members including one heavy equipped with a flame thrower to a room on the map for the heavy to "cleanse" i.e. roast to a crisp. One of the victory conditions is that the heavy cannot die, because of course if they're dead the room cannot be cleansed, so I have only four other members to block the Genestealer spawn points. Of course there are five spawn points and of course the farthest one has a shortcut to the main hallway that only the Genestealers can use. So I tried my best to cover all the spawn points in a way that protected the heavy while he made his way to the room for cleansing. Alas I did not get to the spawn point closest to the cleansing room and half of my squad in addition to the heavy died.
Apparently the game works on chess logic where the attacking piece just wins during its turn. There's a Space Marine skill that you can activate at the end of each unit's movement called "Overwatch" where they will attack anything that comes into their line of sight, but that requires 2 action points which have to be left over after movement and rotation so there's a lot of thinking ahead required that I just don't have the practice or the patience to do well.
Unless you're a tactical turn-based strategy nut, or a 40k completionist I don't believe I can recommend this game. For being nearly 3 years old it's still got a base price of $30 with each of the four DLC chapters sold for $8 on top of that. The "Ultimate Pack" has the base game and all of the DLC for $45, which is better than $62 for everything a la carte. It's gone on sale during the last few Steam Holiday and Summer sales, though no consistent discount, 60%. 80%, then 75%. If you can find it on sale and it sounds at all interesting then there are worse things you can do with your money. I personally found reading about the various Space Hulks in the 40k universe far more engrossing than trying to plod through one.
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