Space Hulk Deathwing (Enhanced Edition): Weapons Hot!

Nothing makes me happier than advancing with the heavy assault gun, I love to hear this puppy roar and light up the darkness, until it jams of course.

So I had a pretty productive Thanksgiving break, and to my surprise I was able to finish a good number of things, though a review wasn't among them. The first game I managed to finish was one that I had on the metaphorical shelf for a while, and that was Space Hulk Deathwing (the Enhanced Edition). It's a rather unique game among the horde-based shooters, mostly due to the fact that you and your squadmates are less outmanned and outgunned and more the big guns. To me it evoked the beginning sequence of the Marines arriving in Aliens, complete with motion-detectors and quiet tension punctuated by intense bursts of gunfire, though without the memorable lines. It's a game that feels good to play (in addition to being gorgeous( and by and large is satisfying to triumph over, but at the same time its difficulty, AI, and lack of any real personality sapped a lot of my enjoyment from playing it.

There's not just despair present in the environments, there's also a cold and etherial beauty to be found, but these instances are far less common than the former

In terms of story, Space Hulk Deathwing starts off pretty well, with the story being yet another taking place in the grimdark future of the forty-first millennium (It's Warhammer 40k guys), where you are a librarian (basically a wizard) of the Dark Angels legion of space marines. Your objective: investigate a space hulk, a cluster of ships lost in the warp that over time have fused together into a big ball before being spat out, for any useful data or resources for the Imperium of Man. Since quarters are tight, and you're not going to walk in there unprepared since lord knows what's lurking there, so you and your two buddies are equipped with terminator armor, essentially becoming walking tanks. As the story progresses and you explore more of the ships that are part of this strange formation, you discover that one of the ships holds relics of your legion's history, something all too rare in the future. From here is the usual shoot through waves of foes, find the goods, endure an escort mission, and then rig the place to blow and escape from the Genestealer Tyrannids (Zerg in space, even though the Zerg are more than likely inspired by them). It's quite a shallow story, with no real memorable characters to speak of (Listen, I know that space marines are stoic and largely emotionless, but come on a board has more memorability or personality than these guys) or themes. All exposition is delivered via briefing and by a handful of short cinematics, so it's easy to space out and miss something. In total I think I heard a single joke in the entire game, though this might have simply been a dry observation. There are collectables to be found throughout your playthrough, relics of your chapter's past, though apart from a visual gallery they seem to serve no real purpose besides XP bonuses. There's also a bunch of holoboards that give backstory of the ships (and also act as checkpoints, much to my chagrin as I entered the final sequence). However these are both easily missable and boring. They each have the same common thread of "um something's not on the up and up here, it's probably nothing but maybe we should check after our next warp jump?", so once you've seen one you've seen them all. The Genestealers, the only foe you face in the game, have no real menace or personality to them, which was a massive opportunity wasted. I'm aware of the difficulty involved in making an enemy who's entire ambition is to consume everything in the universe compelling, but them not having any real memorability only helps me to quickly forget this game once I closed it, though the Cthulhu-Looking variety were a step in the right direction.

What are you even talking about Barachiel? They're coming at us from down a single hallway, we're slaughtering them, overrun my ass.

The gameplay of Deathwing had some pretty big highs and lows for me. At a first glance it's my (or probably most other people's) fantasies come to life. You and your squad are a lumbering bunch, packed to the brim with big guns and cans of kickass, ponderously making your way through these labyrinthine ships.  Your guns are big and weighty with effects to match, though they generally fall in line under the standard shooter fare, though weightier versions. They each are pretty good at what they do while maintaining their unique edge. The plasma cannon shoots massive plasma rounds, the redemptor is a semiautomatic shotgun that fires ricocheting shards, and so on. The flamethrower is the most strange one of the bunch, given that it's armor-piercing and somehow gets better as you face the tougher enemies. Your spells and melee options are also satisfying, being terrors in their own right (though I prefer the ranged weapons). There's a decent enemy selection which acts as a good display of the genestealers' capabilities. A good chunk of the earlier foes you face are physically smaller than you, and several varieties you can kill just by charging into them (though they often take care to engage at range). The later enemies are tankier and have other things to watch out for, mostly in regards to their massive damage output. Magic goes both ways here, you're powerful due to your psychic ability, but so are enemy psychers, who can ruin your day with ease. You do have a minimap to aid in your traversal of these ships, though enemy markers are replaced by directional markers, so you never know the enemy's exact location, only general direction and relative distance. It's a novel idea, and it added a nice additional dramatic factor to the gameplay. Healing functions rather uniquely in Deathwing compared to other games. Where you would normally be healed by carried medkits, pickups, or regenerating health, Deathwing requires that your medic use a charge (of a limited supply) of stimulants to heal your wounds, which helps give your AI companions (if you played alone like me) a feeling of necessity besides raw firepower.

The Targeting HUD, for when you really want to see what you're up against. It's by no means essential but I wish that it didn't feel like that.

But now that I've said what I liked about the gameplay, I have to mention what I didn't, and there's a lot to talk about here. You know how I mentioned that you and your squad are big and burly guys in cumbersome armor? That's also a downside, and not one that aids in your immersion or enjoyment of the game. You and your squad are painfully slow, and you'll wind up using much of your stamina just trying to hurry things along somewhat as you traverse the massive ships. This is not helped by the unforgiving difficulty of the game, which can see you and your squad ripped to shreds in mere moments (especially against broodlords and scythe-strains). Difficulty (obviously) only increases as you progress, but as opposed to objective-wise harder missions, you're assailed with waves of tougher enemies, and without similarly stronger guns I felt like I was depowered. There is a skill tree, though besides unlocking new abilities I did not notice that we were really any stronger for it. This also extends to the map, which also acts as a remote hacking interface. I used that a total of once before never trying it again as its a.) faster to just destroy them with a quickly-recharging lightning bolt and b.) hacking leaves you defenseless and vulnerable to being ambushed, and your allies are of little help in keeping watch. Once you die you are told to restart the mission or reload a save, which I didn't notice until I had almost completed the game, so that's a lot of repeated walks. Even then, dying generally puts you back at least five to fifteen minutes, and in the case of repeated deaths this can quickly infuriate. Your squamates, should you choose to play alone, are quite frankly dumber than a box of rocks. You can smoothly command them with the spacebar, assigning simple orders in addition to 'please heal me friend, I am on the cusp of death in case you haven't noticed'. However, even when given orders your squamates don't really seem to feel any sense of urgency. I mean, the plan is to go in and get out before our enemies notice us, right? Speaking of enemies, it's hard as hell to tell the two toughest varieties, the scythe-strain and broodlord, apart. While admittedly it's not difficult to tell when a big and pissed off alien is charging at your 12 o'clock, it's an unpleasant surprise to be honest when the scythe-strain lobs a fireball that nearly kills you from full health out of nowhere, thus cluing you into the fact that it is a psycher, and thus a broodlord (please heal me at your nearest convenience medic). Fantastic. In terms of gameplay, Space Hulk Deathwing was the source of a lot of mixed feelings, highs and lows. There were a lot of "Fuck yeah"s and "Oh fuck you"s uttered throughout my playthrough. The gameplay doesn't seem bad per say, more needlessly difficult and could easily be better.

The last frame of my campaign, sometimes it pays to just say fuck this, I'm running the hell away from these guys

Negative feelings about the gameplay aside, the aesthetic of Deathwing is pretty damn appealing, even perhaps to people who aren't huge fans of the 40K setting. I'll start with the negative, and it can be essentially summed up with the darkness of the game's environments. The levels are all really dark, and while it's always a nice and scary time to worry about things leaping out from the shadows, you'd think that the Adeptus Astartes had thought of a better flashlight than the shitty incandescent or led ones that were given to kids like me for summer camp when I was six or seven. This isn't hyperbole, and often in order to see you're going to have to empty your targeting computer (essentially iron sights that highlights enemies), and thus wash the color away from the environment. There isn't really music, and apart from teleporting away to heal and resurrect allies, there's a striking feeling of groundedness to the game. What I mean by this is that there are few 'gamey' elements, no feeling that you're doing anything besides experiencing an average day in the lives of a squad of space marines. They even talk and react like space marines do, with all the peerless charisma that entails. The sound design is tense and ominous, with various creaks and groans of the hulk surrounding you. Your weapons sound pretty damn scary, with powerful sounding sounds pouring from them as you unload countless rounds into the Genestealer scum. Visual effects are no slouch either, with your weapons frequently reducing your opponents to chunks of meat and ash on the decks and leaving massive scars on the walls (these weapons are generally as tall as a person after all). The environments of each of the ships each look somewhat similar with a gothic industrial look, but what could you expect, each of these ships is effectively a warship, so they're going to appear somewhat similar on the inside. I'd hesitate to say that the environment itself tells a story of its own, but it does have a personality, mainly of despair and loss. You encounter no friendly forces, only the bodies of tech priests and wrapped up corpses of humans who likely died long before whatever calamity befell their ship. They lie strewn here and there throughout the ships like broken toys for the former, and a mountain of corpses in a hold (that you must climb) for the latter. Neither is remarked upon, and if you and your squad's reactions are anything to go off of, you're walking over little more than dirt. It's a quiet sort of horror that permeates Deathwing's environments, and while it only suggests a fraction of the horror that the dead endured, it's effective nevertheless.

The 'Corpse Room' I was talking about, and probably my favorite room for the perhaps minute or two I was in there. Pretty haunting, I wonder what happened to them.

So there's my space-hulk-sized review of Space Hulk Deathwing: Enhanced Edition, and I'm surprised that I had so much to say after playing this. This is without going into the multiplayer, which seems to be like the single player except with four(?) characters of differing specialties so everyone has a thing to do. At the end of the day, would I recommend Deathwing? I'm not sure either way to be honest. It offers high difficulty in addition to a power fantasy that feels, well, like not an exaggeration, but on the flip side it could easily be better in a number of ways. The overall aesthetic is something that the more I thought about the more I liked, but that can't completely sell a game. In all honesty the jury's out on Space Hulk Deathwing, it's unique and quite different, but had more than a few missteps as can happen when deviating from the norm. If you're going to play it, make sure to bring a friend or three, not only to have more guns, but also probably more competent squadmates. Might make for a good team-building or bonding activity.