Space Hulk (2013) Review

Space Hulk (SH) is more well known as a classic board game from the Warhammer 40K universe. Those who missed out on playing it that way can now play it on the PC. You control a team of the Space Marines called the Blood Angels. As a squad of Terminator units you've been sent to wipe the alien Genestealers off of the derelict spaceship called the Space Hulk.

Over a series of missions you will fight back waves of the nimble and deadly aliens intent on wiping your squad out, protecting a particular unit, or sometimes the squad will be scattered and your mission is to reunite them; it doesn't get more varied than that. If you were a fan of the board games then you'll find plenty to like, as the game often feels more like they're trying to stay faithful to the board game rather than making it a more fun video game. The hulking marines can only travel one at a time through the tight corridors of the Space Hulk. As you stomp slowly around the ship you also have limited Action points and every movement uses them up, even turning costs a point. In games like X-COM a lot can be done with the small pool of action points, in SH you won't be moving far each turn and it tends to make missions feel a lot longer than they should be. The biggest issue I had was with such limited points was the way too many times I wasted a point on moving in the wrong direction while I was trying to just turn them around. There are extra action points that are in a Command Points pool that every unit can draw from, but I found moving the wrong way facing the wrong way the damage had already been done and those extra points go to setting things right.

Fighting the aliens is a straight forward affair, you see them and shoot them before they get too close or set your units to overwatch and set them to shoot any aliens that approach them. You can also deal with them with Flamer units by setting the nearby area on fire. Make sure you keep the aliens as far back as possible, if they get too close and your gun jams it takes one of them to tear you apart. Once you get used to setting your units up to hold back any waves of enemies while slowly making your way to the objective, you won't have many problems. SH also contains multiplayer so you can play against your friends from anywhere in the world instead of only being able to play it at get togethers.

The visuals of SH are a mixed affair, the ship is claustrophobic and corridor upon corridor, but the different details on the Terminator units is pretty cool. The Genestealers fare less better though. One effect that I really liked was the 'armour cam' which shows what the Blood Angel sees as they look down the dark dangerous corridors of the dreadnought.

To the developers of Full Control's credit they have been patching the game and have recently released a big patch fixing some things and have added an extra three missions. After spending some time post-big patch I did notice improvements in how the game ran and I was able to turn the visuals up to the highest without the framerate stuttering.

Conclusion

Space Hulk gives fans of the board game a competent digital version they can play with their friends online. Full Control have been pretty good on working on patching their game considering it was pretty buggy on release and have gone as far as providing extra content while they fix things. But unless you like tabletop gaming/board games SH is less accessible, it can be a slow repetitive game when presented in this format. While I have mentioned a bunch of negatives, I had to remember who this game was really for and for those people there's plenty to like here and it helps provide a way to play SH from where ever someone else is playing it which I imagine would be very useful if you enjoy SH.