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So recently I bought this mario clone called Warhammer 40k: Mechanicus.
It's a first Warhammer game that focuses entirely on Cult Mechanicus as a protagonist force. No spess marines around this time, only Tech Priests and their exotic weaponry, army of cyborg soldiers, autonomous robots and lobotomised slaves. Characters in game talk quite a bit and introduce the player to the various ideas tech priests follows that differ from usual xeno purging and glory seeking. So it's a familiar setting but also something fresh.
As for the game mechanics, it's similar to x-com with a mix of darkest dungeon. Your team consists primarily of your techpriests, which you can equip individually from large variety of tools and which you can level up freely in 6 different disciplines. Then you fill rest of your team slots with more disposable troops. After assembling your team you choose one of the avaiable missions which have various level of difficulity and different rewards.
During mission you'll be exploring Necron tombs room by room similiar way like in Darkest Dungeon. You can go straight to your objective, or walk around looking for stuff. And stuff can be both beneficial and harmful. There's also another risk to it, the longer you walk around the more you alert Necrons in the tomb of your presence, giving them buffs for any battle that may come. After the mission the alert level from the tomb will also translate to global awakening level. I don't know yet what will happen when it reaches 100% but I guess it will trigger endgame fight or something like that.
Every mission will include at least 1 fight, which are turn based. There's no cover system or accurancy in this game however. If the guy is in range and not behind a wall or something you can shoot him no problem. Important thing are Cognition points. You use them for many of your active abilities, powerful weapons, to sprint outside your normal movement range and to deploy troops. The pool of those points is shared between all your tech priests. You gather them by scanning certain objects on the battle map, scanning fallen enemies and using special items. Proper management of those points is very important and vital to your success in battle.
Enemies in the game are quite interesting. You don't know their health points or armour values and how much damage you deal to them unless you scan them first. So I had one guy being shot multiple times only to reveal next turn after a scan that he's completely okay because he had quite high energy armour. Necrons are also basically space undead, so if you leave his body lying around he will reanimate after few turns. You have to either hit him again with anything to force him to teleport away from the battlefield or annihilate him by a critical hit. They also come in many varietes with different abilities so it doesn't get repetive. Maps themselves can be suprising too. Sometimes you trigger something and a platform with new group of enemies emerges from the lower level.
Game can be hard sometimes, especially on the beggining fights can be very brutal. On the other hand it's not very punishing after a defeat. Even if your entire team gets wiped, your tech priest will be ok for next mission and all the stuff you managed to gather until defeat will be avaiable to you. Tbh I lost first 2 missions of the game and I though I was going to restart from the beggining but I went further and got so many successes I though the game is actually too easy (until I got beaten badly by a boss).
Worth noting is music from this game. I'm just going to say I absolutely love it and just leave one sample
https://youtube.com/watch?v=yBEUwkvNbks
It's currently on sale on gog, so if you think this game is for you then it's a good moment to grab it.