So WH40k Regicide is out in EA on Steam now.
It's.....Battle Chess with a 40k skin.
Ok that's not totally fair. Guys have abilities and perks and stuff, you can make ranged attacks, throw grenades, etc....so imagine chess where instead of instant lethality, you have to use attacks on guys multiple times to kill them. Sounds great. Except for the chess part.
So it seems another game in a growing line of WH40K themed games that are testing out every genre from Plants vs. Zombies, to Card Games, to now, Chess. I'm pretty sure there's a 40k themed Bejewelled out there somewhere. All we really need now is 40k Sims (which, I dunno, could be rad if it was actually done well and interestingly) and a 40k MMO that doesn't fold in on itself immediately like a collapsing Warp Drive.
I know there's a faction out there that is like "Any exposure for 40k is good exposure" but I dunno. As the list of games I as a huge fan of the IP am skipping grows...what must people new to it think? "What kind of crap sack game with goofy orks and guys in armor goes with Chess?"
It's further increasing my suspicion that whoever is green lighting these things at the top no longer cares what represents the IP, it's literally whether it will run on a mobile device or not.
I mean, you can do 40k in a lot of game genres. I'm shocked there's not a 40k moba out there yet (it's probably in development.) But treating 40k like it's literally a skin you can slap on any game isn't doing it any favors. As combat gets further abstracted away into different genres, it feels ever more distant from what makes 40k games appealing to play. Sure, every game is still slavishly faithful to the visuals (Regicide has some really nice kill animations.) But at the end of the day, 40k isn't just about how it looks. It's about what you can do and how you do it. Pushing lanes and planning tactics on a 10x10 board isn't really fulfilling any fantasies for me. A game like Chapter Master, which actually drills down into the world as you play, and is loaded with flavor at every turn, and is all internally consistent, is what I want to see more out of the genre. Dawn of War II was great in its own ways, but I think it really started this trend.