Warhammer 40k: Eternal Crusade official artwork

[Update]: After many struggles, Warhammer 40k: Eternal Crusade has now closed its doors.

Eternal Crusade is a squad-based Warhammer 40,000 shooter where Space Marines, Chaos, Orks and Eldar vie for supremacy over a ravaged world. While Eternal Crusade was initially going to be an MMO shooter, something similar to Planetside 2, a variety of issues throughout development resulted in it become more alike your standard third person shooter, though with far more extravagant weaponry given the Warhammer 40,000 setting.

As I've mentioned in my review, Eternal Crusade is currently fairly intriguing as it has all of the elements of a good shooter, but also a whole lot of issues with polish, performance, balance and game design in general. Thankfully, its still in early alpha so the developers have plenty of time to fix all of that before release... or they would if they didn't just announce Eternal Crusade is officially launching on September 23rd!

If I haven't made this obvious enough, Eternal Crusade is by no means ready for a full release. Its barely functional as an alpha game! The gameplay itself is pretty good, but its about as imbalanced as it gets with Chaos frequently stomping all over the other races, and all of this is assuming you can even run the game without suffering from constant stuttering as Eternal Crusade requires a beastly PC.

I can only assume the developers are running out of funds given that this is quite clearly a move out of desperation, but I still can't help but feel that this is an absolutely gigantic mistake. Most issues can be excused while a game is in alpha, that much everyone will agree on, but if all of these problem transfer over to the final version (and let's face it, most of them will because September is quite near) Eternal Crusade is going to get slammed by both the reviewers and the public in general... and for good reason!

I genuinely do like Eternal Crusade and Warhammer 40,000 games in general so here's to hoping I'm completely wrong and that everything is going to be alright once Eternal Crusade goes from alpha to release on September 23rd... but given that I've played the game last week I somehow doubt it. If you would like to make up your own mind, however, feel free to visit the Eternal Crusade Steam page, or check out the recent trailer: