Space Hulk: Deathwing has had numerous cinematic and gameplay teasers over the past few months, but seeing any sort of actual gameplay footage has been rather rare. But with the official release date only a couple of weeks away, Focus Home Interactive has decided to offer everyone a bit of a treat - 17 minutes of unedited gameplay footage from Space Hulk: Deathwing's solo campaign.
What might come as a surprise, however, is that whoever recorded the video didn't shy away from showing some of the less than stellar aspects of Space Hulk: Deathwing. Now while some of the voice work and enemy pathing might still require a bit of work, the actual gunplay and the act of mowing down hundreds of Genestealers does seem to be pretty damn satisfying! But enough rambling from me, have a look for yourself:
Since the good stuff is fairly obvious and self explanatory, I'm just going to list out a couple of things I would like to see fixed in the launch version. The first and biggest issue so far are the NPC voices. They don't sound nearly as menacing as Terminator Space Marines should, and for reasons unknown they seem to repeat the same few lines over, and over, and over again: "Vengenaceeee guideess our weaponz!" If this line got old during a 17 minute gameplay video, I can imagine it becoming downright infuriating when you're actually behind the Terminator armor yourself, so hopefully the devs will hear the feedback and just reduce the frequency of call-outs.
The second, and final major problem I noticed was the enemy pathfinding. The Scythe Strain, aka the big boss fight near the middle, seemed completely incapable of actually hitting the player. Its scythe attacks were so slow, and its movement so cumbersome that if the player just constantly moved in a circle around it I have a feeling it would've just stood there slicing air. Given that this is supposed to be the climactic finale of a mission, a test for the players coordination and cooperation, I'm hoping the devs will make sure its actually a challenging beastie to fight.
Other than these two little complaints, I must admit I'm rather happy with Space Hulk: Deathwing so far. I highly doubt it'll bring about a revolution in FPS gaming, but for us Warhammer 40k fans its one of the rare few games that actually seems to be doing the universe justice, so I'm rather looking forward to trying it out! Also, you get to use a giant flamethrower.... A GIANT FLAMETHROWER! What else can you really ask from a game?
