Warhammer 40,000: Mechanicus II

To preface this review, I loved the first Mechanicus game and the varied challenges it presented while trying to complete all 100% of its achievements. I was ecstatic when I heard that Mechanicus 2 was coming out and that it was from the same studio. I was looking for more of the same kind of gameplay, with meaningful depth and upgrades. This was because, as a 40K and Warhammer fan in general, the games tend to be middling throughout the history of the franchise. To have a sequel to one of the best 40K games was something I was looking forward to. For the TLDR, I have completed all 100% of the achievements and both campaigns, as well as both Epilogue options, on Grim Darkness difficulty. This game has significantly less depth than the first, and it only took me 29 hours to complete all the achievements. I had 41 crashes over my 29-hour run and cannot recommend this game in its current state to anybody. Please do not make the mistake I did and wait for the game to be patched before purchasing. For the good, the music, while not on par with the first Mechanicus game, was thematic. I think that Bulwark Studios must have recognized they had something special with the first game's soundtrack, and I appreciate being able to use the first game's soundtrack during my time playing this game. I also think the artwork was done well and is compliant with Warhammer 40k lore. I particularly appreciated the push and pull of Necron Dynastic conflict and felt that the characters, while one-dimensional in some cases, were done well. The unit design and UI were also done well. For my first in-game look at the Votaan, they were exceptionally well-written and integrated well into the story overall. The unit design was also done according to lore, which is good. For the not-so-good, your characters are pre-made, and their development is linear. This means that the depth that meant every run would be different in the first Mechanicus game is gone. I seriously question why this was done, as it deeply affects the replayability of the game. As it stands, I have no reason to go back and play the game as it exists now. There is no meaningful wargear to unlock, no major artifacts to strive for, and the ones that do exist give abilities that range from mediocre to broken. I do not think a meaningful balance pass was done on these wargear items. Most of the game, I was choosing my least favourite character to do assignments and using two or three other characters to farm character development points. It was incredibly boring, overall. The units each of your lords gets is pre-determined, and you do not get to choose your units, so be careful when you level your lords and check what units they get before you invest in them. I would like to see that changed so you can create battlegroups that align with their abilities. Not be able to do so was a strange and unwarranted decision. Further to that, tomb exploration and the great glyph mechanics that I had to learn to be successful in the first game are gone. The gameplay loop just a linear track with events and choices that are just managing your vigilance meter, so you do not get even more enemies in the next skirmish. Again, there is no choice or strategy here, and all the team had to do was carry the previous mechanics over, so you could try different routes in the tombs you explore, or different decisions with different options that may or may not help you. This has deeply hurt the replayability of this game and the overall game loop. It was my favourite part of the first game and was done so well, and I am sad to see it go. The game's economics, even on the hardest difficulty, make no sense, and you snowball so quickly that you can easily afford all the upgrades midway through the game. Blackstone was crucial, and I remember making very difficult decisions so I could get the units and upgrades that best fit my play style in the first Mechanicus game. There were no difficult decisions through either campaign and, as I said previously, you could just farm currencies by using your least favourite lord to do so and be off use for a few turns at most. Now for the bad. Thus far, this has been one of the buggiest games I have had the displeasure of playing throughout my Steam career. Over my 28-hour playthrough, I had 41 crashes. All of them had to do with some sort of video card incompatibility, which is odd, as my video card has no issues with far more demanding games, or any game at all. The crash logs state that the game has difficulty finding the video card. I have the latest updated drivers and do not understand what the issue is. I have tried multiple reinstalls, deleting player preferences, all to no avail. I do not understand why it is acceptable to publish a game in this state and why this game is not allowed to cook more. There were some days when I would come home from work, spend hours troubleshooting, and have no time to play. Some tips I can give to anybody having performance issues. Volumetric fog takes up a ton of performance, so turn that off. Bloom also causes issues, and when I turned both off, I had fewer crashes. Follow the Reddit and Steam threads to troubleshoot issues. That said, it will not solve everything. Overall, I give this game a very generous 4/10. Its merits regarding lore, artwork and music are to be commended, but those can only carry a game so far. I do not recommend purchasing this game as it currently exists, even if you are a die-hard 40k fan. Buy it on sale after these issues are fixed. How Bulwark Studios thinks this is worth 50+ CAD in its current state is beyond me. How Bulwark Studios thought releasing Mechanicus 2 in this state is acceptable is also a question I have for their leadership team. Why was this not allowed to cook more? Was launching during the Warhammer Skulls Event that important? I wish for a Votaan DLC so we can play their part of the story, but I highly doubt, based on the reception to this game's missteps, we ever will.

This game is so confusingly bad, I have spent less game-time playing it and more googling to try and figure out how it came out so much worse than the first one. Development was clearly rushed, with barely any marketing or hype. It kinda just came out during the Skulls event. Buggy, unbalanced, poorly designed and the audio downgrade is a tragedy. The story is okay, buy it on discount after bugs get patched if you are really into the lore. Design-wise the game feels like a bunch of ideas were thrown out, implemented in random order until time ran out, and never tested. Like, it makes sense to copy-paste the troop deployment limit system for the AdMec to keep you from trivializing later fights, right? But reanimation protocols is another mechanic ported over from the first game and downed Necrons count towards your limit while playing that faction. So if you can only deploy 6 units early on and 2 are downed, you are playing 3 turns with just 4 units unless you brought the leader that revives them. Because design is a mess, Necron units also have a mechanic to resurrect in the squad after being fully killed in a fight. So, instead of picking one and polishing it, you have 2 mechanics to recover troops as Necrons but the first is copied over from the first game and clashes with deployment limits, and the second is new but they don't lean into it because the first is already there. The music is composed by Guillaume David, who did an excellent job with the previous game. But this game's soundtrack is so bad by comparison, there is paid DLC to just replace it with the previous game's soundtrack. There is also a bug, probably in the implementation of this soundtrack switch, that stops the music from playing during cutscenes.

Impossible. Heresy. Unspeakable. Heresy. Heresy. Terrible performance, very little player agency and customization. Annoying enemies and a lot of minor issues that make Mechanicus 2 a heresy of a sequel. The soundtrack is very nice, but not as good as the previous game's OST.

TLDR: An acceptable game that is tragically inferior to the first in pretty much every way except the story The Long: like many others i loved Mechanicus 1 and i was ungodly hyped when i saw the second get announced but now that its here, now that i beat both campaigns and the Epilogue i must state that i am thoroughly disappointed, Sequels are meant to expand and improve on the base, Mechanicus 2 is a step down on most fronts, now given that Mechanics 1 is phenomenal it still means that its an okay game, its mission structure allows for fairly good quick sessions but i cannot forgive the failings to live up to its predecessor THE POSITIVE the Story and characters are the one thing i will credit this game for improving, the story is pretty good, i enjoyed the characters as their dialogue is memorable and the voice acting is stellar (props for taking a fair amount of established 40k Audiobook Va's shoutout to Toby Longworth who voices Faustinius however if you are one of the people who hate the idea that they now speak english however silly that as a complaint, you can turn it off should you wish so its best of both worlds) if this was a Warhammer book it would be among the decent ones, i enjoyed the Necron politicing, the Deciver whispering in your ear is funny and i enjoy the dynamics between the different Mechanicus Leaders. being able to play as the Necrons is also a rare treat for Xenos enjoyers so that is a good selling point for the game, its also a graphical step up from the previous which is nice. THE BAD the combat is just worse and the games systems are badly designed, one of the best parts of Mechanicus 1 was the Tech Priests, you got a gang of customisable and upgradeable Tech Priests with different Gear that you unlocked through completing Missions, this made for fun buildcrafting, it made doing missions exiting because you unlocked something new whenever you did one and piloting them in mission was fun, however this has been completely abandoned in favour of set Lords with upgrade trees but they offer no real customisability or flexibility which not only makes combat worse by not letting us have our Tech Priest gangs but also makes doing missions less exiting because the rewards are so much less, this is a massive negative point for fans of the original and is my greatest personal disappointment, this change actively makes progression less fun and pigeonholes your playstyle massively because you will essentially gravitate towards the two-three you like the most and ignore the rest. for the second most irritating flaw of this game is the troop system, in the first game you simply had to pay in resources to use a certain unit out a list that you slowly unlocked as time progressed and this worked fine, in Mechancius 2 you unlock units through a tech tree and then for each mission it will randomly select from your unlocked units and give you a list that you can take along, this is completely awful as a system and is nothing but frustration as the one Tech Priest you can take will have some specific synergy with certain unit types that you are not guaranteed to get because your options are RNG, the fact that i was compelled to just not unlock certain units as to rig my chances to not get bad units that don't work with my Lord of choice is a testament to how bad this system is and how annoying it is to deal with. the most baffling part is that this was Mechanicus-only Necrons just have the units be unlocked per lord with no randomisation instead of a universal Tech Tree this was fine, good even since it helped guide the playstyle i genuinely have no clue why they implemented this god awful system especially since this game is EXTREMELY troop focused since you can only take one hero per mission, its absolutely baffling they did that and it brings down the game so much. speaking of the one hero per mission it also really restricts your playstyle in the early game since combats fail if the Lord Dies, this is manageable for Necrons as they can get back up once per combat but for Mechanicus this is extremely restrictive because it forces you to play super cagey to not fail which hurts lords like Rho who is meant to be a frontline Tank. some have claimed online that its actually good that Tech Priest usage was limited because you could just optimise and stomp the game, this is false as by mid to lategame you can still massively stomp once you get the resources and unlocks to field good troops and upgrades to make the lords death machines and you can generally clown on the game from there with your only enemy being bad troop RNG, the sole exception for the Mechanicus campaign is Triarch Pratorians, in a strategy game that emphasises positioning its pretty bad that there is an enemy unit that just ignores all positioning, can cross the map from turn one and also will delete most units on its first turn, and the game likes to spam five of them at you. The Votann, i'm not a fan personally but i have a friend who is and i had to break the news that they are sadly completely irrelevant in this game, DLC bait at best a marketing stunt at worst, not sure why they were even here when they show up for about five missions and then leave the story. The Missions themselves, Mechanicus one had you explore the tombs you infiltrated, you made choices on where to go, what rooms to interact with and microchoices in those rooms, this was fun however they completely removed that aspect as each mission is a straight series of events in a fixed order, not even sure why the map is even there because its pointless and so its another aspect of wasted potential. last of all the downgrades, the music is also worse which sucks because the music from Mechanicus one is iconic and Mechanicus 2's sound design is honestly stellar but the music is boring and unmemorable. overall this game isn't absolutely abysmal to play, i did finish both campaigns after all but it does not escape the shadow of Mechanicus one as its a worse game in many aspects and it immeasurably disappointed me, get on sale if you want a 6/10 turn based tactics game but better options exist and at least they aren't worse than their predecessors i pray that the devs get another chance to actually make a worthy sequel but the devs have to really earn the goodwill back after fumbling like they have

I would love to post a positive review, although it wasn't the first game I thoroughly enjoyed my time with this game. The necron story was a bit campy and predictable but the gameplay felt like pushing an unstoppable force forward to spite the imperials. Then the June Unity patch hit and the game is unplayable. Won't even launch. I get error 6000 something because the popup disappears quickly and nada. I've tried reinstalling, verifying files, updating drivers, everything and none of it works. Until the game is playable again for me it has to be a negative review.

Wow shockingly bad, shame they are killing what could have been a great series. This could have a great story and great gameplay but I'll never know since I can't play it at 5fps with my GPU cooking at 100%. CPU doing nothing. This was slapped together with no optimisation, testing or care, cash grab based on the original being a hit, do not buy

huge steps backward from the first game

How was the first one so much better? I feel like it just focused on making a tighter experience. In the second one they could have focused on the Necrons, instead they split it between two factions, with more stuff! More units! More heroes! More abilities! Two factions! Half the fun. What was a fairly tight design just became a flaming mess.

How is it possible to fail so miserably? How is it possible to produce such thing and call yourselves professionals and game developers? With all the AI tha can think instead of you, since you clearly cannot, and you still produced this? It baffles me.

honestly, find the review titled "this is a fake game" - the author is like 144% spot on with it, can't really add anything to it other than mentioning that I tried to give this game 2nd and 3rd chances. I took some time off after the initial disappointment after beating the first act, then tried again in a couple of weeks, again pure disappointment, then slightly over a month break, and then got disappointed even more coming back fresh. What a BRUH moment, ffs, and it cost me 40Eur which can't be refunded now 🤡