Warhammer 40,000: Storm of Vengeance Review

By , on April 4, 2014
Last modified 10 years, 6 months ago


Warhammer 40,000: Storm of Vengeance
Download on the AppStore
3 out of 5

PROS

  • Huge tactical options and tech trees
  • A sizable campaign for each faction
  • Large strategic differences between Orks and Marines

CONS

  • Hard to come back from resource losses
  • Fiddly on smaller screens
  • Long, slow, tutorials

VERDICT

Warhammer 40K: Storm of Vengeance makes fair use of its licence to add some texture to what is a somewhat predictable and repetitive tower defence combat. 


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You don't have to have grown up with Warhammer 40K to understand Storm of Vengeance. The factions are so archetypal that very little backstory is needed to get you up to speed.

You can to take control of the Ork Waaagh! armies or the Dark Angels. The tower defence combat takes place across five lanes. At the end of each lane you must build structures to aid you in battle, ranging from mundane resource generators, to troop spawning drop pods and psychic Weird-Boy towers.

Deploying your units in a lane cause them to march determinedly towards your opponent. While both sides are are well matched, their tactics vary wildly. The side you pick will dictate whether you'll be using heavily armoured Tactical Marines, who methodically devastate everything they approach, or Gretchins, who win by sheer weight of numbers.

You can usually achieve victory by conquering three of the five lanes. Problematically, however, once you lose a lane you also lose the abilities that lane generated, making a comeback difficult. This can lead to painfully long battles, when the result is already a foregone conclusion.

With a huge range of technology trees, the game has a lot of menus to familiarise yourself with. Thanks to an intuitive touch and drag control system, navigating them is fairly easy. You will quickly learn to keep an eye on which units and powers can be used next, with some long winded tutorials in place to ensure you are never unaware of a unit’s abilities.

Unfortunately, on smaller screens menus become fiddly. This meant we occasionally struggled with tasks as elementary as throwing a grenade, with a fumbled swipe resulting in the explosive falling at the marine's feet.

Warhammer 40K: Storm of Vengeance is a repetitive, but engaging enough tower defence game, that makes fair use of its 40K licence. Its intuitive controls may be undermined on small screens, but complexity and flexibility they allow make it a fair compromise. There's no ignoring the fact that this is a reskin of the developer's previous game, and we'd argue it's a little pricey for what it is. However, tower defence fans may get a kick out it nonetheless.

Screenshots

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