Developer: Behaviour Interactive
Publisher: BANDAI NAMCO Entertainment, Behaviour Digital
Platforms: PlayStation 4, Xbox One, PC, Mac
Tested on: PC
Warhammer 40,000: Eternal Crusade – Review
Warhammer 40,000: Eternal Crusade is the latest game in the Warhammer 40,000 franchise. This time Behaviour Interactive took a shot at making a third person online shooter set in the 40k universe. Join your favorite faction in fierce battles and bring pride for your war god!
Story
As most online shooter games, Eternal Crusade doesn’t feature any story at all. There’s a little bit of lore to be found in the game when choosing a faction or when looking at weapons and the skill tree, but it’s nothing too impressive. It’s to be expected that these kind of games don’t have any story but it’s kind of disappointing as well, because there is a HUGE amount of lore to be found around Warhammer 40,000.
Graphics
Graphic wise, the game is quite impressive. However, it requires a beast of a PC to run it, whether that’s due to poor optimization or just good graphics is hard to pinpoint. Right now though, even on low settings FPS tends to dip to 30 on a medium-end rig, which is quite disappointing because even huge games like GTA 5 or Battlefield can run fine on a low-end computer. The recommended system requirements do list some higher than medium-end specs though, so watch out when trying to purchase this game.
Sound
Music and sound effects are pretty much spot on. It’s great to hear all of the clashing metal, chain axes and tanks all the time, on top of an even greater soundtrack to go with it. Sometimes the sound effects can be a bit overwhelming, but you can always turn them down in the sound menu if it’s too much. There’s also some voice acting to be found like your victory cry or quick chat, which is also great to hear when your whole squad is yelling.
Gameplay
Warhammer 40,000: Eternal Crusade is a (massive multiplayer) third person shooter. The control scheme is optimized for both keyboard and mouse and controller, because this game is to be found on both PC and console platforms after all. Of course, the game is set in the 41st millennium, like it has been in all of the Warhammer 40k stories, games and books out there. In this game, you’ll fight with one of four factions and twenty sub-factions on a widespread of different maps and wreck your enemies.
Currently the Space Marines, Chaos Space Marines, Eldar and Orks can be picked as faction. As a Space Marine you can be a Dark Angel, Ultramarine, Space Wolf, Blood Angel or Imperial Fist. For the Chaos Space Marines there’s the Word Bearer, Black Legion, Night Lord, Iron Warriors and Alpha Legion. Then for the Orks there is the Evil Sunz, Bad Moonz, Goff, Deathskulls and Blood Axes. Last but not least there’s the Eldar as Biel-Tan, Saim-Hann, Iyanden, Ulthwé and Altansar. Each sub-faction you choose presents you with a little bit of lore, but ultimately this only affects the looks of your character and nothing further.
Gameplay has a lot to be desired however. The game has an incredibly steep learning curve and without playing over 50 hours and getting better weapons, you’ll just be running around like a chicken with its head cut off. It gets a bit better once you start working together with your squad, but that’s a pretty rare sighting. Also, there are huge server issues, causing a lot of rubber banding and seeing players stutter across the battlefield, of course this doesn’t do the “fiercest and most authentic Warhammer 40,000 battles ever realized” any good.
One of the before mentioned flaws is also kind of a strength for Eternal Crusade. There’s no way you can succeed in a one-man-team, which might be annoying for kamikaze players, but it’s actually a really good thing. However, communication in a shooter is lackluster most of the time, even though the game includes VoIP options.
Eternal Crusade features a couple of different quick battle game modes, but most of them turn out to be the same. You’ll either be capping bases and holding them or capping one base, advancing to the next one and depleting the enemies’ resources. These game modes are okay, but it can get quite repetitive when everything revolves around base capping. However, there’s also a world map you can access which offers some more game modes, such as a 50-60 man fight, 30-40 man fight, a 5 man mission, a training garrison and a competition that unlocks during certain times.
Playing games will award you experience, requisition and advancement points. Experience will give you rank-ups, requisition can be spent in the shop and advancement points give your character some passive bonuses. The shop features a fair amount of items and the advancement point tree is also quite expansive, but you never really get the WOW feeling when using your advancement points. They give some small passive bonuses, but there’s nothing that really makes you stand out, which is quite dissatisfying. Furthermore, the game also features micro-transactions, which seems like trying to stretch it too far because the game already has quite a high price for what it is right now, but that can be argued about. The items bought in the shop can either be cosmetics, weapons, attachments, consumables and more. These can be used to make a custom loadout for your character during battle.
Eternal Crusade also features some more social options like guilds and war parties where you can easily team up with other players, so you can create your own squad and dominate the battlefield.
Conclusion
In its current state, it’s hard to recommend Eternal Crusade to Warhammer 40,000 fans and even third person shooter fans in general. There are a couple of big issues like high system requirements, a lot of server lag and an unrewarding player progression system. However, if you’re just looking to devour your enemies and can look over some lag (both FPS and server), then this game will still have something to offer for you. Hopefully down the road the game will get updates to be a little less sluggish.
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