Back over the Christmas holidays and into the new year I had the chance to sit down to Bulwark Studio’s Turned Based Strategy Warhammer 40K: Mechanicus. Taking control of your troops from the safety of your ship, you got to control them through a holographic table that outlined the planet below where they were deployed. Having just recently added more content, Mechanicus is back with both a new discipline for your Tech Priests and a whole new scenario that has you fighting against your own people on your own ship!
Starting off with perhaps what I thought was the bigger inclusion to Mechanicus is the new discipline for Tech Priests. Basing a discipline straight off of the Necron forces, your new tree to level into provides plenty of restorative possibilities like regenerating health per round or flat out being able to restore several hit points with a permanent skill that goes into cooldown. The catch to all of this hit point regeneration comes at the price of losing hit points for every single attack that the Tech Priest makes. Shooting a weapon that takes no CP or several CP will both knock you down a hit point so if you’re making several attacks in one round make sure that you can actually survive a hit from the surrounding enemies.
The reason that I found the inclusion of the new path the bigger addition to Mechanicus is because it can be used right from the beginning. Restarting your travels and explorations of the Necron world you can go straight into that tree and see how it unfolds over time instead of having to meld into it when the world is halfway or three quarters awakened depending on how far you’ve made it. Side to this new tech tree though is the inclusion of a new scenario that raises the bar a bit as it acts quite differently than the core experience.
Partway through your travels when levels start going from all easy to easy / normal or even normal / hard you’ll have a new option open up at the bottom but don’t trust it when it says that it’s easy. It really isn’t but I’ll be damned if it wasn’t fun even if I got wiped the first time that I tried it as it was clear that it was too early for me to have tried it. Opening up with a new series of dialog that you have defectors on your very own ship that have also taken parts of your troops with them, it’s up to you as to how you want to deal with them but it’ll be a little bit different this time.
Being on your own ship, you won’t exactly be hovering over your table until it’s time to open up a can of whoopass. So instead of moving from room to room, you’ll instead go straight to a series of decisions that can affect the battle ahead. Do you quietly take out a sentry while they aren’t paying attention? Do you send your forces in weapons blazing and blades severing? Or do you just keep on moving. Your first decision will bleed into the next which after a few of these and plenty of dialog between your advisors, it’ll finally be time to launch into combat on your own ship and fighting Tech Priests and your own style of forces? It requires a bit of a different touch than the Necrons on the planet below but at least when you knock your enemy down, they are down and out. Once finished the first part, you go back to your planet exploration until the time that the next part opens up.
The inclusion of this new content is a great addition if you want to start off from scratch and use it to your benefit. While the new class may be a bit harder to incorporate into your battle plans halfway through your exploration or crusade on the planet below, the battles on your own ship are timed perfectly as you should definitely have the gear and your Tech Priests loaded with enough firepower to show to those that defected that it was a bad idea to piss you off.
Score: 8.5 / 10
