Warhammer games

Coming Soon. Narrow by preferences Hide ignored items Hide items in my library. Blood Bowl 3 The iconic death sport returns with the new video game of fantasy football faithfully using the latest board game rules and new content. Create your team, then crush, mulch and cheat your way to the top Warhammer 40, Battlesector 22 Jul, In the grim darkness of the far future, there is only war.

Experience every bone-rattling explosion and soul-crushing charge in Warhammer 40, Battlesector, the definitive battle-scale game of turn-based strategy and fast-paced combat that takes you to the battlefields of the 41st Millenium. Warhammer Combat Cards 3 Jun, Build a powerful army of cards from your favourite faction in the Warhammer 40, universe and battle other players in fast-paced, turn based online combat!

In the grim darkness of the far future there is only war! Warhammer Quest: Silver Tower 2 Jun, Bite sized turn-based strategy battles in a Tower of pure Chaos! Dive into one of our huge campaigns, or jump in to a Daily Quest. It was decent while it lasted—the servers have long since been switched off - but it deserves a mention for having the most enthusiastic dev interviews in the history of gaming.

No more modding Medieval II. No more staring back wistfully at Shadow of the Horned Rat. This is the Warhammer world as it once was, brought to life with epic flair and a palpable love of the source material. Whether or not you care about swirling magical vortexes, the second game deserves the nod because of its scale and ambition. Seeing that gigantic map crammed with warring Warhammer races is a dream for anyone who spent their youth thumbing through army books while listening to Slayer, wondering which dwarfs lived where.

Total War: Warhammer does an incredible job of pulling the camera back and letting you see the Old World from a distance, but it can feel impersonal. Warhammer: Vermintide 2 , however, lets you get so close to a place on the brink of destruction that you feel every shattered bone and can inhale the singed fur.

Smashing through swathes of rat men is a messy, ichor-spewing joy. Those 10 seconds contain a bewildering amount of stuff, as one plane powerdives to avoid an attack from behind, another explodes, and one of your pilots pulls off a high-G turn then blacks out.

Switching to theater mode, which lets you see all this at once rather than following each pilot in turn, makes it easier, though I could do with a simple way to scrub the timeline back and forth. Planes can switch loadouts if you remove the default missiles, and pilots might gain skills if they shoot down enough enemies, but one fighter is much like another.

Even top guns are replaceable in 40K. Games Workshop published several pick-a-path gamebooks under the Path to Victory label, and this one was turned into a visual novel. Legacy of Dorn really gets across the oddness of a ship made out of the fused remains of multiple wrecks, and as you explore each section feels distinct, whether fungal and orkoid or sanctified by the Sisters of Battle. The turn-based combat is nothing to write home about, but the difficulty options include the ability to skip the boring fights and cheat as if you're leaving your fingers in the pages, as is only right.

Hammerfall Steam. Take chess, but make it 40K. That's Regicide, which you can play in classic mode using the boring rules of real chess, or in Regicide mode, which adds an initiative phase after every turn where pawns shoot boltguns and queens launch psychic lightning. While taking a piece the usual way is an instakill, complete with gorey duels reminiscent of Battle Chess, attacks in the initiative phase chip away at the hit points of your target.

At first it feels like regular chess, but focus fire and combine the right abilities and you'll soon remove a bishop from across the board. It feels like cheating in the best way, like you have outsmarted the centuries-old game of chess itself. There's a story mode, but some of its puzzle matches can grind to annoying stalemate halts.

Stick to skirmish play and Regicide does a better job with its ridiculous concept than you might think. Behaviour Interactive Inc. Initially billed as a Planetside-esque MMO with a persistent world for players to fight over, Eternal Crusade was scaled down in development. What eventually released was a lobby shooter that took the multiplayer combat from Relic's Space Marine and added vehicles, eldar and orks, as well as a co-operative PvE mode where four players take on tyranids. Players who'd bought in early were disappointed at the reduction, but here's the thing: Relic's Space Marine was great, and so was its multiplayer.

Building on that with missions where you might be defending a fortress while other players tried to smash through its gate in Predator tanks, or hovering over victory points as an eldar swooping hawk, made for some thrilling battles. Hardly anybody gave it a chance though, and even after being released for free it's still almost empty. If you can get together some people or luck into a match, Eternal Crusade is better than its reputation.

Rodeo Games Steam. The Deathwatch are elite alien-busting marines who draw their recruits from other chapters, and this turn-based tactics game gives you command of a squad of them.

Deathwatch is another game originally made for tablet, which you can tell by the way you get new wargear and marines out of random packs with lootbox sparkle, though they're earned through play rather than microtransactions.

This Enhanced Edition for PC remastered the original's graphics and gave it a mouse-and-keyboard UI, though it could do with tooltips for the many buff icons each marine ends up with. Hive cities cram billions of people into illustrations of the class system someone drew winged skulls on.

At the bottom of the hive, gangs who work for mid-level Houses fight over scavenger rights and who has the coolest mohawk. Underhive Wars is another turn-based tactics game that isn't content to copy XCOM and instead has to go and mess with it. Every map's covered in ziplines and elevators, and gangers have enough movement to whip up and down them. Seen in over-the-shoulder third-person, the AI's moves are often baffling.

Gangers run past enemies they could attack, deploy buffs for opaque reasons, pick up mission objectives then end their turn exposed, sometimes just jog on the spot for a bit. And yet, if you ditch the story campaign after the intro missions and get stuck into the procedurally generated Operations mode, there's a fun game here. Though each gang has access to the same classes, gear, and only slightly different skills, over the course of an endless war of territorial pissing they feel like your own.

Customization makes your leather-fetish wrestlers or leopard-print amazons look rad as hell, and successive injuries, bionic implants, and limb replacements turn them into individuals with stories. It's essentially Tank Battle: 30, It's a particularly rock-paper-scissors wargame, with tanks, infantry, fliers, walkers and titans as counters to each other in specific situations, and terrain that's either damaging, hard-stopping, crossable only by fiers, or cover but only for infantry.

Like all the Horus Heresy games and books it demands a dedication to the fictional history of Warhammer 40, as passionate as any WWII nut to get the most out of it, but if that's you then you probably already know Battle of Tallarn and are humming the theme tune right now. Another take on the Panzer General turn-based hexgrid wargame, Armageddon is set on a hive world so polluted it's all fire wastes, lava canyons, and acid rivers, which the armies of the Imperium have to defend from hordes of orks.

Each scenario is a puzzle where you'll have to decide whether to split your battlegroups or unite them in a single wedge, lock down the bridges or move into the bombed-out buildings, scout ahead with walkers or fliers, and so on.

There's DLC for various other conflicts that have played out on the well-named planet Armageddon, but skip the expandalone called Da Orks, which lets you experience the other side of the conflict. Instead of handing you control of a horde it makes you play a balanced force that feels like a green reskin of the humies. The Imperial spacecraft of Warhammer 40, are one of its most distinctive elements.

Each one looks like someone painted Westminster Abbey black, chucked a prow on the end, and hooked it off into deep space.

Battlefleet Gothic: Armada is an RTS where these stately, miles-long ships swing about on a 2D plane that emulates both a tabletop and the ocean. They do battle like it's the age of sail, complete with broadsides and boarding actions, though troops insert via torpedo rather than swinging over on a rope with knives between their teeth.

The other thing about Battlefleet Gothic: Armada that feels like the age of sail is the time scale. Even with the speed set to its fastest, getting into position at the start of an engagement takes a fair old while. And then by the time the fleets make contact, there's so much micromanagement it can feel overwhelming even slowed down.

It's deliberately paced this way, tempting you into mistakes and collisions that will cost you a capital ship with the population of a city inside it. A singleplayer FPS that's part looter-shooter, where you'll find a bolter and five minutes later swap it for a lasrifle because it's a higher rarity tier. It's also a movement-shooter, with wall-running, dashing, sliding, a grapnel, and augmetics that let you double-jump, slow down time, and more.

Even your dog has an upgrade tree. Each fight's a high-speed zip around a huge environment, abusing automatic takedowns for a window of invincibility and some health. That said, the animations frequently look garbage and sometimes the whole thing breaks. There's a nonsense story that expects you to have read all the Kal Jerico comics I have , and cared I didn't. Side missions, which increase your rep with factions including genestealers and Chaos cults, are separated by difficulty grade—but some are always hard and others, where you can ignore the endlessly spawning enemies to zipline around completing objectives, are always easy.

And yet, it's really fun. The combat's hectic, and you end up with so many abilities it's like Borderlands only you're playing all the classes at once. Every level is a perfect evocation of the setting, whether corpse-grinding factory or maglev megatrain, with dead-ass servitors controlling doors, cargo ships, and even the bounty board.

One of the villains looks like Marie Antoinette gone Mad Max. If you like 40K enough to read this list, you'll probably like Hired Gun. When I wrote about Sanctus Reach, I said other games do what it does better. That was before Battlesector came out, but it's a perfect example. It's the same kind of mid-sized turn-based tactics game where you control squads and vehicles rather than a handful of individuals or massive armies, but what Battlesector gets right is that it gives troops personality.

That's thanks to a momentum system that rewards you for playing to type, with bloodthirsty Blood Angels scoring points for killing enemies close enough to see the whites of their eyes, the swarming tyranids for staying within range of a hive leader, and the sadomasochistic Sisters of Battle for taking damage as well as dealing it.

It would be even better with some kind of veterancy system for squads rather than just HQ units, but Battlesector remains a cut above. There are other Panzer General-alikes with 40K trappings, but this one was straight-up made in the Panzer General 2 engine.

It's got the tactical depth you want thanks to a collection of pixel units who all work slightly differently, with every turn a stream-of-consciousness where you're thinking things like, "If I attack this guy the heavy weapons will be able to support, but the jetbikes are in cover so they can make a pop-up attack, but then there's a unit who can attack and fall back in the same turn The campaign lets you play as the eldar, colorful but stone-faced murder elves with psychic powers and a weapon that unspools a long monofilament wire inside your poor enemy's body to reduce their organs to soup.

They can summon an incarnation of their war god inside a shell of superheated iron, and they charge into battle wearing harlequin pants. It's a crime more 40K games aren't about them instead of the same four chapters of space marines every time. The first of the many attempts to turn the Space Hulk board game into a videogame remains one of the best for two reasons. An innovative freeze-time mechanic lets you transition into turn-based mode where you can move your five space marine terminators around like you were playing on a tabletop—but gives you a timer.

When it runs out, you have to play in real-time, bouncing between them in first-person and the map to keep your squad alive while genestealers boil out of the walls. Manage that for long enough and you earn more freeze-time, and the relief of switching back is intense. The other thing it gets right is the atmosphere.

Spinning wall fans chunk away, unknowable alien sounds echo down the corridors, and somewhere in the distance there's a scream. When marines die their screen goes to static, fuzzing out one by one. Plenty of videogames have been inspired by Aliens, but few of them do the panicky "game over, man, game over" moment as well as this.

It's brutally difficult, but that's because it's not really a strategy game—it's horror. In the 40K universe faster-than-light travel is made possible by briefly hopping over to a universe next door called Warpspace, where distances are contracted.

The downside to Warpspace is that it's inhabited by the Ruinous Powers of Chaos, gods who represent and are fueled by the dark urges of mortals. Chaos wants to spill out of the Warp into realspace, and when they do you get places like the Eye of Terror, a hellish overlap at the edge of the galaxy.

Near its edge is the Imperial world Cadia, a bastion that stood firm against multiple excursions led by the forces of Chaos—until the 13th Black Crusade, when Abaddon the Despoiler crashed a gigantic alien starfortress into it.

This happens several minutes into Battlefleet Gothic: Armada 2 while you're playing the prologue campaign. It's a hell of a spectacle. This sequel improves various small things about the spacefleet RTS game, adds campaigns from the perspective of the insectile tyranids and Egyptian robot necrons, and leaves its core of 2D sailing ship combat intact. The one big thing it changes is that sense of spectacle, understanding what we want to see is entire worlds falling and a galaxy in flames.

Where the first Dawn of War is about masses of tanks and a screen full of lasers, Dawn of War 2 gives you just four badasses, maybe eight replaceable squadmates, and a bunch of special abilities. It's not about researching at your base until you've put together an unstoppable force—most missions begin with you falling out of the sky, sometimes squashing a few enemies, and then it's on. A typical battle involves parking the heavy weapons and sniper in cover, charging in with your commander, then telling the assault squad to jump-pack over the top.

After that it's a matter of setting off abilities as they come off cool-down. The boss fights can be chores, but maps where you're on the defensive , outnumbered by hordes of tyranids or whatever, are excellent—both in singleplayer and the Last Stand, a three-player mode with waves of enemies and unlockable wargear. Final Liberation is a strategy game that gets the scale of conflict in the 41st millennium spot on, with a mixed force of Imperial Guard and Ultramarines having to not only pool their forces, but then unearth an entire lost legion of titans to repel an ork invasion on a planetary scale.

The orks are faster and brutishly hard to put down in hand-to-hand, but you have artillery on your side and, as the Tyrant of Badab said, "Big guns never tire. Every turn is a cautious advance, trying to keep the speed freeks away from your bombards and flatten buildings with thudd guns just in case orks are about to pop out of them, while staying the hell away from the gut buster mega-cannon that obscenely juts out of the gargant's undercarriage.

The peak of the 40K games to come out of the s, Final Liberation has two extremely s things about it. The first is its heavy metal soundtrack, and the second its FMV cutscenes. Both are cheesy in exactly the right way, clearly being taken seriously by people unconcerned with the ridiculousness of what they're doing. Criminally underrated because it came out after a string of middling games with the words Space Hulk in the name, Tactics is the best of them.

It's an adaptation of the board game that understands what makes it fun—the asymmetry of five clunky walking tanks pitted against limitless numbers of speedy melee monsters—and also understands that it's even more fun if you can play either.