Back in the late 90s, Tom Clancy’s Rainbow Six made waves in the shooter genre by slowing down the run and gun gameplay of the genre and introduced squad based tactics and planning. The series of course took root and became one of the most prominent PC brands for some time. However, it wasn’t the first series to experiment with “think first, shoot second” type gameplay and today’s game is one of my favorites.
Space Hulk: Vengeance of the Blood Angels is based on the WarHammer 40k board game of the same name. Developed for the PC, Sega Saturn and 3DO, (and eventually ported to the Playstation) the game was a blend of first person shooting, close range combat and interestingly enough, strategy.
The basic plot is that you play as a space marine who is a member of the Blood Angel sect. For those not familiar with the brand, in the War Hammer universe, Space Marines are augmented humans who wear the most powerful armor and wield the strongest weapons. They belong to different chapters similar to a religious order. In the game, your squad is tasked with boarding a space hulk, which is an abandoned space ship and clear of it of an alien race known as the genestealers before the ship reaches a human planet.
The game begins with you as the lowest member on the squad as you and your fellow marines enter the ship. Orders from an off screen commander tell you and your teammates what to do while trying to survive. Each time you play, the orders are randomize to some extent. Combat is entirely first person as you use a weapon called a bolter to blast any genestealers that appear. One on one the enemies are easy fodder, but they will attack in swarms from multiple directions and if one sneaks up behind a marine, they’re dead.
If a genestealer gets too close, you’ll have to fend it off with your fists. And the same goes for your fellow teammates, but you can help them by blasting the genestealer they’re grappling with. Complicating matters was that your squad members were persistent and any that die during a mission are gone forever. What that means that if you’re the only survivor on one level, it may just be you against an army of genestealers on the next level.
This continues for several levels and after every few levels, your squad gets resupplied with new members. But then something happens that changes things: you get promoted. Now you’re the one giving the orders to your squad and trying to get them through each level. From the pause menu, you have a top down view of the level in which you can give a variety of orders to each person.
Challenging the player is that they don’t have infinite time to plan. Instead a bar drains while the game is paused that allows you to give orders with the world frozen. Once time runs out, the player can still give orders, but the game will not be frozen. The bar slowly refills while the player is away from the pause menu.
Space Hulk would have been a tense and challenging game without becoming a squad leader, but this added mechanic elevates the game further. You begin to care for your squad members as without them, you won’t be able to survive long. As the game goes on, you’ll unlock new weapons to help deal with new enemies. Such as Chaos Marines, who use the same weapons as your squad to try and kill you. Along with telepathic genestealers who can set areas on fire and make weapons malfunction.
The problem with Space Hulk is that the persistent gameplay is black and white and a bit too far out of the player’s hands. In the early levels, it’s easy to lose squad members due to stupid mistakes or poor luck by the AI teammates. This sometimes forced you to replay levels out of necessity to try to get more people through.
This is a common situation in older games, where the player needs to effectively play “a perfect game” to have a shot at winning. Promotions and new squad members are determined by the player’s progress in the campaign and not by how they play.
Still, Space Hulk is an interesting game and its squad based style gameplay has not been fully replicated since. The 40K brand has become popular in the game industry with the Dawn of War strategy games and the War Hammer: Space Marine third person shooter. I’m surprised that that we haven’t seen a developer tackle Space Hulk’s design using modern platforms as the brand is more prominent now amongst gamers compared to when it was released in the mid 90s.
But in a world where we’re finally getting a new X-Com sequel, maybe there’s hope yet.
Josh Bycer
Up Next: It’s Good To Be the King
