Warhammer 40,000: Mechanicus 2 review

Warhammer 40,000: Mechanicus was an evocative turn-based tactics game, accentuating the spookiness of 40K and the hypocrisy of its heroes through both writing and mechanics. You sent your tech-priests into tombs to recover lost knowledge and high-powered weaponry, with lesser cyborgs in front to soak up attacks from the necrons who lived in those tombs. There was no cover system. The necrons attacked whoever was closest, so you'd shove a skirmish screen of robotic zombies and work-experience kids out front, your overpowered tech-priests with force axes and plasma guns waiting safely behind.

As well as doing away with cover mechanics, Mechanicus introduced a cognition system where you'd earn points by learning things—studying monoliths, examining enemies, letting your servitors take hits to better understand the enemy's guns—then spend those points to activate more powerful abilities. If you got the balance right you could steamroll missions, powering up gloriously busted combos.

But it only let you play as the tech-priests. Mechanicus 2 has two campaigns, and after the prologue introduces the two factions, it lets you play as either the Adeptus Mechanicus or the necrons. Getting to see things from the necron side stops them from being faceless robots—you get to know these dynastic intrigue-loving immortals at their most noble and their most petty. If you're into necrons, if you collect an army of them in tabletop 40K for instance, you might want to play Mechanicus 2 just to see them get a turn in the spotlight.

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It's tougher to recommend for anyone else. Not because Mechanicus 2 is bad—it's actually pretty good when it hits its stride—but because you could be playing the first game and having a better time.

Unfortunately, a lot of what made the original so special has been done away with. There's cover now for starters, and the choose-your-own-adventure tomb exploration has been replaced with linear sections where your leader gets to make some token strategic decisions that adjust the balance of the next skirmish while just sort of taking a long walk across a map.

Might & Mechanicus

The big change is the way it treats your leaders. Where the tech-priests used to be customizable and could be assigned different classes, then multiclassed to really break the system, Mechanicus 2 gives both the tech-priests and necrons five named leaders with their own upgrade trees—but kind of rudimentary ones. The guy who plays like a tank will always be best at tanking no matter how you spec him.

Instead of being able to bring several of them on each mission, you can only take one and they're essential. If your leader dies that's it—restart the skirmish or load a savegame. It reminds me of Heroes of Might & Magic 4, which might be a deep cut to reference but too late, I've done it now. In every other HoMM game the general stood off the side of the battlefield casting spells or shouting encouragement like a dad at the junior softball league. In HoMM 4 your generals could get stuck in, marching onto the battlefield where they were no longer perfectly safe and could fight and die like everyone else.

It completely changed the tactics, and made protecting that one guy the only thing that mattered. Mechanicus 2 is the same, which gets particularly rough once you encounter enemies who have jetpacks or can teleport. Rather than targeting your frontline they'll deep-strike right next to your leader and take them out in no time flat. It warps the way you play, making every skirmish about making sure you clump more attractive targets together to draw out the assassins and then you just repeat that across every fight.

That's true in both campaigns, and makes them feel less distinct than I was hoping. While tech-priests in Mechanicus 2 earn cognition points by using troops the most strategic way—rangers get a point for shooting someone at long-range, for instance—and that does work differently to the necrons ramping up their dominion level by causing damage, in both cases you're just running protection for a named leader while earning points to activate their cool power. Like Voltron waiting till the end of the episode to bring out the big sword.

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I hit a bug where the subtitles for the necrons showed Adeptus Mechanicus dialogue, though the audio remained correct, and the performance isn't great either. It's worth turning down the volumetric fog if you want a decent framerate, though it's a turn-based game so I didn't mind the fact it often ran at just over 30 fps. Not worth bothering with on Steam Deck, though.

The atmosphere is lacking compared to the original as well. While you can turn off voice-acting in the options to get the tech-priests to talk in an approximation of the first game's dialogue, a kind of Modem Simlish, the music doesn't hit as hard. I still listen to the original Mechanicus soundtrack whenever I need an industrial monk rave-up, which is more often than you might think, but Mechanicus 2 sounds more muted. It's closer to ambient menu music, and I didn't hear a single pipe-organ drop.

Mechanicus 2 has the novelty of playing as necrons going for it, which normally only happens in 40K games that contain basically every faction like Gladius or Dawn of War. And when I stopped trying to get as immersed in the vibe as I was in the original and just plugged away at it without paying much attention, treating it almost like a second-screen activity, I had a pretty good time in a "heavily modded XCOM" kind of way. But that's a step-down from the OG, which was both absorbing and innovative in ways Mechanicus 2 is not.