Tedious and frustratingly hard – Space Hulk Review

I see that they chose to remain strictly faithful to the original board game. But it just doesn’t translate well. On an iPad it becomes far too slow to play, with lots of pointless interstitial animations, associated loading stalls, etc. The fundamentally glacial gameplay may have been okay when you were physically moving pieces around the board and playing with other people, as a fundamentally social game, but in a single-player game it’s just.. boring. However, my biggest gripes are around the inconsistencies in the subject matter. Giant steroid-filled power-armoured uber future warriors? Check! Die instantly on contact with anything? Check! …wait, what? You have less than even odds of surviving any melee combat, which is both stupidly unfair to begin with - given you’re outnumbered five-to-one or more, most of the time - and particularly frustrating when you’re given melee-only marines. You end up having to not only push through the level with fewer marines than you should have, but sometimes you have to carefully protect the moronic melee-only ones to boot, to avoid losing the mission due to casualties. And to add insult to injury, these space marines honed their targeting skills at the Stormtrooper Academy. It’s comically inconceivable that a power-armoured marine with massively advanced auto-targeting, firing a huge calibre machine gun, down a long corridor four feet wide, could miss completely six times in a row. I don’t buy it. Lastly, even assuming you aren’t pulling your hair out three missions in, there’s little incentive to keep playing. The missions are basically all the same - move from point A to point B while not dying, fighting the *exact* same single type of NPC every single time - and there’s no continuity between them - no experience points, no levelling, no items to find and keep… heck, even death isn’t permanent - important characters come right back the very next mission anyway, without so much as a comment. I really wanted to like it. I was a great fan of many of Games Workshop’s board games, and I very much enjoyed the iPad version of Warhammer Quest. “Space Hulk” is a black sheep in the family. Skip it and go get Warhammer Quest instead.
Review by Wade Tregaskis on Space Hulk.