Warhammer 40,000: Eternal Crusade Is Gears of War Crossed With Space Marine

The last time GR covered Warhammer 40,000: Eternal Crusade was back in 2014, when it had been rescued from the ashes of THQ’s fiery crash, and was little more than an announcement that it had been pulled from the fire by Behavior Interactive to continue development. It’s being published by Bandai Namco, in whose offices the MMO third-person shooter was available for play at their recent preview event, in its Steam Early Access build.

The Eternal Crusade brand manager described it as having a Planetside 2-like arena and objectives, with combat like Warhammer 40,000: Space Marine and the visual aesthetics of Gears of War. It’s an on-point description, actually. The goal of the game is to take all three capture points for your faction across a large arena. I saw two different maps, both with intense, giant fortifications but with enough space for transport vehicles to be driven across them and through them: one sun-blasted and desert-like, and the other cast in a cold snow-covered night.

At the time, only two of the four planned races were available for play, Space Marines and Chaos Space Marines—with the Eldar space-elves set to join them soon and Orks planned to be the free-to-play faction when the game finally launches. The Space Marines and Chaos Space Marine builds gives the player characters the appearance of a cross between Gears of War’s Cogs and Fallout’s Brotherhood of Steel’s armored paladins. Even the lightest of them moves like a human version of a tank, and combat is a mix of mostly low-damage weapons fire and brutal melee combat with chainsaw swords or war axes. Like Gears, it has a revival mechanic if you are knocked down, but can only be revived once; after that, you’re done.

“After that, you’re done” actually feels like an adequate description of Eternal Crusade. Though respawns are frequent, the deadliness of the game makes squad-based gameplay imperative, and leadership, online strategy, and tactics are a big part of the game, with squad leaders giving live commands on where to go and what objectives to take. Since I was experiencing the demo in an office without headphones, I was bereft of these instructions and mostly watched coordinated attacks happen from the outside as members of the other team successfully flanked me—or just ran me over with a troop transport.

Playing a heavier build, I pushed up against a low wall in cover and was able to stabilize my weapon on top of it. Firing at enemies, I found myself marveling a little too much at the visual beauty of the game. Gothic cathedral-like fortifications and a stylized monochrome color palette give the whole endless war a look drenched in a starkly beautiful end-times atmosphere. Considering how intense the gameplay was with just two races, I wondered how much more intense it would be with all four and the maps potentially flooded with Orks. I was of course shortly thereafter murdered by turret fire from further up the defenses opposite me.

There’s also planned PvE interactions with Tyranids, who may be more likely to attack the more dominant force in the arena, but this was not shown at the event. Each of the four races will have five factions to choose from additionally, and there are plans to add more races as the game continues to grow and develop after launch.

Warhammer 40,000: Eternal Crusade is a starkly beautiful, brutal third-person faction-based MMO that was fun to play, even though I wasn’t following orders and was quickly ground up like hamburger repeatedly. It had some bugs, the demo was mixing keyboard and controller controls that ended up canceling each other’s buttons out, sometimes, but that’s clearly an early UI issue that is sure to be fixed. And I thought I spied a clipping issue at one point, but that is really nitpicking what was otherwise a surprisingly polished experience for what’s still a very early build.

Warhammer 40,000: Eternal Crusade is expected to release in the Summer of this year on PC, Mac, Linux, PS4, and Xbox One.