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Games Workshop's series of tabletop miniatures games has long been popular in a select crowd. One of the major problems keeping them from gaining wider acceptance is the incredible expense required to start playing - the starter boxed sets usually hover around $70, and to play the games correctly (with miniatures matching the game's characters) one has to spend hundreds of dollars on miniatures. Then, the company tends to release a new version, which makes all the old rules and expansion sets obsolete, or discontinue the game entirely, making those large purchases fairly worthless. I personally have two obsolete editions of Warhammer 40,000 sitting around, and a discontinued game called Man O' War, along with miniatures for each. The value of a computer simulation of these games is obvious - it costs nothing to draw a new miniature on a screen, and rules changes can be made with a simple patch.

There have been four attempts at porting Warhammer games to the PC platform that I'm aware of. The first was Warhammer Fantasy: Shadow of the Horned Rat. This was one of the first DirectX games ever (be careful installing it, the DirectX 1 installer doesn't realize there are later versions and will cheerfully overwrite DX6!), and didn't translate the feel of Warhammer very well. Troops moved in huge squads, there was very little detail, and the game did not provide for a lot of unit customization. There was also no multiplayer support that I recall.

Then came Dark Omen and Final Liberation. I have to admit, I didn't really play either of these very much, so I don't know much about them. They did add multiplayer, and some degree of freedom in unit choice.

Chaos Gate is the fourth, and the Warhammer 40K spirit is in this game to a degree. It shares a problem exhibited in previous games, which I will get to later, but brings back fond memories of X-Com's combat.

I will first address the biggest problem I see with Chaos Gate, and for that matter Shadow of the Horned Rat and Final Liberation.

WHY ARE WE RESTRICTED TO ONE RACE?

The Warhammer 40,000 universe is a large, diverse one, with about a dozen widely varying races. Each race has its own individual characteristics, weapons, vehicles, equipment, and armor. The Orks, for example, have weak but extremely cheap units, and rely on grunt rushing to win battles. The Eldar have very expensive, very effective units that can win battles singlehandedly (but make great targets!) The Tyranids are huge, dinosaur-like creatures that refuse to admit they've been shot. There are many other races, too many to go into on a tangent like this. So why did Random Games and SSI decide to make the entire game of Chaos Gate based around the Space Marines and Chaos? This lack of diversity has kept any of the Warhammer games from being a true port of the tabletop game, and it sadly continues in Chaos Gate. You can't even play as Chaos, except in multiplayer games...the campaigns and single missions are restricted to playing as the Space Marines, which are in turn restricted to playing as one "Chapter" faction, the Ultramarines.

This aside, Chaos Gate plays wonderfully (as long as you take necessary precautions when installing...see the Installation section). You choose from eight squads of five Marines, each with his own individual characteristics that can be improved through battling. Each squad comes with a standard weapons configuration, which you can change to your liking as long as you stay within the boundaries of the Warhammer rules and your own limited supply of weapons and ammunition.

The actual gameplay varies slightly from the Warhammer 40K tabletop rules. Ability scores range from 1 to 100 instead of 1 to 10 as in the tabletop game. The actual combat is handled in a turn-based format, and reminds me of nothing so much as the old Microprose classic X-Com: UFO Defense. Moving and firing is handled through Action Points (another ability score), instead of "You can move 4 inches, then fire once, unless you're special" as was the rule of thumb in the tabletop game. Different weapons cost different numbers of Action Points to fire. Some weapons have sustained fire modes, where after the first shot, any shot within a certain arc from that original shot costs vastly fewer Action Points. This allows a character with a sustained fire weapon to mow down large numbers of enemy troops.

Each mission has a certain objective. This is usually either "Kill everything that moves" or "Find the Magical Doohickey of Power". While accomplishing these objectives, your characters can run across ammunition crates. As long as you've looked in a given ammo crate (or dead Marine's body...), all the ammunition and weapons within are added to your general inventory at the end of a mission, and can be used to outfit your squads for the next mission.

Marines lost are, as far as I've seen, irreplacable. This forces you to think strategically, and not rush through every mission throwing caution to the wind. You have but 40 Marines, and once they're gone, they're gone.

The enemy is very smart, and will move to high ground for a better shot, use grenades on large groups of Marines, charge with its worthless grunt units in large numbers, hide behind cover, and otherwise be a worthy adversary. And if you figure it out, you can always play against a friend online. I found, however, that online battles over modem connections took hours to finish, and not many of us have that kind of patience. Now, if someone would just release a Warhammer game where every race was usable, perhaps we could use that as a substitute for the tabletop game if money is tight or the other players can't physically be there.

That being said, Chaos Gate provides excellent Warhammer 40K-flavored gameplay, even if it's not a perfect translation.

There are 15 campaign missions, and you can only play from the Ultramarine side. Before taking on some of the campaign missions, you can try one of the Targets of Opportunity, which are randomly (I think) generated maps on a certain terrain type with opposition based on your place in the campaign and your difficulty level setting. These missions are useful for gathering weapons and ammo (there are ammo crates) and gaining valuable experience for your troops before the main battle of that part of the campaign (which is always about two levels of difficulty higher than the Targets of Opportunity). You can also randomly generate a map to play on, use the Scenario Builder to create your own, download a created map from the Internet, or take on a human opponent in Multiplayer (assuming they're a fan of Marines or Chaos). Strategy fans can lose a lot of hours to this game.

The game controls with a simple click interface, with keyboard shortcuts for some commands. The viewpoint can thankfully be zoomed in or out, to either get a good view of where a certain marine is, or get an overview of the entire battlefield. Those of you who have played X-Com: UFO Defense or Soldiers at War will recognize the interface instantly, others may need to practice with it a bit before they get the hang of it. The lack of a tutorial mode makes it difficult to immediately grasp all of the available commands - tutorials are very important, and adding one would have helped this game out a lot.

Graphics are this game's weak point, although strategy games generally aren't known for mind-blowing visuals. While each onscreen model has its own weapon clearly visible, and every piece of scenery on the board can be damaged or blown to smithereens in some way (except maybe walls), it can sometimes be difficult to tell the difference between, say, a Khorne Berserker and a Chaos Sorceror, or between your own Marines unless you click on each one. The movies also exhibited some odd behavior on my Matrox Millennium II, where the old screen would not entirely disappear when the new one came on, leaving pixel effects all over the movie and making it difficult to see what was going on. The graphics do the job, however.

The music in Chaos Gate is first-rate. Its monastery-like chants help capture the quasi-religious feel of the Marine/Chaos conflict in the Warhammer universe, yet they fit well in a battle situation and avoid being too intrusive. All in all, a fine job.

The different sides have their own speech effects for different characters, and even for firing different weapons. You know you're in trouble when you hear "Blood for the Blood God" on the enemy's turn and three Berserkers run out from behind the trees. A Marine throwing a grenade yells, among other things, "A gift from the Emperor!", while a Marine with a plasma pistol will say "Starfire will devour you" before he fires. Chaos troops have their own set of sounds. The sounds seem somewhat muted, though, and the different weapons' actual firing sounds pretty much the same for each weapon. I should KNOW the difference when I hear a Boltgun firing as opposed to, say, a Missile Launcher or a Heavy Boltgun.

Remember that warning at the beginning of every Installshield install that warns you to "Close all Windows programs before running this installer"? Well, in Chaos Gate that actually MATTERS. If you have ANYTHING running while the Installshield is running, your copy of Chaos Gate will be prone to random crashing and obscenely long load times. This can be somewhat alleviated by having the same combination of programs running while you play the game as were running when you installed it. However, it's a much better idea to Ctrl-Alt-Del everything but Explorer and Systray, sign off the Internet if you're online, then run the installer. This is an inexcusable problem, which was not fixed in the version 1.1 patch. Don't bother installing the animations unless you have less than an 8X CD-ROM drive, as it takes up a LOT of hard drive space and doesn't seem to provide any noticeable speed increase in-game. It doesn't fix the movie corruption problem, either.

While not a perfect Warhammer 40K translation, Chaos Gate is still a fine turn-based strategy title, which will please Warhammer fans and general strategy gamers alike. It's refreshing to see a great turn-based game like this amid the sea of real-time crap (not that all real-time strategy games are bad, just most of them) that the developer community sees fit to deluge us with. I definitely recommend Chaos Gate to anyone looking for turn-based strategy, or who wants more gameplay like the combat in X-Com.