Having just finished Mechanicus 2, I can safely say that Bulwark Studios' follow up to their surprise 2018 hit is a well crafted tactical experience, an entertaining cyber gothic jaunt, and a worthy entry into the canon of great Warhammer 40'000 video games. You wouldn't know it, however, looking at the average discussions on the Mechanicus game Reddit page, or from its currently mixed review score on Steam.
Truth is, I understand why some players feel sour on Mechanicus 2. It is a very different game from the first, with very different priorities. It zigs where the previous game zags. It focusses its attention elsewhere. If you came out of Mechanicus 1 wanting more Mechanicus 1, then Mechanicus 2 certainly does not deliver on that.
In many respects, the game reminds me of the similar situation Dawn of War 2 found itself in. A very smartly designed game with a lot of depth and creativity, that nonetheless was not what players wanted coming out of Dawn of War 1.
So, let's tackle that, I guess.
Part 1: Just Another Brick in the Wall.
One of the reasons that Mechanicus caught so many people's attention is that despite being a Turn-Based Strategy Game, it was mechanically different from what so many people were used to. Normally TBS games follow the core design popularised by XCOM. Units have a predetermined turn order, a limited pool of 'action points,' and inflicting damage is dictated by an invisible dice roll chance to hit.
Mechanicus, instead, eschewed nearly all of these conventions. You could choose to play your units in any order each round. Instead of having a limited number of actions, your units shared a pool of 'cognition points,' which were accumulated from various power sources across the map, and could theoretically allow units to make as many moves as they wanted. Attacks always hit, though damage could vary and certain abilities could negate it.
The only exception to these rules were secondary support units, which could only move and shoot once per turn, but these very much were supporting players in the fight, with your Tech-Priests in the starring role.
What this did was bring a great degree of tactical depth to the game, and allowed players to focus on a wide variety of strategies. It also allowed for a significant scope of progression. At the start of the campaign, players had to be very careful, as they were limited to only a few cognition points. By the end of the game, your Tech-Priests were running across the length of the entire map in Turn 1 and mauling Necrons in close combat, or firing off multiple shoulder mounted canons to wipe out the enemy before they could even act.
This, naturally, made the game something that obsessive players could easily get addicted to. Your Tech-Priests have a wide variety of skill options to choose from, and they can mix and match them from multiple trees. With some experimentation it is possible to reach some absolutely game-breaking builds, and the re-playability of the campaign meant that there was ample opportunity for such experiments.
What Mechanicus had in mechanical depth, however, it lacked in terms of narrative scope. The plot of the first game is relatively threadbare, with the Imperial war against the Necrons going on entirely in the background, and the missions themselves involving Adeptus Mechanicus strike teams embarking on expeditions to weaken the Necron war effort.
Each expedition works as a sort of Rouge-lite run, where the player has to navigate across the map of a Necron complex, avoiding hazards, and making logistical decisions that can potentially help or hinder the player in the battles proper. The health of the squad persists across these runs, so losing Tech-Priests early can doom one before it has truly begun.
While each run has a specific story conceit from the high ranking Tech-Priest giving the briefing, there are only four types of battles. Kill all enemies. Survive a number of rounds. Reach an extraction point. Kill a Necron boss. Despite all this, the variability of the game means that it never feels stale, and you barely notice the limited number of objectives when playing the game the first time around.
Wrap all of this inside one of the most infectious soundtracks ever committed to a game, and you've got the makings of an absolute cult classic, and that is exactly what it was. Mechanicus got by with very good word of mouth, sold well, and had players eagerly awaiting a sequel for years. When that sequel did arrive, however, it wasn't quite what the fans expected.
Part 2: Welcome to the Machine.
Mechanicus 2, is not Mechanicus 1. Despite sharing similar DNA, and being a narrative sequel to the first game, Mechanicus 2 is otherwise entirely its own thing. Most of the elements that made Mechanicus unique are significantly de-prioritised in the sequel.
The big contributing factor, I feel, was the decision to focus more on the secondary units. Unlike in Mechanicus 1, where most of the action was done by your squad of Tech-Priests, this time only one Tech-Priest partakes in the battle, the bulk of the fighting being done by your force of what were previously secondary units, which, again, may only move and shoot once per turn.
What this does is move the focus away from the cognition point system. Where in the first game your access to cognition points could make or break a battle, here they are primarily used for activating your Tech-Priest's secondary weapons and buffs. This change also transitions over to the Necron campaign, who don't have access to cognition points at all, but instead a 'Dominion' system, where the more damage the Necrons do over the course of a battle, the more powerful abilities they gain access to.
All this puts Mechanicus 2 more square in line with traditional TBS games. While it still has some of the original's more unique elements, you can still activate your units in any order, and attacks (nearly) always hit, the game feels much more designed with a casual player base in mind. If you were the kind of person who bounced off the first game because it was too unorthodox, Mechanicus 2 is being more traditional will likely win you over.
So too do these priorities relate to your character's skill trees. Gone are the sprawling levels of customisation from the first game, instead each character is already specced to perform a particular role, and has a skill tree to accompany that. Most of your points will be spent on expanding your deployment count and buffing your basic troops. There are no game breaking power combos here.
If you've read this far you're probably coming to the conclusion that Mechanicus 2 lacks a lot of the mechanical depth of the first game, and a lot of the unique aspects that made it interesting, and you'd be right. Why then, do I still consider the game great? Well, because I'm judging Mechanicus 2 by what it is, not what it isn't, and what it is is a solid, action packed ride through some of the more lesser explored parts of the Warhammer 40'000 universe.
Part 3: High Hopes.
While Mechanicus 1 had some very interesting characters with quirky personalities, and some great vocal taunts from its Necron villains, it didn't really have much of a plot to speak of. You arrive on the planet, you fight a bunch of Necrons, you beat them, roll credits. By contrast, Mechanicus 2 puts a significant amount of effort into weaving a detailed plot with twists, turns, surprises and betrayals.
Not only does it do this, but it delivers two campaigns that allow you to experience the story from different perspectives. There are mysteries raised in the Adeptus Mechanicus campaign that are resolved in the Necron one, and vice versa. Both campaigns have a sprawling cast of characters, from the cynical and demanding Omnisynnod council of Tech-Priests, to the Necron Phaeron's scheming advisors and generals, to cameo appearances from the Leagues of Votann and the Iron Hands chapter of Space Marines.
This widening of scope and greater priority on story means we get to experience a broader deal of the action this time around. While we don't get to partake in any large scale battles, you won't be commanding any tanks or aircraft here, we will still find ourself fighting on the planet's surface as much as we do in Necron tombs, and we'll even do battle in towering Forge-City spires.
All this is to say that Mechanicus 2's priorities are in a very different place. It wants to take you on more of a roller-coaster ride than the first game, albeit still at the kind of pace you'd expect with Turn-Based combat. This is a game that wants you to be absorbed into the fiction of its world more than that it wants you crunching numbers in order to unlock more powerful combos.
And I know some players are going to have a problem with that. I know many fans who have dedicated hundreds of hours to the first game are going to be disappointed to find that the sequel does not have the same degree of complexity.
It's very clear that Bulwark Studios didn't want to just sit back and do Mechanicus 1 again. They wanted to make a game with a different kind of scope with different priorities, and they absolutely nailed that in my opinion. Narratively, this game digs deeper into the backstory of both of its primary factions in ways that we haven't seen in video games before.
I love the cynical paranoia and duplicity of the Adeptus Mechanicus' senior Tech-Priests. I love the constant schemes and double-crosses that plague the Necron court. I love that the Votann are finally getting a bit of a spotlight. I love that I can joke that Scaevola and Nefershah have a toxic yuri relationship.
Alas, Mechanicus 2 just isn't getting a fair shake, and it is in no small part thanks to it's name.
Part 4: You Know You Just Can't Win.
I honestly reckon if they hadn't called it Mechanicus 2 then the game would have been embraced with open arms. It they'd called it, Warhammer 40'000: Battle for Heketeus IV, or Souls of Steel, or something, then audiences would have been more receptive to the changes. They'd have gone in understanding that the game is entirely its own thing, not something that picking up the baton of Mechanicus 1 and enhancing and evolving its gameplay mechanics.
I understand, though, that doing a name change probably wasn't really an option. In this current era of the digital economy, it is insanely hard to capture people's attention and get the word out. Had Bulwark Studios gone with a different name, they'd have run into the very real possibility that audiences would miss that it was a sequel to Mechanicus. They'd basically have to forgo the word of mouth and good will the first game had got in the hopes they'd find an audience all over again.
They had to call it Mechanicus 2 because brand recognition is the best form of advertising you can get these days. Better to run the risk of being labelled an unworthy sequel than languish at the bottom of the Steam charts on day of release. In a better world, in a more sane one that didn't have such a demented digital distribution process, Bulwark could probably have got away with a name change, but not in this one.
All in all, its a damn shame that Bulwark has found itself between a rock and a hard place. Mechanicus 2 is a great game, of that I have no doubt, but I don't really know what you could do to quell the dissenters. For many, this game is going to be the great disappointment of 2026. For those who spent years tweaking their Tech-Priest's power-sets and experimenting with combos, Mechanicus 2 really does have nothing to offer them.
This, unfortunately, doesn't bring me to an easy conclusion. It is highly likely that in time the opinion of Mechanicus 2 will mellow, but right now that mixed review score on Steam is really going to jeopardize the studio's reputation. I'm really hoping that the rumoured Votann DLC will smooth some things over and really let them reinforce that this is a game focussed on story first and foremost.
Mechanicus 1 hasn't gone anywhere. It is still there. Still available to play. Mechanicus 2 hasn't changed that. As the old adage goes, "Why not both?"
---------------------------------------
Jack Harvey 2026
No comments:
Post a Comment