Space Hulk has rarely been a series with a consistent quality in any regard. For every victory there is a failure, or sometimes a botched concept will be given a second lease on life thanks to a remake. Sometimes this can work, as shown with Space Hulk: Ascension, but Deathwing’s Enhanced Edition falls short of the mark. It fixes many of the essential programming problems, and even offers a few new concepts. However, these are only secondary elements, and many of the core problems of the game are still evident in this release.
The story follows the Dark Angels’ First Company, an elite unit of Space Marines dispatched to carry out the chapter’s clandestine operations and high-risk situations. With the discovery of a massive mangled combination of various lost ships, they are dispatched to the vessel in order to recover a multitude of items. They just need to wipe out the massive infestation of Genestealers in their way.
The new additions, in this case, stem largely from some additional cosmetic choices, which makes many marines much more distinct as a result. These range from basic purity seals to full-scale reworking of plating, and the intricacies of these details make them a worthwhile reward. Furthermore, the presence of experience, renown and the like means you have much greater incentive to escape missions with a perfect score over merely rushing through them. Add to that the fact that the new special missions offer some much-needed replay value, and it seems at first as if the Enhanced Edition has perfected a very flawed experience. Then you start to play it.
The big problem with the game is that the Terminators lack the sheer power they are known for. These guys can be hurt from basic light gunfire, or even take heavy damage from being caught on the edge of a blast radius. Rather than shrugging off entire squad’s worth of gunfire, you’re lucky if you can last more than a minute in open combat without losing a limb. Furthermore, the melee weapons offer weak feedback to the player, making it difficult to pick out your exact position. This encourages the player to better use the – admittedly awesome – wide selection of ranged weapons, but the basic load-outs of these are remarkably weedy. It takes at least three direct hits to bring down even cannon fodder. When combined with some bizarre choices for spawn points, you can end up meeting with some extremely cheap deaths by enemies which effectively teleport in out of nowhere.
Even now, this enhanced edition of the game still suffers from a multitude of bugs, optimization issues, and framerate problems. Stuttering and freezing screens are quite commonplace, and it’s only worse when you opt to try to launch a co-op mission. This is only made notably worse thanks to some surprisingly ropy multiplayer coding, which unfortunately forces the game to frequently restart or boots people at random. This ends up undermining the game’s main appeal and makes it very difficult to justify buying without further patches.
The Enhanced Edition still retains the glorious scenery, SWAT-style squad commands and surprisingly interesting story of the original, but it simply doesn’t do enough to make it a worthwhile experience. Give it a look if you’re a Warhammer fanatic, but don’t expect much from it.
SPACE HULK: DEATHWING – ENHANCED EDITION / DEVELOPER: STREUM ON STUDIO / PUBLISHER: FOCUS HOME INTERACTIVE / PLATFORM: PC, PLAYSTATION 4 / RELEASE DATE: OUT NOW
