Isn’t bad except for some absolutely infuriating stupidity on the part of the designers.
Three examples:
- Loot doesn’t carry over between missions that appear to be taking place hours or minutes apart. It doesn’t bother to mention this, and it gives you enough things like medkits and grenades that it has the feel of a resource management thing. So there you are debating whether or not to use a medkit on a character, weighing the advantage you’ll gain in the short term vs hanging on to it. Then the next mission starts and all of it is gone.
- Mission tells me to set traps at choke points. OK, cool. I’ll do that. How aboot you tell me how to do that? Nope. Turns out only one of your characters — who isn’t obviously flagged as someone who can do so — can actually set traps and it’s buried behind a submenu. So if you don’t already know this and send her out to do so, you just end up standing around at the place where you’re supposed to set the traps wondering WTF to do. It also later wants you to do a few other things with exactly the same issue.
- Mission tells me to call an elevator. When you go to call it, it turns out the generators need to be fixed, so you need to have someone grab a toolbox and fix the generators. Cool. Until you bypass the whole “try to call the broken elevator” part, try to fix the generators with the tools, and you can’t. So you have to run to the elevator, try to operate it, get told it’s broken, and then go fix the generators.
Meanwhile you’re in the middle of a firefight and on a timer, so all the dicking around trying to do everything in the secret decoder ring’s order makes you run out of time.
It’s really sad when you consider how many older GW games suffered from tutorials that held your hand to the point of making the game nearly unplayable until you got past it. They must have gotten sick of the complaints and overcompensated in the opposite direction.
This is why you need outside testers, a problem GW has always had. Back in the ’90s you’d get the latest GW game, start reading the rulebook, everything seems fine, go to play, and find out a situation comes up that is — to be polite — ambiguously explained. Eventually you’d go to their website to see just WTF you were supposed to do, and have the designers give you a smug attitude about how everyone at the company got it immediately. Wait, you mean the guys who designed it knew how what they were designing works because they didn’t have to rely on a badly-written rulebook? No way!
There are also some weird issues with setting up a new gang. It’s really hard to get the composition you want in the beginning because it insists upon giving you a leader, two heavies, and enough money for one basic gang member. You know what? Maybe I’d prefer only one heavy and two regular riflemen because the riflemen are a lot more flexible. Nope. You also just have to take what they give you for gear. Want different gear? You have to reject that member and hope something better comes up on the next one.
Likewise with the character models. It just rolls a random model and that’s what you get with three sliders. Get stuck with a stupid mask? Too bad. Throw him back and try again. Just let me customize that member’s look. If this was possible way back in Neverwinter Nights, it should be easy twenty years later.
Especially for a company that makes miniatures with interchangeable body parts. When you buy plastic minis for a GW game, you get a whole bunch of bodies, a whole bunch of heads, a whole bunch of arms, a whole bunch of legs, and a pile of weapons. You cut everything off the runners and assemble your minis from parts. With a few exceptions, any Imperial Guardsman can use any Imperial Guardsman torso, arm, leg, head, and weapon combination. The primary exception is that some of the bigger or rarer weapons have special arms made to hold them properly; the arms for a Space Marine with a missile launcher are going to look weird if you try to use them with a bolter.
Speaking as someone with 3D modeling experience, this is not an incredibly difficult process. Hell, Fallout 4 beat them to it with the extensively-customizable armor — Necromunda uses more or less the same equipment slots.
How about this: let me recruit a gang member of X type without any gear. Then let me customize them. Then let me shop for gear for said member (or even just the gang’s stockpile so I can redistribute it later). After that, let me repeat the process with the next guy.
It wouldn’t be so annoying if I hadn’t been playing the tabletop version since the ’90s. My former roommate and I spent a lot of weekends playing Necromunda, eating buckets of fries, and drinking heavily. Having played that game so much, I know exactly how good this game could be. With luck they’ll fix some of this stuff in future patches. They’re certainly not in maintenance mode yet since they just released the Van Saar gang upgrade.
> Mission tells me to call an elevator. When you go to call it, it turns out the generators need to be fixed, so you need to have someone grab a toolbox and fix the generators. Cool. Until you bypass the whole “try to call the broken elevator” part, try to fix the generators with the tools, and you can’t. So you have to run to the elevator, try to operate it, get told it’s broken, and then go fix the generators.
This trick is often done to enforce “this is how story went” (or, to quote Joker, “doing last level first? Shame on you!”). It might be infuriating at times (especially for a TTRPG fan) but it is also somewhat reasonable (especially for a casual gamer). After all, video games are not TTRPGs, they are telling a story not making it up as they go. (Same can tentatively be said for the lack of customization of gang members.)
None of that excuses poor design, especially hiding required abilities in submenus and not bothering to mention anything on the subject. It’s doubly worthless when they pull this crap in a campaign that’s intended to teach the player how to play the game.
The generator thing was clearly just unbelievably lazy on their part, especially when you’re already on a short time limit as it is. That is the definition of unreasonable, especially when it means tying up a character screwing around with the elevator for half the mission instead of completing the “kill all the attackers” part.
There is exactly zero excuse for the lack of customization for gang members aside from them reverting to their old, pathetic “ToE by die roll” antics of early Warhammer and 40K. I kid you not, in old editions you were paying points for die rolls on an equipment class table, sometimes with bonuses or penalties for the character type. There were equal chances of getting a sawed-off shotgun or a power fist for the same points, which is basically what they’ve done in N: UW and the Mordheim mobile game.
I’m not surprised, though, considering some of the other painfully stupid decisions GW has made over the years and especially recently.