Game Spotlight! Battlefleet Gothic: Armada

 So I've been playing a lot of Battlefleet Gothic Armada lately, which is something I never thought I'd say. To explain that I'll have to give you a little background information on this game. BFGA is a space warfare game based in the Warhammer 40k universe. I love Warhammer 40k which is the main reason I picked up this title without knowing much about it. To start off with this game is hard. Not just pleasantly challenging, I mean one mistake and you lose even on "easy" difficulty. I know some people like games that are extremely punishing, I am not one of them. Part of the challenge is that the tutorial is terrible, and the UI is not intuitive. You go through a little scenario that in no way represents the rest of the game, and then get thrown into the first mission with hardly any explanation of whats going on. It is very possible that some people quit before they got past the first mission, not me though. I had the testicular fortitude to press on to mission two where you fight the Ork pirates for the first time.

 The Orks, in case you didn't know, are a greenskin race of barbarians whose whole society is based around war or "waaaaaagggggggghhhhhh" in their parlance. Their "technology" consists mostly of cobbled together junk and their ships are no exception. It's often hard to tell if an ork ship is damaged or just "upgraded". They have great physical strength so the prefer to ram other ships (which does a ton of damage in this game) and board for hand to hand combat. So the mission involves you escorting transports( which are very weak) from one end of the map to the other while ork pirates try to destroy them. You have three, and you can only lose one before you fail the mission. Lets just say I tried this more times than I care to admit. One of the biggest obstacles is the limited number of ships you can bring due to the fleet point system. This system pretty much guarantees you will always be out numbered making the margin of error even smaller. I eventually gave up and put this title back on the digital shelf for about a year and a half.

 I was bored, browsing the internet when I came across an article about Battlefleet Gothic Armada 2 coming in 2018. I thought to myself that game got a sequel? Having nothing better to do I dusted off BFGA and decided to give it another go. This time I studied all the controls and UI features carefully, read a guide on what upgrades and skills to get, and played some rounds in skirmish to get the feeling for combat back. I read a guide on what exactly the effects of the engagement distances were ( the game doesn't tell you), and I did some research into what the strengths and weaknesses of the various weapon types were(again no help from the game). I loaded into my old campaign and I beat the ork pirate mission! It felt great putting all that I had learned and practiced into action and coming out on top. I didn't know at the time that this was just the tip of the iceberg when it came to challenge from this game's campaign but I was ready to take on more challenges.

 So I guess what I'm trying to say is that I have grown to enjoy this game quite a bit over the last few weeks and with a huge sequel on the way the future looks bright for this series. If you want a tactical space combat game set in a great science-fantasy setting and don't mind doing a bit of research I don't think you can go wrong with Battlefleet Gothic Armada. You can pick it up on Steam here. I would wait for a sale as 39.99 is a bit much for a game you need to read a book to play. I would also skip the DLC unless you really love the Tau or Space Marines as they will be implemented as base factions in the sequel.