Are you some kind of fucking loser?

YES, YOU ARE.

What's that? You don't know what a Space Hulk is? Well shut the fuck up and take a seat it's time for a history lesson.

It's the dawn of the 41st millenium, and everything is completely fucked. Everything is trying to kill us all the time and there is no hope of living past the age of 12.

EXCEPT THERE IS HOPE, THE GLORIOUS SPACE MARINES.

The holy warriors of the Imperium, the angels of death that rains down destruction and purity upon the corrupting influence of the xenos menace that threaten to tear our society apart at the seams.

Space Hulk is a game where we celebrate the glorious Emprah sending all 1,000 Blood Angels to die at the hands of alien scum in a vain attempt to recover a floating trash heap of mangled up spacecrafts and rocks.

ALL HAIL THE GLORIOUS EMPRAH.

If you've ever played a "survival horror game" in your life, you're a fucking pussy because that isn't horror. THIS IS FUCKING HORROR.

Have you ever stood back to back with three of your battle brothers as genestealer after genestealer, a never ending torrent of flesh and teeth, comes screaming down a narrow corridor foaming at the mouth for a taste of your delicious biomass?

Have you ever watched as a flood of xenos fall one after the other to your mighty bolter, blood boiling up to your knees, praying to the machine spirits and the glorious Emprah that your weapon doesn't jam, giving up that brief second those abonimations would need to separate your head clean from your neck?

Have you ever set an entire hull ablaze with the last of your flamer fuel, the inhuman screams piercing the air as dozens of xenos cry out in absolute anguish, taking only a brief moment to celebrate your victory before realizing there are a hundred more ready to take their place, AND THEY'RE RIGHT BEHIND YOU?

Space Hulk is a simple game of simple premise and simple mechanics. You control a team of Terminators, heavily armored Space Marines, sent on a mission to reclaim the titular Space Hulk, a contorted mess of various spacecraft filled to the brim with the intelligent alpha predators known as Genestealers.

On the surface this appears to be a fairly simple turn based strategy game with a few sprinkles of 40k lore and a health dose of Alien dark corridors and frightening beasties. This is far from the truth however, and while Space Hulk might be easy to play, it is not easy to win.

Where the genius of Space Hulk comes in is how it uses these simple mechanics to create one of the most genuinely tense, heart pounding situations you will ever find in a game. While your Terminator squads are certainly powerful, they are also large and bulky. You will rarely be able to move two or more marines through a hull in anything but a single file line, and when you do it will be a slow and agonizing process. Your enemy on the other hand, the Genestealers, are agile, numerous, and they can chew through power armor like it was construction paper.

It's a classic example of the hunters becoming the hunted, but in this rare situation you are in the shoes of the hunted. So many games these days rely on empowerment to keep the player engaged, but Space Hulk does the exact opposite, and in someways it even seems to go out of its way to lull you into a false sense of empowerment. It may be easy going at first, using your squad of heavily armored Marines to chew through alien after alien, but it only takes one wrong move, one jammed gun, one wrong step before everything goes to shit and your invincible soldiers are being torn limb from limb and you find yourself at the mission select screen.

Oh and that's just the Space Marine side of it, you knew this game was competitive right? Yeah, you can be the guy running all those little fuckers. Now you're the one in control. You lose a few Genestealers to a sergeant's power sword? Who cares, there's 20 more where that came from. Now Space Hulk becomes a completely different experience, one devoid of terror or joy or any other emotion, all feeling being replaced with the unquenchable urge to kill and feed. Space Hulk flips the script again but now it isn't just empowerment, it's fucking genocide. It isn't justified, these aren't bad guys or evildoers, you're a horde of horrible space monsters killing for the sake of being able to kill more.

THIS IS WHAT GAMES ARE MISSING. THIS SHIT RIGHT HERE.

There's a narrative here, there's a story. You feel things while playing Space Hulk, wonderful things, terrifying things. It's a game that expresses a dozen different emotions just through gameplay, through the sheer mechanics of its play.

Now obviously it isn't fair to give all the credit to this, admittedly rough, PC release. Space Hulk is a classic board game released under Games Workshop's specialists line of games. However, much like its cousin Blood Bowl, it's a property that's received very little love or support from GW in recent years, and you'd be hard pressed to find a better alternative to this digital release without dropping a few hundred bucks.

But that shouldn't deter you from playing this game, and really at the end of the day it's fucking irrelevant. Space Hulk is a game without a story, without true characters. It's bunch of mechanics thrown together and fine tuned to make a game that is not only fun to play, but is actually emotional. It's tense, hell it's downright terrifying. So many games are completely contingent upon words and pretty pictures to communicate with their players; Space Hulk stands as a stoic counterpoint to all the glitter and fanfare.

Here is a game that is affecting through, and relies solely upon, its mechanics.Here is a game that is a game,

So stop crying on your blog and writing fanfiction about what you think the ending of Bioshock means and go play a real game you fucking sissy.

The Emprah protects.

Well, thats one way to viral market your game..

I'm not playing it because its an overpriced game which seems to suffer from performance problems. Not to mention, its just a straight port of the board game, nothing more. Well the digital board game version is painfully slower now...

@lordxavierbritish: Ok, I'll play physical the board game thx...

Have fun.

I am flabbergasted by this thread.

I LOVE YOUR FUCKING WRITING STYLE REALLY MAKES ME WANT TO PLAY THIS FUCKING GAME AS THE LOSER I AM

Hell naw son.

BECAUSE $30 IS A LOT RIGHT NOW AND I'M UNCOMFORTABLE PIRATING ANYMORE, YOU FUCK.

SHIT.

Not convincing me a single bit. A lot of the things you say applies to a lot of other games too.

Sounds like you wouldn't know a real game if it chewed through your space armor and melted your fucking stomach.

I read the Rock, Paper, Shotgun review, and they seemed to be of the opinion that they didn't really video game it up in any interesting ways, and that just playing a board game on your PC isn't like amazingly fun compared to actually rolling dice and playing the real thing.

And I otherwise have no familiarity with Space Hulk because it's before my time, so I'm pretty fine with not playing it.

It's expensive and I'd rather play the real Space Hulk instead of a computer game version of it.

Can't hide the number of genestealers on a blip in local play. Unacceptable.

Meh.

It's terribly overpriced for what it is because Games Workshop knows you're a rough trick and you like it.

http://www.teardown.se/

These guys made a freeware version of Space Hulk, then got shut down and had to change the art to generic sci-fi dudes. But you can mod the graphics to look just like space hulk. The only downside is no multiplayer.

No dice!

Nah.

I don't know why I have to keep explaining this, but I guess I do.

This game costs about 1/10th of what you would have to spend to get the actual Space Hulk. If you only have a passing interest in the game and don't want to drop a few hundred dollars just to see what it's all about, this is it.

If you already have an actual Space Hulk box then good for you, this game isn't for you.

But for everyone else this is an amazing game they should try at least once.

Also it's a fucking computer game do I have to spell this out, you don't have to pay $30 to play it.

Space Hulk is awesome.

No further explanation necessary.

The Space Hulk experts at Rock Paper Shotgun told me it was a mess. WHO DO I BELIEVE?

I want Space Marine 2 or Dawn of War 3.

That review was completely bull shit.

He said there is no simplified board view (there is), that you can't tell where doors are (you can), and that you have to wait for a lengthy animation every time you move your guy (you can issue commands while animations carry out).

Hell, he even complained that people dropped out of online games and took forever to finish their turns. That isn't a review, it's fucking bait.

It isn't a perfect game by any means. It's buggy and has some performance issues, but as far as the game goes it's about as good as you could ask for digitized Space Hulk. The only real issue you could leverage against it is the poorly done hotseat multiplayer and the lack of randomized objectives or mission building, but the first is fixed by just not playing fucking hotseat and the latter may come at a later date.

For what it is right now, it isn't worth $30. It's a solid $10, maybe $15, but that really doesn't fucking matter. The game, on its own and without a price tag attached, is solid as hell. It isn't the board game but then again what the fuck do you expect?

Looks boring and is overpriced. I watched the video TB did on the game and I'm not interested in paying $30 for that mess. Maybe when it goes on a Steam sale for $2 I will pick it up.

@crusader8463: Space Hulk is really never going to be $2 in a Steam Sale. Let's be realistic here.

@lordxavierbritish:

WAIIIIIITAMINUTE.

You're the guy who said Gone Home was bullshit. I'm beginning to think our preferences in video games don't necessarily align!

I'm also pretty sure this is the best version of Space Hulk.

Space Hulk is the Citizen Kane of board games turned into video games.

If I need to pirate a game to get the cost/benefit ratio back in my favor, I probably won't like it anyway. The fact that it's $30 isn't the problem, the part where one of its apparent fans goes and tells me it's worth about a third of that is.

TB loves this shit and even he said it wasn't very good.

If only the Space Marines can stop everyone from dying a horrible premature death, why doesn't everyone just become space marines?

Checkmate athiests.

A turn based strategy game with no way to fast forward (or accelerate) move animations can fuck the right off. It has been a basic feature in TBS games since the 90s.

HA! Jokes on you then, I already have the board game! I have no one to play it with though... D:

If playing the song of time on an Ocarina can turn me back into a kid meaning I never have to work a day in my life again, teach me how to play this song of time?

I don't understand why everyone has to judge a game by its price.

That's the fucking worst, you people are the worst.

You can say a game is overpriced, but you're basically saying "This game is bad because it is $30."

What? WHAT?

Have we regressed to a point where this is a coherent argument, where someone can say something this asinine and not be dragged out from their home and beaten in the streets?

Yes, we have. And they are dark times indeed.

I'll keep it simple, no.

Because I know enough about turn based games that this is not worth 30 bucks. Even at that price is looks like a rushed title that could have used lots of fine tuning.

The PC version is not very good and also incredibly expensive for what it is. That's why.

It's Space Hulk. It has the same rules and mechanics as Space Hulk.

There is nothing wrong with the actual game, there are some graphical bugs and technical errors but the game itself is solid as hell.

If you think the game is bad you think Space Hulk is bad. You can have that opinion, but you can't like Space Hulk and hate this game.

That's actually wrong, if you have that opinion you have a wrong opinion.

It's a cool version of Space Hulk. Makes it easy to play with mates during the week and not on our regular hobby day. Make no mistake Space Hulk has always been a "beer and skittles" game. The price argument going on here is a bit funny. You can't really get a new copy of the last edn (which the video game is based) of the miniature game for under $250 AUD, so $29 ain't so bad. It is definitly not worth getting all upset about on the internet though.

I really enjoy Space Hulk, which is why I'm planning to play it with friends on Vassal in the near future. I won't play it on the shitty PC version.

I'm good.

I tried it. It looks like shit and played okay I guess. Didn't like it. And it's so not worth 30 bucks.

Money is subjective, unless you're poor.

Get a fucking job.

Get a temper, Lord Dudebro. I have all the rights in the world to think of this game as merely entertaining.

Is it a art like Gone Home?

I spent all of my august disposable income at Otakon :V

You seem like an awful person. I don't know about Space Hulk.