I only played the first one for a few minutes, so pardon me if I'm late to the party with any of this, but holy shit, these Mechanicus games--or at least the second one, Warhammer 40,000: Mechanicus II, which was released last month--are good.
Warhammer fans will probably already know this, and know the setting, but for casual fans and everyone else: rather than put you in command of Space Marines, this series is named for their nerdier cousins, the Adeptus Mechanicus. They’re a bunch of computerised bookworms who may not be as cool as the Imperium's mainline forces, but are definitely more interesting given this is a chin-stroking tactics game, not an RTS or shooter.
The reason I'm going to lengths here to introduce the setting to non-Warhammer people is that, regardless of your thoughts on painting miniatures and arguing about rule changes in 11th edition, this is a fantastic tactics game, so I just want to make sure XCOM and Fire Emblem fans are up to speed and paying attention.
Mechanicus II takes the form of a tactics RPG. You're ushered along a linear story while you play, where events will pop up and ask you to make choices (some of which can earn bonuses, others draw penalties). In between, you dip into turn-based tactical battles, which is where the majority of your time is spent.
I can't think of anything revolutionary to say here in terms of how it plays, other than it draws on some well-established genre hallmarks to good effect. You can build your own army out of points, meaning you get to be creative with different unit types. Battles take place using an imitative-based turn order where you don't get to control who goes next, but you can at least see who will.
You get hero units every battle, who are stacked with special powers, and there are both melee and ranged units to choose from, depending on how you want to play. The game's two factions--you can play as the Adeptus Mechanicus or the undying Necrons--have a neat mix of unit types and characteristics, like how Necron units "die", but also don't really die.
All of which is fine. It's a solid tactics game, in the way so many others are. It's a dependable genre! What makes this game actually good are two things. The first is the heaviness of it. Every unit in this game has weight to it, and you can really feel it moving around the map, firing off heavy weapons and swinging axes into metal and flesh. If tactics games are supposed to be a digital representation of their tabletop siblings, this one really nails the "feel" of your units being weighty, real things.
The second, and I know this is cheating slightly, is the license, or more specifically, the way the license has been adapted. This game is extremely cool. It's got fantastic writing, the character art is A+ and I enjoyed listening to everyone yell at each other--especially during the Mechanicus campaign--as much as I did the actual fighting. A tactics RPG that leans into the RPG side of things as much as this does will live and die on whether that RPG content is worth a damn, and this game's is terrific.
I've spent the last few weeks talking to people about this game, and outside a few souls in the 3MA Discord, dangerously few tactics or 40K fans I know have even heard of this game/series, and I think that's wild. Maybe there are too many 40K games out there at the moment, maybe there are just too many games out there at the moment, but as someone who likes taking turns and moving little guys around, I absolutely loved Mechanicus II.
