Each army in Warhammer 40,000 has its own codex containing rules, lore, and nice pictures, and The Leagues Of Votann’s – the game’s contemporary space dwarves – was out of date before a single model was available to buy. Advance copies went out, people noticed that the rules were horribly broken, more people noticed that the rules were actually massively, horribly, absurdly broken, and the company issued an apology, pulling out their cutesy ‘James Workshop’ moniker in an attempt to aw shucks the fact they’d just sold everyone some very expensive hardback kindling. They later issued some rules errata, and they’re supposedly in a more sensible spot now, even if doing anything interesting with them visually is confined, as per, to Necromunda.
If I had to bet money on it, I’d guess they won’t be nearly as broken in Warhammer 40,000: Mechanicus 2 when they appear as potential allies or foes for both the Ad-mech and Necron playable factions. That’s because difficulty balance was one of the major problems holding the original Mechanicus back from strategy greatness (the game was later patched), so I imagine it being at the forefront of Bulwark Studio’s mind this time. Decide for yourself by observing the trailer below. How many busted tokens do these dwarves have in their beards?
If you skipped the first Mechanicus, it was notable for a couple of things: an absurdly entertaining action economy that let your late game popebots sweep maps without stopping for breath (do Ad-mech breathe?) and a soundtrack that felt like a pipe organ had gained sentience and declared war on reality itself. It was, balance aside, a good time, and I’m interested to see what Bulwark have learned from their first outing.
At the time of the writing, the game’s Steam page lists the release date as TBA, but the presser I received reckons it’s out sometime this year. This may be old news by the time you’re reading this, by which time hundreds of billions of cells in my body will have been replaced. A truly antiquated and wasteful biological system I wouldn’t have to deal with if the machine god would simply bless my digusting, fallible flesh.