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Warhammer 40,000: Mechanicus II Review
- Jordan Wood
- 20 minutes ago
- 7 min read
The crypts of this alien world have begun to close in around my squadron. I'm on my fourth consecutive firefight, and as accustomed as my Imperium soldiers seem to the slaughter, the endless reanimating hordes of Necrons have turned these skirmishes into a meat grinder. Units fall to the weird green plasma of their weapons left and right. But finally, the exit is in sight. The Omnisynod requires our leader, Videx, make it back to the Forge City at all costs. Glory to the Omnissiah.
One problem. Videx, my leader for this mission, is a big boy, and he can't fit through the route I've directed him toward. As he rounds the corner, his holy mechanical limbs wedge between two pillars, and just like that, the mission fails — death comes quickly, painfully. I restart the skirmish, deciding to take a different direction this time, right into the mouth of a Necron Destroyer. So I restart a third time, going back to the old path but trying a slightly different route. I get the same result as the first — stuck on the map behind a slower unit, unable to pursue the wider path that can accommodate Videx's four-square body.
I think about how I wish I had brought Khepra or Captrix along instead.
Publisher: Kasedo Games Developer: Bulwark Studios Platform: Played on PC Availability: Released May 21, 2026, for PC, PS5, and XBOX Series X/S. |
Warhammer 40K: Mechanicus II is a satisfying but also frustrating experience — and moments like the ones I just described lie at the heart of that tension. Escaping death is one of Mechanicus II's greatest joys. The game's many tactical skirmishes feel calibrated to produce that sense of narrow escape and sudden, decisive victories.
At its best, Mechanicus II settles into a pleasant rhythm of intense tactical battles interspersed with crowd-pleasing genre writing and higher-level strategic decision-making. However, its strengths are consistently hamstrung by some unfortunate UI implementation, a strange reluctance to make critical tactical information available to players, and significant pacing issues that ultimately keep the dark heart of this new entry in the Warhammer gaming universe from shining as brightly as it should.
Warhammer 40K: Mechanicus II is, at its core, a tactical RPG in the vein of X-COM where you build a squadron of units before each mission to take into battle under the leadership of one of five unique characters who serve as your faction's captains. These skirmishes unfold on relatively small battlefields, each of which is laid out in a grid where a smattering of obstacles, cover, and terrain features adorn otherwise straightforward arenas.
Your path to victory usually lies in one of a few directions: killing all enemies, killing a specific enemy, keeping your own captain alive for a set number of rounds, or making it to an extraction point. In between these tactical fights, you execute a range of side missions, send captains out on assignment, upgrade your units and leaders, and generally try to position yourself for success in the next round of skirmishes. It's a solid if well-trodden formula.
There is so much depth to the mechanics and world of Mechanicus II
Mechanicus II puts its best foot forward with an excellent prologue that introduces players to the stakes and key figures in this corner of the Warhammer universe. It's a tale as old as time — expansionist, technologically advanced space-farers attempt to industrialize a far-flung planet and find that it's not as uninhabited as it looks. In this case, the space-farers are a bunch of weirdly philosophical cyborgs, and the inhabitants are pharaonic skeletons with weird radiation signatures and immortal magic.
If you're like me, someone who is aware of the Warhammer property but has steered clear of it for fear of losing your house and good credit score, fear not. Mechanicus II expertly introduces its world and characters through this prologue and the game's opening act. As its story of planetary conquest and defense unfolds, the scenarios are articulated well enough that I never felt lost in the lore sauce — the situations are contained and familiar in a satisfying way, and all the character motivations are legible almost immediately.
That prologue is followed by a strong opening act where, regardless of which faction you're playing, Mechanicus II offers an early array of critical path missions that help showcase the strengths and uses of each leader. These missions require you to take specific leaders onto the battlefield, which allows Mechanicus II to design skirmishes around the specific strengths and weaknesses of those characters.
On my fifth mission for the Adeptus Mechanicus faction, for instance, I took Captrix — the Prime Hermeticon huntress — out on an escort mission. Captrix's starting special ability involves granting herself and her units additional mobility, a true boon on a mission where we are meant to keep a slow-moving friendly alive across the battlefield. The entire first act is full of clever design decisions like this that emphasize the unique vibe of each leader and leverage what appears to be a large variety of missions and enemy types to make appropriate use of those abilities.
If you're like me, someone who is aware of the Warhammer property but has steered clear of it for fear of losing your house and good credit score, fear not.
Unfortunately, this early momentum grinds to a halt once the full game opens up, as the mission structures very quickly begin to feel generic, repetitive, and artless — especially those off the critical path. Don't get me wrong, each skirmish still came with a satisfying, puzzly bit of crunch. The variety of units and the multiple layers of advancement mean that there are always new ways to bring carnage to the enemy.
I found the winged flamethrowers, the Pteraxii Sterilizors, to be a particularly fun way of bursting AOE damage while controlling the battlefield terrain. There are always fun new combos to be found between the mixture of passive and active abilities each unit brings to the table, but when strung together, one after the other, the battles lose their sense of identity, becoming a vague wash of samey tactical decisions.
The exception to that monotony is the critical path missions, which, while retaining much of the same structure, at least spice it up with some reasonably compelling character interactions. These exchanges may be delivered in a visual novel style between your chosen faction's protagonists and side-players, or even as some in-the-moment tactical decisions that might grant your unit a small bonus or obstacle to overcome in their next fight.
Those interactions are a major highlight of Mechanicus II for me, offering a surprising dose of grimdark camp that, along with the beautifully realized art and effective score, combine into a pretty engaging atmosphere. It is, at the end of the day, a world and a design loop that is satisfying in and of itself, despite the monotony of the mission structures.
However — and this is a big however — for a game that puts so many of its eggs in the basket of the moment-to-moment tactics of its battles, it consistently gets in its own way in terms of providing players enough at-a-glance information to make informed decisions. Sometimes, this is due to baffling user interface decisions, as it is with Rho.
Rho is a tanky, axe-wielding leader whose special abilities are fueled by something called Data Choir, the amount of which he has can only be seen by right-clicking his character model, scrolling down a list of attributes and statuses in a pop-up menu, and finding among them a number in parentheses besides the name of the passive ability. This is a number you need to be able to see to make even the most basic tactical decision when Rho is on the field, and for some reason, they've chosen to hide it behind three additional clicks and a scroll.
These sorts of user interface peccadilloes are kind of everywhere in Mechanicus II. It's hard, for instance, to understand at a glance on the world map what the relative value of one side mission is against another. It's not clear, either, what is lost or gained by the expansion and contraction of territory under your control.
The character interactions are a nice way to break up the moment-to-moment gameplay.
The incoherent approach to interface design multiplied my frustration with the repetitive mission structure. I often felt that routine things would go wrong, not because I had made a poor decision, but because I didn't catch a crucial bit of information that had been buried somewhere I didn't look or, in some cases, just wasn't available at all. Which meant, in the event I lost a skirmish, I'd need to go back and replay an already repetitive series of missions rather than progress through the otherwise interesting story and compelling ability trees.
For me, this came to a head during the skirmish I described at the start of this review. I had taken Videx, a kind of Humpty Dumpty–looking tech-zealot, out on the mission. Going deep into Necron Territory made this a mission of aggression, and — based on that description and what I knew of Videx’s skillset — I felt he would be a good choice to take in.
Big mistake.
Instead, what I found at the end of four or five tough battles where my units had gradually been whittled away was an extraction mission where I was meant to sprint to the other side of the map as row after row of Necron reinforcements streamed in from the edges. Only Videx needed to make it alive to the extraction zone, but he was my slowest leader, and unlike three of his four other compatriots, he took up four squares on the grid instead of one. In other words, he was the worst possible leader for me to have taken on this mission, and by my fifth or sixth death, I felt, frankly, a little misled.
I often felt that routine things would go wrong, not because I had made a poor decision, but because I didn't catch a crucial bit of information that had been buried somewhere I didn't look or, in some cases, just wasn't available at all.
This all might sound like a bit of sour grapes, and honestly, I think it is. In most ways, Mechanicus II is exactly what I want out of this kind of game — solid tactical core, interesting unit and enemy variety, a tightly written and characterful story, and satisfying skill progression are all here.
And at the end of the day, I do recommend Mechanicus II. Games in this vein, with these kinds of production values and this level of expressiveness in its combat mechanics, are rare. But that recommendation is couched in a bed of frustration about what this game could have been if it had been more thoughtful about the player's experience, and had leaned more heavily on the careful pacing of its opening acts.
Verdict  |
Image Credits: Kasedo Games via JetsonPlaysGames
Disclaimer: We received a copy of the game from the publisher.