izigame.me

So... XCom but grey knights?
On the hop, that sentence alone should be the determining factor for you. If you're a fan of the grey knights, and the 40K universe, and you enjoyed XCom style gameplay; surely this is an easy win.
I realise it's odd to chastise a game after it's been out for ages, but it is part of why I'm a little less willing to forgive some of the problems that CGD has. If this were the first month, I'd say we've got a great game that needs a little more polish; but what I think we actually have is as finished a product as we're likely to see which suggests we're probably not going to see more updates.
Let's start with the good:
- I think if you're really into the 40K space marine vibe, this game has a lot to offer. The mythos that is 40K is given a lot of reverence and I think the game does a great job conveying the world. The voice actors do a good job bringing the world to life, and kudos to all the attention to detail that's present to paint in this world.
- The three action point economy feels good. I like XCom style games that let you go for multiple attacks, and giving you a free melee attack at the end of a move is a nice way to encourage the sort of aggressive gameplay that CGD is trying to go for. Hiding behind cover and taking pot shots is not how grey knights do their work.
- Also, I appreciate some of the UI decisions they made. I like that you can tell how much damage you'll do based on where you're standing (which allows you to make better decisions), and with the exception of crits; you're told up front what to expect based on the actions you take.
Which takes me to the negatives:
- I think this game would really benefit from 'quality of life improvements'. As examples of what I mean by this:
* If you lose a piece of equipment, you have no real way of knowing what it was other than it's name (and everything has a weird name so good luck figuring out if you just lost your favourite hammer, a suit of armour that someone was wearing, or a random bolter that nobody was using)
* There is no way to compare the equipment you're about to get with what you've got sitting in the armoury so often times you're picking rewards trying to remember if this reward is better than what you already have.
* I'd really like an option to turn off some of the cinematics. Examples include when you go to warp, or when you come back from a mission, or when you're going to a mission. The first few times; it's neat... After the 100th drop, I started to get annoyed by how navel-gazey the camera work was as you weave through the ship to get to the teleporter pad.
* Occasionally there are events which may 'take a knight away for X time'. That's cool, but the system seems to prioritise taking your best knights, and any equipment they're carrying remains locked away during this time. So the thing to do from a house keeping perspective would be to dis-arm everyone at the end of a mission so you don't get suddenly shafted when the best suit of armour walks off for 60 days. But that's really tedious and maybe not in the spirit of the game, but I think a really easy way to not punish players for this would be to just let them remove equipment from people who are deployed.
* Inversely, you occasionally get boned because you've got too much 'stuff' just lying around (your hoarder you). Except there's no way to return/ sell gear back to Titan so it just feels like you're getting punished no matter which way you go?
* Occasionally, you'll get some help from some NPC's in the field. And sometimes you'll think 'it'd be great to buff said NPC with X'. The game will often let you spend the actions to buff your target, but then said buff doesn't apply. I don't mind that maybe you can't buff non-grey knights with grey knight boons, but then say something in the text, or don't let the action happen. In particular, the last mission says nothing about this and without spoiling anything; the npc you're given really should be able to benefit from buffs (or as mentioned above; just don't let me buff them if you're not going to let the benefits happen).
* You have the option on embarking on little challenge modes to get extra requisitions (which may include challenges like killing X enemies in melee, or not using any grenades, etc...). In situations where you're tasked with not having X equipment; the game does a pathetic job of telling you that. Sometimes the warning is bugged (showing that you're good when you're not, or vice versa), and it won't tell you which knight is invalidating the rule (so you probably have to kick everyone out then add them back one at a time to figure out who the offending party is), etc... By the last quarter of the game, I stopped doing the challenges, not because I didn't want to but because I couldn't be bothered to strip all my knights of their 'master crafted equipment' (since you have to go knight to knight to make the gear swaps). Seems to me like you could have just made a system of 'you accept the challenge of no grenades? Great; every knight you add to the squad will automatically have their grenades taken away and you can't add the grenades from inventory. Anything unequipped goes back to the armory for later use).
All in all, CGD is a fun romp. Now that it's been a while since it came out, I might encourage folks to try it at a discounted price if you're really keen on the 40K universe and like tactical games. Personally I found these weird quality of life misses to be really surprising from a game that looks as pretty as this; but it's enough for me to say that I wouldn't recommend CGD (especially when there are other tactic isometric games that you could easily pick up).