// PC GAMER — GAMING
3 Warhammer 40,000 sickos share their strongest held beliefs—and you can vote on them
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Warhammer 40,000! It's absolutely everywhere. You can't leave the house without almost stepping on an ork (which hurts even worse than stepping on Lego) these days. It's on your table, in your book shops, even on the TV, but the place you're most likely to encounter 40k is on your PC.
Since PC Gamer is, humbly, the global authority on PC games, we naturally have some thoughts on 40k. So I've gathered my fellow 40k freaks, Jody and Sean, to share our strongest held beliefs about Warhammer 40,000 and its PC game adaptations. And you can express your agreement or outrage by voting "good and pure" or "heretical" underneath each opinion.
I started playing 40k in high school, but it was just too damn expensive, so the videogame adaptations became the best way for me to enjoy the grimdark future of the 41st millennium. Now I'm middle aged and can just about afford to play the real deal, which has resulted in most of my income going towards Space Wolves.
Most of my time is still spent with the tabletop game's myriad digital counterparts however. OG Dawn of War remains my go-to, but I'm also a sucker for Darktide. And when I want to escape my office, I do some reading from the Black Library. At the moment, the second book in the Eisenhorn trilogy.
Warhammer is deeply rooted in satire and parody. It's incredibly silly. This might be a touch more overt in the fantasy universe, but 40k certainly isn't meant to be taken seriously. We are talking about a setting where humanity is ruled by the corpse of psychic Jesus, and where space fascists fight space elves and frequently annihilate entire planets.
But often it's presented with a straight face. It can sometimes seem like we're meant to just find all this edgelord stuff incredibly cool, rather enjoying it for the absurdity. And this has largely been promoted by Games Workshop, but I would love for the adaptations to embrace this seemingly forgotten side of 40k—to acknowledge the silliness or use the setting to say something, to dig back down to its satirical roots, even if it's just so we can have a good laugh. I mean, c'mon, the first ever inquisitor depicted in 40k was called Obiwan Sherlock Clousseau.
When my former colleague Robin Valentine gave Space Marine 2 a score of 60% in his review last year, he got a lot of shit for it. Allow me to humbly offer an alternative perspective: he was actually incredibly generous.
I will never understand the love for either Space Marine game—because they're bad. Sure, they look great, perfectly capturing both the 40k aesthetic and the hefty feel of the tank-like Space Marines. But they are a chore to play. With the campaigns being as short and linear as they are, there's just no excuse for the endless repetition. It turns out there is a limit to how many times you can execute a tyranid or an ork before it becomes rote. If you've played either game for 30 minutes, you've seen everything.
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