Warhammer 40,000: Chaos Gate – Daemonhunters gets sneaky with the Execution Force
The Officio Assassinorum has joined the Grey Knights’ struggle against the daemonic forces of Nurgle in Warhammer 40,000: Chaos Gate – Daemonhunters’ new DLC, Execution Force. After Duty Eternal introduced the Techmarine and Dreadnought as playable characters, four types of imperial assassins will be available for deployment – and they bring much needed variety to the grimdark tactics title by Complex Games, or so is our first impression of the new content.
The Vindicare Assassin, your regular sniper character, allows you to take out threats from afar with impressive range and is incredibly useful thanks to his ability to disrupt enemies – clearing suppressive fire or overwatch zones for your Space Marines is really opening up your room to maneuver around.
The other three assassin types – Eversor, Culexus, and Callidus – are more focused on dealing damage up close and all come with different specializations. Eversor Assassins wield sneaky Executioner Pistols, which fire poisoned needles instead of more explosive ammo. They will not outright kill an enemy, but inflict painful damage over time effects on them to wear them down slowly. The Callidus Assassin likes to get up close and personal with heavily armored targets, piercing through their protection with her arsenal of Phase Swords and Neural Shredders. Culexus Assassins are even more special, unleashing devastating Psyker abilities that ignore cover and can be boosted with the use of more Willpower.
You probably won’t want to make an entire squad of assassins when you go on missions, as they are much less tough than your Space Marines, but enhancing your squad with one of their numbers is a fantastic idea – especially if you have good intel on what types of enemies you’ll face. All four Officio Assassinorum members are adept at sneaking around undetected for a while, which allows them to get into critical positions or out of trouble. That’s especially important due to their aforementioned lack of armor.
Their skills and playstyles bring some much needed fresh wind into Warhammer 40,000: Chaos Gate – Daemonhunters, which still suffers quite a bit from just feeling a bit samey throughout a run, especially due to the limited map variety. Where the assassins are helpful, too, is difficulty – Duty Eternal really amped this aspect of the game up without giving the player the necessary power boost to keep up long term. Adding an assassin into the mix does a lot to alleviate issues with certain enemy types and situations, though it adds vulnerability to the team as well and still does little against the feeling of being overwhelmed and outnumbered.
You’ll be able to recruit assassins after around 15 hours of gameplay, so the game doesn’t make you wait too long for them.
Variety is added by a brand-new mission type as well: You’ll get to board the vessels of the Death Guard, fighting in the cramped and enclosed space of Nurgle’s cruisers. These fights are deadly since there is little room to maneuver and you should definitely prepare lots of explosives to use that terrain to your advantage.
The great attack range of the Vindicare Assassin is enormously helpful.
Complex Games / Frontier
Of course it’s not just you getting new toys – grandfather Nurgle fields the lethal Tentarus Hive in Execution Force, confronting you with new enemies and mutations on five fresh maps. While the main mission types won’t benefit from this, the addition of these maps, boarding actions, and the new character classes does a great deal to spice things up. At first glance Complex Games hit a much better balance with the difficulty as well, making the experience much less frustrating as it can be with the Technophage missions introduced in Duty Eternal.
Warhammer 40,000: Chaos Gate – Daemonhunters can still be a hellishly difficult challenge – it really brings the grimdark theme of hopelessness to life at points –, but Execution Force provides fun new options to delay the inevitable and may just be the thing to invigorate your fighting spirit.
Warhammer 40,000: Chaos Gate – Daemonhunters Execution Force assassinates your wallet on July 25, 2023.
