Eisenhorn: Xenos [The Game!]

[The Grim Squeaker]

GDC 2015: Hands-on with Eisenhorn: Xenos - the Warhammer game that favours brawn over brains

Eisenhorn: Xenos is not your typical Warhammer game. Most games based on the 40k license are strategy games, card battlers, and tactical turn-based head scratchers.

Xenos is very different. It's real-time, cinematic, focused on combat, and has ambitions to feel like a big budget console game.

You play as Inquisitor Eisenhorn - voiced by Mark Strong - and follow him through the story of the first book in the Eisenhorn trilogy, and into battle.


The fights feature a rhythm-driven combo system where you do more damage and use less stamina if you swing your sword, or fire your gun, with careful timing. And if you want to be more strategic you can 'pause for breath' to slow down time and queue up attacks like Fallout 3's VATS system.

The game sports the usual ocean of virtual inputs on the screen for all these attacks, but it also has MFi controller support if you like actual buttons.

Eventually you'll get party members who follow you around. There's a bodyguard who fights alongside you in battle, and a support character who helps out in the adventure bits between battles.

You'll get to choose who you put into those slots, but you'll also be given recommendations of who to use, based on who is with Eisenhorn in the book. The game is trying to be faithful to the source material, after all.

04

It's not all fighting, of course. You are given options of how to tackle the game and its enemies, and you may choose to avoid some fights by finding an alternate path through the stage, or taking a stealth approach.

If that's your bag, you've got a stun gun to incapacitate baddies, and you can even use mind powers to convince an enemy that you're invisible for a few seconds. Those psychic abilities don't work on cameras and turrets, though.


On the whole, the game is going for a cinematic, console-like quality and developer Pixel Hero Games (of Spiral fame) points to bombastic franchises like Uncharted and the Tomb Raider reboot as sources of inspiration.

And it looks the part. Xenos is using a modified version of Unreal Engine 3, with added effects like cloth physics, post processing effects, smooth model outlines, and lip syncing.


We'll see whether the game itself can live up to those lofty amibitions when it launches on iOS (and PC - and maybe one day Android) in September.

Sweeeeeeeeeeeeeeet!
Colour me terrified but expectant

[bilateralrope]

Lets start with the fun question. Which platforms will it be on ?
Above the article:

For: iPhone Also on: Android, iPad

Last paragraph:

when it launches on iOS (and PC - and maybe one day Android)

As for the rest of this promotional piece:

cinematic

Never a good thing to hear a video game promoted as 'cinematic'. At best it's a meaningless buzzword. At worst, it's someone trying to say that something bad about the game is actually a good thing.

has ambitions to feel like a big budget console game.

If the developers wanted it to feel like a console game, they should write a console game. Not a smartphone game.

This is a worrying start.

[Brother-Captain Gaius]

Why Mark Strong? I mean, he's great, but he's already Brother-Captain Titus.

[Balrog]

At first I was all like then I read it was a smartphone game and I was all like

The Eisenhorn omnibus, and by extension Xenos, was the first 40k book I ever read and it got me hooked on the entire franchise. I still believe the trilogy is some of the best writing for 40k. And they're adapting it as a freaking smartphone game. My expectations this'll turn out anywhere near to where it ought to be have been cut in half.

[Darth Tanner]

The fights feature a rhythm-driven combo system where you do more damage and use less stamina if you swing your sword, or fire your gun, with careful timing.

No fair dance off with genestealers, they have the grooves and the limbs for button mashing.

I'm about as enthusiastic about this as pasta night. Now an epic scale RPG game would be ace...

[Lagmonster]

Try to remember that iOS games are catching up rapidly in just about every department. Even in terms of control games are starting to catch on and include support for clip-on and wireless controllers.

This in particular sounds like a cross between Infinity Blade and the various Telltales Games story games (Tales from the Borderlands and The Wolf Among Us), both of which perform just swell on tablets due to the input style and have top-tier production value.

[Sinewmire]

you've got a stun gun to incapacitate baddies

Wait, what?

Why Mark Strong? I mean, he's great, but he's already Brother-Captain Titus.

Relatively well known actor willing to work on 40k, I'd imagine.
They've had Leslie Phillips, Brian Blessed, John Hurt all in their games and horrifically misused all of them. Mark Strong does quiet and understated strength well, he's a good match.

Oh, and Bert Kwouk.

[Vendetta]

Try to remember that iOS games are catching up rapidly in just about every department. Even in terms of control games are starting to catch on and include support for clip-on and wireless controllers.

But have to be designed for people who don't have those clip on controllers because the fraction of the audience who do is infinitessimal, like probably not even a tenth of one percent of the possible market. Designing a game which requires one would be a gigantic waste of money and touchscreens are always going to be shit, so the game has to be balanced around the user having only a shit input device, and they are limited by the storage space of the format. Most users probably don't want to give up 6GB+ per game on their device.

[Imperial Overlord]

you've got a stun gun to incapacitate baddies

Wait, what?

For most people it's easier to get live prisoners to talk than the dead.

[Kingmaker]

Why Mark Strong? I mean, he's great, but he's already Brother-Captain Titus.

Just wait until the crossover.