I don’t have time to edit again today, but I wanted to post that Templar Battleforce is a game that’s really less than the sum of its parts. It’s currently available for 10$ and that’s probably an appropriate price point, because it’s not a hidden gem or an indie classic but rather a muddled homage to X-Com and Dawn of War.

But some of you might not know what I’m comparing it to, so let me explain.

X-Com was one of the earliest and most highly regarded squad-based tactics games on the PC. I’ve seen both the original game (made in 1993) and the modern remake (made in 2012) top lists of the 100 best games of all time. X-Com puts you in command of a squad of soldiers trying to defeat and alien invasion, and despite your rookies have the life expectancy of a WW1 soldier at higher difficulties, players became instantly attached to their digital avatars thanks to the fun mechanics, varied enemies, and interesting scenarios they could be thrown into. Naming all your soldiers after pop stars, then telling your friends how Taylor Swift hit an amazing shot to blow up a cyberdisk and save Freddie Mercury was exactly the kind of fun that X-Com was made of.

Dawn of War meanwhile was a series of tactical RTS games based on the Warhammer 40k franchise. The Dawn of War series put you in the shoes of a bunch of Space Marines fighting enemies from without and within, with a lot of the enjoyment coming from the over-the-top, dare I say “cool” scenarios you could be faced with.

See, Warhammer 40k (and the Space Marines in particular) are extremely over-the-top in every way. So having your guys drop from orbit onto a burning planet to fight an awakening God with their chainsaw-swords is exactly the kind of “cool” you want to lean in on, and the Dawn of War games delivered. Whether it was endless legions of Tyranids, nigh-unkillable Necrons, or Orks who just love to fight and talk like football hooligans, Dawn of War tried to make each battle feel like an extravagant power fantasy against impossible odds.

So Templar Battleforce is an indie game that tries to make exactly the game I wanted as a kid: an X-Com style game with Warhammer 40k lore. And it just doesn’t work.

The first problem is that the lore is kinda boring. I find myself skipping most of the dialogue and story because it just isn’t interesting. This game gets around the Warhammer 40k trademark by having these “Templars” be slightly different than the Space Marines of Dawn of War, but the game is definitely leaning towards these guys being zany impossible badasses in their own right. And it just doesn’t land, in part I think because the game doesn’t have enough fidelity to *show* cool stuff and relies on *telling* us instead.

We very rarely get a nice comparison point between our Templars and the normal humans who they’re so superior to. And we don’t really get any instances of crazy scenarios that make our Templars seem cool, like the God-chainsaw fight above. You can tell me all you want about how these enemies are so strong they’d tear through any normal human, but with no comparative or stand-out moments of their own, the Templars *feel* like normal humans. They aren’t cool, and to be honest I don’t know how to fix it.

The second problem is that the gameplay isn’t as fun as X-Com, or even as some of the Dawn of Wars like Dawn of War 2. These other squad-based games were fun because of the cool tactics you could do, the cool abilities that you could use, and how the fights encouraged experimentation and rewarded you for your ingenuity. I had moments in the original X-Com of blowing up the side of a building to flank aliens who were covering the doors, and I loved it. And later games gave your soldiers special powers that were integral to victory but also really cool to use, like snipers parkouring up an impossible ledge to get a better vantage point, or heavies using a special shredding rocket that made enemies take double damage from everyone else once they were hit by it.

Templar Battleforce doesn’t really have that. I shoot and I stab my enemies, but I don’t feel like many of my tactics are cool or interesting. I feel like I’m learning the loadouts and correctly reading the maps to find the optimal way to victory.

Part of this may be the design choice that unlike X-Com, Templar Battleforce makes it very hard to dodge shots and stabs. In X-Com a 50% chance to hit was expected, and the game was all about optimizing and improving that chance through your numerous powers and abilities. In Templar Battleforce, missing an enemy is very rare, and there isn’t much you can do to optimize and improve your damage numbers. So instead, it’s mostly a game of calculating how to use your limited movement points to fire as many shots as possible, with the assumption that each shot will do an expected range of damage.

It’s not that there’s *no* special abilities, just that they’re rare and not encouraged by the game mechanics. I like how the Hydra (flamethrower guy) can set down a wall of flame that persists for the rest of the battle. I like that the Engineer can set up turrets. But most of the abilities are just giving you small bonuses and buffs that you don’t usually need because as I said misses are rare. The game doesn’t do enough to make these bonuses and buffs feel impactful at all.

Finally the online community helpfully *discourages* you from investing into the other soldier that might be cooler like the Berzerker or the Neptune, because the game doesn’t give you enough points to spread your investments wide. Instead, the recommended playstyle is to invest heavily into the bog-standard soldier and scout classes, the least interesting classes by far.

The thing is, the soldier and scout *don’t even need to be uninteresting*. To bring it back to Dawn of War 2, that game did a lot to make every class interesting in its own unique way. Now it was real-time instead of turn based, but regardless the units in that game had heavy differentiation in their jobs and abilities. There was huge variety in the range of your weapons, the effects of your weapons, and each unit had a very unique upgrade tree that made you really think about your choices while upgrading.

My Dawn of War scout could go invisible and spam explosive mines at anyone he wanted, my Dawn of War heavy could lock down huge amounts of the map by himself, making enemies duck and move slowly, my Dawn of War soldier could ignore this ability when enemies tried to do it to us, and he could taunt enemies so they’d target him instead of my squishy scout.

These kinds of abilities made me really think about what I was doing with these units and where I was positioning them, and the maps did a lot to encourage this thinking whereas the Templar Battleforce maps just don’t do these things well.

Even better was how Dawn of War rewarded you for experimenting and playing against type. The soldier is by default a ranged-weapon guy, but you could give him his own chainsaw-sword and have him join the melee fight instead. He had a whole upgrade path that made this really effective even, taking less damage from both melee and ranged while locking down his enemies.

The Dawn of War commander could also play this game, he was by default a close-combat specialist, but you could hand him a heavy weapon if you wanted him to stay back instead. By the end of the game he could get an upgrade where he was guaranteed to 1-shot most low level enemies when he did so.

I tried playing against type in Templar Battleforce and it was severely underwelming. A melee-focused soldier is lame and ineffective, and they’ll always carry their ranged weapon just to taunt you for picking the wrong upgrades. A ranged-focused commander also feels underwelming, I can only equip pistols with paltry range and damage, no rifles or heavy weapons for the commander, not even dual-wielding pistols for rule-of-cool.

Finally, Templar Battleforce includes Relics, special items like in Dawn of War that are supposed to be of immense power and cost a lot to use. But unlike Dawn of War there’s no blurb on them to make them interesting, no tales of impossible odds or epic last stands to go along with your hand-me-down, just a name and a bonus that’s 25% bigger than the bonuses on all your other equipment.

Nor do these relic ever change your tactics like they could in Dawn of War. There’s no sword that damages you when you use it but deals massive damage to the enemies. No pistol with the range of a sniper rifle. No armor that is worse than your default armor but doubles your movement in exchange. There’s nothing here that would make you sit up and say “hey that might be cool to use.” Relics just have the same bog-standard bonuses as every other item only now the numbers are bigger.

Let me finish up with this: I don’t hate Templar Battleforce. I think 10$ is a great price and I encourage you to try it. But I’ve now tried 3 times to finish this game and I’ve always stopped short. The engaging build-a-soldier menus aren’t interesting if there’s no interesting choices like in Dawn of War, the maps aren’t fun if there’s no cool tactics and abilities like in X-Com. “X-Com meets Dawn of War” is exactly the type of game I would have made if I knew how to make games, but as Templar Battleforce proves, making great games is a lot harder than making games, and an interesting premise just isn’t enough.