Welcome back to another devblog for Space Hulk: Tactics, where today we’ll be going over the customisation system. We’ll be focusing on the cosmetic aspects of your units, but let’s start by talking about weapon and squad customisation from a gameplay standpoint.
How you build your squad or swarm is entirely up to you. On the Terminator side you select five Terminators to begin the battle with, and can decide which and how many of the five classes you wish to field. Obviously, a balanced team has its advantages, but so does a pair of autocannons, or a focus on melee, depending on the mission. For Genestealers, you select which special biomorphs you’ll have access to via the card system, which also governs the other cards in your deck, as weapon and class choice does for the Terminators.
Everything that changes how you might play the game - weapons, classes, chapters, and so on - is unlocked from the start for skirmish and multiplayer. In the campaigns, different options are unlocked over time, as well as through resources you find while exploring the Hulk. In this way you build your force naturally, and story events are tied to the different options you have available.
Cosmetic customisation has many more features. For the Terminators, each piece of armour has several options, sometimes as many as a dozen or more, to be selected. This includes the helm, pauldrons, and chest piece, as well as less obvious elements like shinpads, thigh adornments, and the exact look of a weapon. Each chapter also has unique versions of some or all of these, meaning the total number of options is far higher across every chapter. This allows you to theme squads or individual units if you wish, or make them a grab-bag of mismatched items, a squad who have undergone many repairs.
Speaking of which, the system goes deeper and allows you to change the wear and tear on a unit’s armour - how many scratches and marks does it have, how many layers of battle-dirt? On top of that you can customise colours, emblems, and patterns, letting you build a personalised version of each chapter using their colour scheme and markings. Want all-green Dark Angels covered in bumps or solid-black Blood Angels, wings on every surface? That’s possible here.
Genestealers have no armour pieces to play with, being armoured by bone structure and hardened flesh. However, their look can be altered across a variety of their body parts, again using the colour schemes of various hive fleets as a base. Blood-red or bone-white Genestealers are just a trip to the squad creation menu away, and of course you can match (or mismatch) this individually across the base Genestealers as well as the various biomorphs.
We’re exceptionally proud of the amount of customisation possible in Space Hulk: Tactics. For more options you can also pre-order on Steam and receive some additional colour schemes based on later founding chapters, the Angels Sanguine, Nova Marines, Disciples of Caliban, plus Bran Redmaw’s Great Company and the Heresy Grey colour scheme of the Space Wolves.
Stay tuned for news very soon about our pre-order beta, and we look forward to showing you the game in full on October 9th.