Space Hulk
| Developer: Nick Wilson | Graphics: |
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| Publisher: Electronic Arts | Sound: |
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| Year: 1993 | Difficulty: |
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| Genre: Strategy-RPG | Lastability: |
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| Number of players: 1 | Rating: |
7/10 | |
Set in the Warhammer 4000 universe, Space Hulk is a tabletop role-playing game (board, dice, and miniatures) released in 1989, inspired by a certain James Cameron film… It was played by two, under asymmetric conditions. The first player controlled a group of Terminators (no, not that James Cameron film…), human soldiers clad in massive futuristic armour. These were slow units with ranged weapons. The second player controlled the opposing faction, the Genestealers™, fast, clawed, and irritable aliens, superior in number but attacking only in close combat.
In English, Space Hulk means “huge spaceship” and refers to those abandoned wrecks floating in space, infested by monsters, which serve as the setting for all the game’s scenarios.
The video game version only lets you control the Terminators. It includes 14 training missions, 16 missions from the original game (which can be played in any order), and an extended 21-mission campaign (successive, this time) from the Deathwing expansion.
You play as the Imperial Captain of the Dark Angel Chapter, a warship. You oversee the missions of your Space Marines (1 to 10 at a time), from a distance, using cameras built into their helmets. There’s an interesting mix of turn-based (top-down view) and real time (first-person view), which saves us from the action point mechanic typical of board games. This adds a bit more dynamism and reinforces an extremely nerve-wracking atmosphere.
It’s one of those games where the player’s lifespan is shorter than the loading times. You’d be well-advised to read the manual and start with the tutorial. However, don’t expect to finish all the training missions, given the steep difficulty is… Moreover, there’s a significant element of chance (enemy spawn frequency, the occasional jammed weapon). This is counterbalanced by the (limited) ability to stop time to plan your actions. But beware, reflexes remain essential, as the enemies seem to appear out of walls, in front or behind you, which is likely to annoy fans of traditional turn-based strategy games bereft of time limit.
Note that the PC-DOS version is superior in every way, except for the music. On Amiga, the stunning animated intro and most of the digitised voices were cut. The AGA chip (Amiga 1200) is also unsupported, which could have provided a wider colour palette. Loading times are also particularly frustrating (not to mention the constant disk swapping, if you didn’t possess three disk drives). It was also impossible to install it on an Amiga hard drive back in the day. Today, on an emulator, this is possible thanks to WHDLoad. If not, at least make sure to activate three disk drives and remember to disable the joystick to use the keyboard arrows.
The “tabletop” role-playing game will see various reissues (in 1996, 2009, and 2014), but despite their popularity, video game adaptations will take a long time to arrive on successive generations of consoles (and PCs): Space Hulk: Vengeance of the Blood Angels (1995), Space Hulk Ascension (2014), Space Hulk Deathwing (2016), and Space Hulk Tactics (2018).
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