Adeptus Titanicus cross-pollinates 40K and BattleTech

There's an inherent sense of All This Has Happened Before And All This Will Happen Again when you've spent as many years as I have writing about videogames, but I got proper head-spinning deju vu when I read about Adeptus Mechanicus: Dominus today. Didn't I only just post about an XCOMish Warhammer 40,000 turn-based strategy game with a cod-Latin name? Turns out that was Mechanicus, not Titanticus. Obv. Though these icuses share a genre, Titanicus is ploughing more of a BattleTech furrow. Which is to say, giant bloody robo-tanks knocking seven bells out of each other.

I lost my heart to a 40K Titan when I was 13, and I never got it back - so maybe, just maybe, this can overcome my Games Workshop adaptation fatigue.

Let's go straight into the trailer:

It does look a bit PS3, and I'm not wild about the gameiness of what looks like a points-scoring system. but in fairness it's based upon the Titan Legions tabletop game - which I've never played, my own Titan-love being based upon teenage bouts of Epic 40K. However, we get destructible buildings, a whole mess of Titan and weapon types that are burned into my memory forever, and what looks like a BattleTechish subsystem damage targeting setup.

I came around to BattleTech in a big away, after an unhappy first dozen+ hours, but it remained rather short on personality throughout - maybe the heavy metal charisma of Warlords, Reavers and Warhounds can make up for Titanticus' noticeably less swanky presentation.

In any case, Titanicus is first launching as an early access dealio, so it might end up looking significantly glossier yet. It'll also be launching without melee combat, which feels a bit You Had One Job... when it comes to giant robo-tank slugfests, but apparently that's due to be added in the first major update. This is the first game from two-person Australian developer Membraine Studios, so your guess is as good as mine as to whether they're gonna pull it off or not.

The initial early access release is next Thursday, May 31. Just skirmish and multiplayer modes in that, but a campaign is due for the full release. Here's the Steam page if you want to scour for more details or add it to your big, stompy wishlist.