Deathwatch Killteam review

Last week at club I played Deathwatch: Killteam. Read on to find out how I got on.....

Ian had brought Killteam with him, and I'll be honest the models are beautiful. As much as it pains me to say it, games workshop are doing an excellent job with the quality of thier miniatures, and the ruleset isn't that bad either. The game plays basically like how Soace Marines are in any of the books you read. Ian described them as being are superhuman "movie marines". 

The way that this is borne out in the basic game is that the marines go first, and shoot twice. So each turn looks roughly like this:

• Space marines move
• Genestealers move 
• Space marines shoot
• Genestealers shoot
• Space marines shoot again

This means that as a marine player you can wade through hordes of cultists and stealers as you achieve your objectives. Having only played the one game, I'm not going to go deep into the rules, but they are very simple. They've removed "to wound" rolls entirely, if you hit, that's a wounding hit. 

The game plays very fast, with the phases cycling through very quickly each turn. What's interesting for the tyranid player is that you get cards to lurk with every turn, similar to space hulk. You draw from a deck every turn and place those cards facedown, not revealing them until after the space marines have moved. It's tough to bring down a marine, and I found that they were taking out smaller groups of 6-7 cultists with ease. The cool thing is you can leave one card lurking for another round, especially as you can only place what models the game comes with. 

This creates a balancing element, as you can never have to many purestrain genestealers running around. It's nicely balanced though, as the marines are so tough you might cycle through the same models every round. 

The thing that I realised very early on was that I needed to swarm the marines to stand any chance of killing one. You need at least 5 or 6 to 1 to stand a chance of taking one down. And that's after thier attacks! So you probably need 8/9-1!  It feels very cinematic, games workshop have got that bit spot on. There is desperation on both sides and it really turns into a swirling blood bath!

Springing the trap is all important. The cards that give you cultists also give you abilities such as "attack twice" and combining these factors is the only way to take down a space marine. Even with that ability and all of these guys I was only able to take down 1 marine. They're tough!

Overall, I'd reccomend playing this game if you get the chance. It's fun, fast and cinematic. I don't know that I'd buy it, as £118/$160 is quite a lot, and I don't play tyranids. But if you have always planned to do a cultist army, then the models are amazing, and if you've got a group together you could play through the missions quite nicely. If you can, give it a go!