PCOverview
The game plays from a 45º Isometric perspective, similar to X-COM. In that view, the player and the computer take alternate turns to move, shoot and perform actions with it's troops, in this case Space Marines for the player the Chaos Space Marines for the computer.Warhammer 40.000: Chaos Gates is a near faithful adaptation of the Games Workshop universe and rules, with turn based combat helping to the bring that tabletop feeling to the computer.
Chaos Gate can be played in a simgle player campaign or independent two player skirmishes
Single-Player
The player has as its disposal a fairly large and tactical campaign, in single player mode.
At your disposal, as a commander of the Ultramarines is a full company of Space Marines, Composed of one Terminator Squad, five Tactical Squads, one Assault Squad and one Heavy Squad. He also has, a few librarians at his disposal, chaplains, techmarines and apothecaries.
Each mission, the player is given as objective and a force organization chart of what he can field in that mission, say for example, two Tactical Squads and one Assault Squad. What makes the campaign and mission layout unique is that your company of Space Marines is limited in all ways, manpower and wargear. Loose a marine and you have one marine less in that squad for the rest of the campaign. That fact is somehow mitigated by the fact you can swap marines around between squads and as they progress in the campaign their stats and battle abilities increase.
It is also the player and commander responsibility to outfit all of his marines as per Codex Astartes rules, and when wargear starts to lack perhaps it is time to do a little secondary mission to gather more supplies.
At last, at the commander disposal lie all the vehicles from the Space Marines, from Rhino to Landspeeder.
Gameplay
Chaos Gate follows the well known formula of turn based combat.
What it means is that first the player will move/shoot/act with all his troops. Each action a troop performs spends a predetermined number of AP, or Action Points, and each troop has a set number of them at the begging of each player turn. Once the player has passed the turn, either by running out of AP in all units or by strategic value, the screen will go black while the computer processes his turn following the same rules as the player.
Troops can have reaction fire during the opponent turn their owning player finished his turn with some AP left on that unit. One addition to the turn-based system, that Chaos Gate used, was the weapon jam, as per old Games Workshop rules and they usualy tend to jam on the most perilous moments.
As per Codex Astartes rules, Librarians posses as wide array of psychic powers to pick from while leveling up
Mission objectives can vary from seek and destroy missions, capture missions, defend missions, etc.
Two-Player
After the single player campaign is over it is possible for two player play via hotseat or LAN, as the game features a fairly detailed random mission and terrain generator. Int a two player game, one player plays as the Ultramarines and the other as the Word Bearers and can choose at setup the kind of objective to play.
