Warhammer 40,000: Chaos Gate

This is an old late 1990’s Warhammer 40,000 universe game from SSI. Very good soundtrack and tough tactical combat. The game has a narrated story between missions with in game graphics for the video and audio. You get to equip one or more squads for each mission with different weapons and other items. There is no fog of war over the map (you also get a minimap on screen if you desire), but enemies only appear if a soldier can see them. Each soldier has a certain amount of action points per turn to move, fire, use equipment, etc. There are some decent sound effects and voice overs during combat.

I played the first couple of levels of this game on Windows 98, then I decided to retire that machine when it didn’t want to boot for me. I was able to get my old games off, including Chaos Gate, so I wouldn’t lose my progress. Chaos Gate looked like it would work on XP, but I found out it has some troubles there and is very buggy in general.

I was able to play the game somewhat and solve one annoying bug involving enemy fire by following the advice on a Warhammer 40K forum site. One problem I tried to overcome was patching the game to version 1.2. I didn’t even know the game had a patch, and it is very difficult to find after all these years. I did find it, but it wouldn’t work on my game (my version may have already included the patch as it was part of a 4 game set of Warhammer games, not a standalone version). However, on the fourth level of the game, after battling long and hard, I killed the last enemy on the level only to have the game crash. I tried again several times with the same result.

Unfortunately for now I will give up on this game. This would be a good one for GOG.com to pick up though.

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