Warhammer 40,000 : Eternal Crusade promises a lot, and delivers very little. Nonetheless, what little there is is solid enough to be interesting and even enjoyable if you do not expect much from it. That said, it is hilarious how overpriced and overmarketed the game is.
WH40k EC promises you the world - MMO Warhammer 40k, massive persistent world, campaigns, thousands of items, huge battles and 20 different subfactions? This sounds great! I'd say that is one of the best sounding lists of features that I've seen before. But that is not to be. As much fun as the game is - good controls, decent graphics and fast paced gameplay where it truly feels skill matters - essentially none of that feature list actually got into the game proper. Not to mention the bugs and missing quality of life things that seem to pop up somewhat regularly.
With that said, the game itself is worth playing, so let's go through the promises to point out where it went so wrong and why you should not expect anything the marketing tells you so that you can enjoy what is there rather than feel betrayed that you did not get what you wanted.
MMO tag - this is not an MMO. It does not look like it will be any time soon, or like anything resembling it is planned for in the future. It is a lobby based shooter without a server browser. You queue up and are placed in an instanced battle with a number of other players and that is all there is to it. Nothing about this is an MMO, and since there is no early access tag I can only assume that there are no serious plans to make it into one.
Persistent world - nope. Nothing persistent about it at all. There is truly nothing about the world that will ever carry over to the future in any way, shape, or form. It is not unlikely that the same map is played on several different servers at the same time, none of them having any effect on anything else whatsoever.
The 'massive' part of the world - maps are slightly big for the playercount, I suppose. But only if you don't bring a vehicle and have to walk. As established there is no persistent map, so there is no real overworld to speak of either. "Slightly above average map sizes" is a better description.
Campaign - does not currently exist. They have a feature called a 'campaign', but it is as the time of writing this review it's both disabled and a joke. "Win 10 random battles for extra tokens" is not a campaign. While I appreciate getting the extra stuff, it would be dishonest to call it anything resembling a campaign.
Thousands of items - to be added, clearly. Because there sure aren't that many now. Maybe if you count every single item in the game, for every race and every modification and scope? Perhaps you'll even get close to a thousand, but you won't reach it still.
Huge battles? 30 vs 30. I mean, it's bigger than Overwatch, bigger than TF2, and bigger than CS:GO. But 60 people isn't exactly that impressive.
20 subfactions - which are entirely cosmetic, nothing to see here.
I'm not sure what happened exactly, although many things appear to be placeholders the game has a solid foundation and is a pretty good thing to spend time on. The combat feels like it's varied enough to not grow tiresome, skill based enough to not become boring and fast enough to not leave you sitting on your rear waiting for hours, and the developers appear to be actively trying to improve things still. But it seems that's all there is to it. It has its issues, and it seems very much like it's just an early access game claiming it has great plans and will put it all in "soon", but it just isn't there.
Warhammer 40k: Eternal Crusade is worth playing, don't get me wrong. But it does not deliver on any of its promises, barring a few. A pricetag of 50€ is a joke and an insult to anyone considering to buy it, and it seems unlikely that it ever will do as it promises. While I honestly believe the game is good at its core, the fact that the core is the only thing there is and that it flat out lies about almost everything means I will have to recommend against buying this, at least as long as you can't get it for under 20€.
If you do get it, have a referral link so you get some extra stuff ingame:
EC-VV6W63JL0ZJXR
