The best Warhammer 40k games

What are the best Warhammer 40k games? From tabletop-flavored technique titles to grungy first particular person shooters, Games Workshop’s grimdark universe has spawned 50+ videogames since Warhammer 40,000 first hit tabletops in 1987, lots of which have, sadly, sucked – however we 40k followers are nothing if not persistent. These are the best Warhammer 40,000 games you possibly can play proper now, from current releases to retro classics.

Just just like the marvelous tabletop sport that impressed them, Warhammer 40k laptop games typically have a tactical or strategic slant – however this checklist is style agnostic, and there are virtually as many games for motion followers as there are for technique buffs.

Our standards are easy: every little thing on this checklist has been performed by the Wargamer crew (typically slightly too a lot), and we’ve really helpful as a result of we personally price it. For upcoming 40k games it’s best to regulate, some additional trivia on 40k gaming, and a few cellular picks, hop to our FAQ on the finish.

The best Warhammer 40k games are:

Blasting and tearing by way of hordes of Tyranids and warp-teleporting warbands of Thousand Sons chaos house marines is an ultraviolent delight, and each possibility in an expanded arsenal of Space Marine 2 weapons provides a brand new and completely different, scrumptious technique of eviscerating them. Missions are virtually uniformly fantastically designed, and each boss combat is a difficult deal with.

Sadly, the principle story is a moist squig, and a combo of built-for-multiplayer design and lackluster squadmate AI makes the marketing campaign an actual trial to play by yourself – so we are able to’t advocate this for single participant purists. But so long as you’ve acquired some buddies to play with (or don’t thoughts matchmaking with randos) SM2’s interwoven modes of co-op marketing campaign, PVE Operations missions, and PVP multiplayer matches mix into by far the best Warhammer 40,000 motion sport but made.

Read our Warhammer 40k Space Marine 2 review.

No different sport captures the immense scale of the Warhammer 40k universe like Rogue Trader. This isometric, party-based CRPG places you accountable for a city-sized spaceship, and duties you with constructing your individual dynasty among the many stars in a subsector ravaged by warpstorms.

Your customized character is one potential successor to a veteran Rogue Trader, a space-faring service provider queen with a divine mandate to broaden the borders of the Imperium by way of commerce and conquest. You gained’t wait within the wings for lengthy, although – treachery and Chaos plots put your forebear out of the image and also you into the Captain’s throne quickly sufficient.

The journey that follows will take you a minimum of 100 hours to finish. To start with, you’ll be involved with getting your city-sized void-ship into peak operating order. But past that you’ve got the conspiracy of your predecessor’s homicide to unravel, commerce offers to dealer, adventures tied to your NPC companions’ backstories, and an empire to construct.

A gamut of methods have been put in place to replicate your standing as a profoundly rich and highly effective particular person. Building your commerce Empire generally occurs in story beats, like main-story-missions to make contact with misplaced worlds and kick their planetary governors into line. But there’s a light-weight colony administration minigame, by which you’ll discovered settlements, extract sources from them, and form their growth as crises arrive.

Combat occurs each within the void of house and in face to face floor fights. The floor fight is especially visceral, enhanced by appropriately cacophonic audio design for iconic weapons just like the boltgun and chainsword. It’s enjoyably deep, too, with as many technical choices to control the battlefield and layer buffs and debuffs as there are OTT weapons.

To realise a sport on this scale, developer Owlcat restricted the scope in some areas. Rogue Trader’s graphics are efficient however unexceptional. The sport launched with loads of bugs, although these have principally been squashed. It takes a standard method of totally separating fight, dialogue, and exploration, and the environments are principally set-dressing in comparison with the interactive arenas of Baldur’s Gate 3.

But the guts and soul of the sport is spot on. Rogue Trader has hundreds of traces of dialogue, and the narrative leads completely get Warhammer 40k – the horror, inhumanity, and pathos of the Imperium of Man. This shines by way of notably effectively in your NPC companions, who’re written to be believably human, but distinctively alien.

Read our Warhammer 40k Rogue Trader review.

Read our Warhammer 40k Boltgun review.

If you’re a fan of each co-op multiplayer FPS games and Games Workshop’s grim, darkish, bloodstained far future, Darktide will blow your thoughts (particularly when taking part in because the psyker character, who can actually blow enemies’ minds by exploding their heads with concentrated warp power).

Warhammer 40k Darktide is successfully a 40k-flavored reincarnation of its bestselling co-op slash-em-up Vermintide 2, which was based mostly within the Old World fantasy setting. You play a ‘reject’ half of an Imperial Inquisitor’s warband, finishing varied missions in a hive metropolis that’s overrun with servants of the Chaos god Nurgle.

Each of the Darktide classes provides a unique core capability and playstyle, its personal number of weapons, armor, and wargear, and a unique library of conversational voice traces that’ll play out in procedurally generated conversations between the characters as you combat by way of waves of chaos-warped enemies, full challenges, and combat disgusting bosses.

The voice traces can begin to grate a little over time, however there’s sufficient selection that it nonetheless works effectively (and it helps that the voice performing and writing are each glorious, with celebrity Black Library and Horus Heresy book creator Dan Abnett on the crew).

The sport’s environments are regularly gorgeous, and an impressively devoted, atmospheric rendering of 40k’s distinctive aesthetics. You’ll be combating by way of the spires and flying buttresses of futuristic gothic rooftops one mission, and trudging by way of oppressive, dirty industrial undercities the following. It’s by far the best visible simulation of the Warhammer 40k world we’ve seen in a videogame.

Darktide had a rocky launch, with a number of efficiency and connection points which have taken a very long time for the small studio to repair – which appears to have delayed plans for a sequence of post-launch content material and story expansions. That, mixed with a scarcity of selection within the high-level gear accessible, led to followers crying out for a greater end-game expertise to maintain them taking part in.

That’s been tidied up properly, with patches delivering efficiency upgrades and much richer content material – Darktide patch 13 really turned things around, and the developer added extra modes, missions, and weapons as just lately as December 2024.

Warhammer 40k Chaos Gate Daemonhunters simply steals the crown from Mechanicus because the best game like XCOM set within the 40k universe. In Daemonhunters, you are taking command of a strike drive of Grey Knights – elite, secretive chapter of Space Marines which might be all psykers, and use their psychic may and superior wargear to fight incursions by Chaos Daemons.

You’ll construct a base, practice and equip a crew of troopers, and deploy them on varied missions to carry again an oncoming, apocalyptic risk – a brand new, lethal galactic plague cooked up by the Chaos god Nurgle.

The varied completely different courses of Grey Knights accessible in your roster (in addition to the Duty Eternal DLC’s Venerable Dreadnought and Imperial Assassins within the Execution Force enlargement) every provide completely different ability timber to improve and specialise all through the sport – as long as you retain them alive.

Combine that with a ton of unlockable weapons and wargear gadgets, plus beauty customisation choices popping out the wazoo, and also you’ve acquired a ‘war-barbie’ expertise second solely to accumulating and painting miniatures in actual life.

Like others within the style, Chaos Gate Daemonhunters’ race-against-time marketing campaign is a tricky strategic problem, forcing you to handle restricted sources and prioritise your missions rigorously in opposition to a stronger, better-resourced, ever-growing opponent – and the turn-based tactical battles are not any cake stroll both.

In a twist on the XCOM DNA, your superhuman Space Marines’ pictures will all the time hit their goal (no soul-crushing share hit possibilities right here) and also you’re given a number of useful contextual data to tell your techniques, together with advance discover of how a lot injury your pictures will deal out from a given motion vacation spot, earlier than you make that transfer.

On the opposite hand, each few turns, you’ll hit a Warp Surge – granting your Nurgle-loving enemies a random chaos boon, starting from momentary injury boosts to mid-game reinforcements becoming a member of the battle. Every mission is a probably punishing battle that rewards fast pondering, aggressive techniques, and canny use of specialists’ skills; it’s excellently performed.

Like XCOM 2 earlier than it, Daemonhunters could be an exhaustingly intense expertise, the place losses are all however inevitable, and sometimes crushing – however the mix of technique and techniques is on level, the core gameplay could be very satisfying, and the Warhammer 40k lore background effectively realised. If you want each XCOM and Warhammer, that is important.

Read our Warhammer 40k Chaos Gate Daemonhunters review.

As incurable tabletop 40k megafans (between us, Wargamer’s writers personal armies from almost all of the Warhammer 40k factions), we’re suckers for the idea of a turn-based PC wargame that nails not solely the 40k vibe, but additionally the gamefeel of constructing and combating tabletop armies – and that’s precisely what the wargame maestros at Slitherine have created in Battlesector.

We had our points with it on launch, however there’s no doubting its finely tuned, compulsive core tactical gameplay, as you rigorously advance, place, and direct your specialised models, managing a cautious steadiness of buffs and talents to obliterate as many beautifully recreated, grimdark baddies as potential each flip.

In the three years since launch, developer Black Lab has tweaked and improved an enormous quantity of Battlesector’s rougher edges – to not point out including 5 full new playable factions, from the pitiless metallic Necrons to the high-tech mech-loving Tau Empire. If you wish to play real-life 40k throughout a variety of lovingly realized, atmospheric battlefields, Battlesector is the closest you’re going to get – simply prepare for a lot of unplanned hours of ‘one more turn’…

Read our Warhammer 40k Battlesector review.

Back to the classics now: 2004’s Dawn of War is a huge which nonetheless stands up as one of many best RTS games ever made. Though it pioneered many ideas that may drive the RTS style forwards, it stays rooted within the base-building RTS period.

Developer Relic struck gold by simplifying and streamlining many traditional RTS mechanics. Each click on produces a neat squad of infantry, not particular person figures that must be cursor-lassoed collectively. Resources come from taking and holding battlefield strongpoints, not faffing with ancillary farmer models.

Base-building is light-weight, strongly targeted on unlocking navy models and upgrades. This sport, like its tabletop counterpart, needed you to depart the admin at residence, get on the market, and make conflict.

More importantly than all of that, it acquired the really feel proper. Dawn of War has simply sufficient lore-appropriate flavour to sate gamers with a shelf stuffed with lovingly painted Dark Angels proper above their monitor, however not so a lot as to confuse others, or bathroom down the sport’s inherent strengths as a fast-paced, aggressive RTS.

These days, with this venerable title now sufficiently old to drive a automotive and enlist within the US military, we all know we’re viewing it by way of barely rose-tinted helm-lenses.

But with a rock-solid gameplay basis, a satisfying, genuine 40K storyline, and a collection of blockbuster expansions, we are able to confidently say Dawn of War is a stunner – simply a contender for the best Warhammer laptop sport of all of them.

Warhammer 40,000: Space Marine, the epic, gore-drenched odyssey of Ultramarines Captain Titus achieves one thing Warhammer laptop games virtually by no means can: it really makes us care about its major character. Not that it is a sophisticated story – you go to a human manufacturing facility planet besieged by Orks, kill hundreds of Orks, realise it was Chaos’ nefarious doing all alongside, kill the Chaos chief, the top, then it’s straight residence for tea and nutrient paste.

No, we care about Titus as a result of he’s probably the most impressively realised, most relatable and plausible Space Marine warrior ever in a videogame, and, by putting us in his large ceramite boots, this sport will get nearer than another to recreating on display the peculiarly gripping energy fantasy of being a transhuman Astartes warrior.

Titus’ 8-foot-tall, 6-foot-wide bulk towers over human-sized NPCs and scampering greenskin enemies alike, making you’re feeling like one of many magnificent gods of conflict so reverently described in Black Library novels. Every decibel of his voice – the inimitable and excellent booming tones of Mark Strong – tasks the grave, dutiful assiduousness of an Ultramarine.

His each animated step, lunge, swing and leap is completely tuned to really feel impossibly highly effective and weighty, conveying an uncanny sense of superhuman heaviness that makes Gears of War appear a bouncy, air-filled platformer by comparability.

The sport’s environment is treacle-thick, bloody, and intoxicatingly 40K. While the environments are an limitless succession of near-identical corpse-strewn industrial zones, it actually doesn’t matter, as a result of all you’ll care about is the banging of your boltgun’s explosive shells and the rhythmic roar of your chainsword swinging up and down, carving Orks into green-and-red jelly.

Yes, Space Marine 2 is out now, and outstrips the 2011 authentic in most methods – however the first sport has seen a bump in gross sales since SM2 got here out for an excellent cause. It’s nonetheless required gaming for 40k followers as a result of, greater than another title earlier than it, it will get, on a deep stage, the actual escapism baked into Games Workshop’s pre-eminent sci-fi ‘heroes’ – gigantic shoulder pads and all. 

In the grim darkness of the Forty first millennium, there may be solely conflict. But the overwhelming majority of 40k games are inclined to concentrate on ‘grounded’ combating, whether or not that be on the floor of embattled planets, contained in the tossing, red-lit corridors of a freshly-boarded warship, or deep inside the pitch-dark, drifting stomach of a Space Hulk.

Not so amid the cosmic naval warfare of Battlefleet Gothic, first launched as a spaceship fleet-based miniatures sport in 1999, and revived for PC by developer Tindalos in 2016, three years after the dwindling tabletop line was lastly canned by Games Workshop; and the 2019 sequel is the best execution of strategic void warfare but.

You take command of a flotilla of 40k’s preposterous spacefaring warships: colossal, flying gothic cathedrals with extra buttresses, spires, and crenellations than a small European metropolis. You’ll by way of fleet-on-fleet battles on a hard and fast horizontal airplane, in opposition to vessels from a choice of humanity’s many lethal enemies.

On prime of that, there are three absolutely fledged campaigns within the base sport. There’s a sure stage of 4x gameplay right here, as you safe management over completely different methods and muster your armies, and whereas the Imperial marketing campaign is the ‘default’, the Tyranid Hive Fleets and robotic Necrons each provide very attention-grabbing variants. The strategic worth of a planet if basically completely different when all you wish to do is eat it, in any case.

With their sluggish turning circles and prow-mounted broadsides, there’s quite a bit in widespread between the Imperial Navy and nineteenth century ships of the road. But the various fleets of the Imperium and its enemies – each servants of chaos and alien xenos races – wage conflict within the void in starkly alternative ways, from the nimble and fragile Aeldari to the ram-fronted Ork ships, and in addition to the three marketing campaign factions there are hundreds extra to tussle with in multiplayer or skirmish mode.

The Adeptus Mechanicus is a faction of technology-worshipping cyborg mystics from Mars, whose prevailing mission is to amass hoards of technological knowledge and understanding – primarily by scouring the galaxy for uncommon, advanced or esoteric devices, stealing them, and taking them residence to tinker with within the storage for the remainder of time.

This, in a nutshell, is the plot of Kasedo Games’ 2018 turn-based tactical squad battler, Mechanicus. You take command of a small however rising squad of Adeptus Mechanicus tech-priests, tasked with exploring worlds looking for hi-tech plunder. So far, so good.

Once you get right down to the floor, although, issues begin getting all spooky, geometric, inexperienced, and glowing actual quick. Those subterranean treasure vaults you noticed on the scanners had been, it appears, really stasis crypts stuffed with Necrons – soulless, historic robotic killers – and they’re none too happy to be woken up by a bunch of half-organic grave robbers attempting to nick their laptops.

So begins your distinctly XCOM-inspired development by way of a sequence of more and more difficult – however fairly related – grid-based maps, rigorously managing your tech-priests’ restricted motion factors to finish goals, whereas avoiding vaporisation within the neon inexperienced beams of Necron gauss weapons.

Mechanicus is right here in no small half due to its strikingly devoted, vivid, and unapologetically bizarre portrayal of the Adeptus Mechanicus – a lovably eccentric however pretty high-concept sci-fi faction that it could have been really easy to cope with in a half-arsed method.

From the characters’ campy, cyborg-ish names made up of jumbled numerals and Greek letters, right down to the fizzling data-blurts of their part-sonic, half digital language, Kasedo did the AdMech correctly.

If you just like the sound of XCOM-like gameplay with a couple of good twists, a surprisingly glorious narrative, battling cyber-mummies in a dusty crypt, and having USB sticks for fingers, that is the one for you.

If you want 40K, slick digital board sport diversifications, and spending a number of hours scant grid squares away from slavering alien bioweapons that wish to eat your organs, you’re in the proper place. Recommended.

We might go on for pages concerning the revolutionary storytelling in DoWII, its beautifully-constructed missions, and the ingenious, maddeningly addictive and shockingly ahead-of-its-time Last Stand horde mode, however, actually, your time can be higher spent simply taking part in the sport. Just go and get it, proper now. We imply it.

If you’re a 40k fan who reduce their technique gaming tooth on Civilization (on a decrease issue setting, a minimum of) don’t sleep on Gladius; there’s a number of enjoyable available right here.

Released in 1997 (that’s after the printing press, however earlier than the breakdown of the western liberal-democratic order, historical past followers), it is a strategic stage laptop wargame based mostly on Epic – GW’s late 90s 40k spinoff miniature wargame, which simulated a lot larger-scale battles and campaigns by utilizing teeny, tiny 6mm scale figures, reasonably than the usual 28mm or 32mm-high guys.

Channeling that very same scale in digital type, Final Liberation sees you marshal an enormous mixed drive of Ultramarines, Astra Militarum fireplace help, and Warhammer 40k titans (tower-block sized strolling conflict machines) and direct it throughout whole continents to combat off a colossal Ork Waaagh! by the use of lethal however rewarding flip based mostly tactical battles.

The Nineties are sometimes remembered fondly as a ‘golden age’ of Warhammer 40k, pushed by sheer bombast and silliness, reasonably than the mass market manipulations of right now, and this sport matches that invoice – it’s required gaming for brand spanking new 40k nerds desirous to pattern the wildly completely different vibes of the before-times. But it’s additionally, basically, a compelling large-scale turn-based technique sport that’ll have you ever hooked as soon as you realize the ropes.

If you check out Final Liberation and love combating these bigger scale battles, you must also try Warhammer 40k Legions Imperialis – GW’s new iteration of Epic, set within the Horus Heresy period and launched in 2023.

15. Shootas, Blood & Teef

Rogueside

Shootas, Blood & Teef is the least critical, most delightfully slapstick Warhammer 40k sport on this checklist. This is a side-scrolling run and gun multiplayer platformer within the model of Metal Slug, Broforce, and even Castle Crashers. Up to 4 allied Orks set out on a violent quest to batter every little thing of their path with bullets, lasers, explosions, and weaponised squigs.

Developer Rogueside honed their craft for one of these gameplay with the Guns, Gore, and Cannoli sequence, and the appear and feel of SBT is totally spot on. The chunky cartoon artwork model matches the excessive character of the Orks completely, and the large Imperial conflict machines that seem in some boss fights, just like the Baneblade or Knight Valiant, are incredible.

We must put a really massive caveat right here. The story marketing campaign is brief, most likely round 4 hours lengthy. There is team-based Ork on Ork multiplayer, with quite a lot of modes, however that depends on a secure participant inhabitants.

However, the Steam model of the sport has the good ‘Remote Play Together’ function: just one participant in a multiplayer group wants to purchase a duplicate of the sport for his or her pals to hitch a session. It’s quite a bit simpler to advocate this as a short-lived however excessive affect expertise for a bunch of pals – you’ll get extra hours leisure for a lot much less price than shopping for cinema tickets.

Kasedo Games and Bulwark Studios announced in May 2024 that the wonderful tactical battler Mechanicus was getting a giant, stunning sequel with two full campaigns – one because the AdMech, and one because the Necrons that’ll see you constructing your individual empire as Vargard Nefershah.

No launch window has been introduced however, if the primary sport’s growth is something to go by, it’s not unreasonable to hope we might even see Mechanicus 2 drop in 2025. The authentic sport was introduced in February 2018 and launched in November of the identical yr! We’re maintaining our mechadendrites crossed.

And there’s all the time the niggling query at the back of our minds: is there ever going to be a Total War: Warhammer 40k? Neither Games Workshop nor Creative Assembly have ever given even a cryptic trace {that a} Forty first Millennium Total War game is in growth, so we do not know – however we are able to’t assist however hope for an announcement in 2025. It might be so good – and after the runaway success of each the Total War Warhammer fantasy sequence and Space Marine 2, there’s certainly a marketplace for it. The Emperor supplies.

Warhammer 40k games FAQ

Games Workshop has been making (or a minimum of licensing different individuals to make) Warhammer 40,000 videogames since 1992, when George Bush Senior was US President and cellphones had been like small bricks. Consequently, there’s a number of gaming trivia for Warhammer followers to dig into – listed here are a couple of enjoyable info to go along with our prime picks above.

What was the primary Warhammer 40k videogame?

The first official Warhammer 40k videogame was Space Crusade, launched by Gremlin Interactive in 1992. It’s a direct digital adaptation of Games Workshop and Milton Bradley’s traditional 1990 Warhammer board game of the identical title, which sees a number of Space Marine squads discover a spaceship, battling Genestealers, Orks, and Chaos Marines managed by a single sport grasp participant.

It’s now accessible to download and play free as abandonware, too – so give it a strive if you would like (however beware, it may be completely deadly for the Space Marine gamers).

What’s the most well-liked Warhammer 40k sport?

We’d say the unique Dawn of War is the most well-liked Warhammer 40k sport of all time – by way of lasting reputation, fan loyalty, and affect on the gaming group.

When it was launched in 2004, it launched large numbers of PC players to the Warhammer 40,000 universe for the primary time, and remains to be revered right now as a landmark real-time technique title that hordes of 40k followers bear in mind fondly – despite the fact that its sequels decreased in reputation.

What’s the best Warhammer 40k cellular sport?

The best Warhammer 40k cellular sport proper now could be Warhammer 40,000: Tacticus. We don’t embody it in our major checklist, which focuses on PC and console games – however in the event you’re after a slick, playable enviornment battling sport you possibly can play in your telephone, Tacticus is value a go.

Tacticus’ fundamental schtick is roughly equal to Plarium’s mega-hit Raid: Shadow Legends; you acquire characters through gacha mechanics, then type them into groups to combat turn-based grid battles in quite a lot of modes.

What’s the best Warhammer 40k card sport?

If the world battler style isn’t your bag, and you like trading card games to gacha hero fights, there are a handful of various free-to-play Warhammer 40,000 digital card games throughout cellular and PC.

On the entire, we predict the best Warhammer 40k card sport is Warpforge – the newest 40k digital card sport, which emerged from Early Access in October 2024. There’s all kinds of various faction decks on provide; the gameplay is refined sufficient to permit lots of the traditional TCG technique archetypes chances are you’ll acknowledge from Magic: The Gathering and others; and the slick graphics on each PC and cellular ship a pleasant, genuine grimdark environment.

If you like the Horus Heresy setting, its predecessor from the identical developer, Horus Heresy: Legions, can also be an excellent shout.

Their cousin, Warhammer 40k: Combat Cards, provides a barely completely different, much less conventional TCG model of play, with three lanes of fight and a rock, paper, scissors dynamic for ranged, melee, and psyker characters. Cards additionally function correct images of GW ‘Eavy Metal painted minis, reasonably than authentic artworks – which might be a plus or a minus relying in your style.

And if that’s not sufficient grimdark goodness for you, try our guides to the best Warhammer 40k books and the newest Warhammer 40k codex guidelines popping out for the tabletop sport.