COLOGNE, Germany—Both developer Streum On Studio and publisher Focus Home Interactive seem unwilling to define it as such, but Space Hulk: Deathwing is essentially an old-school dungeon crawler masquerading as a first-person shooter. The basic setup is that your four-player squad, consisting of either human players or AI, battle through enormous space stations made up of various rooms, corridors, and doors that can be blocked off or opened up.

The layout of the Space Hulk (read: dilapidated star ship) highlights just how dungeon-like the level design goals are, particularly the overhead map I'm shown during the Gamescom 2016 demo. Pathways bleed into each other to create circuit board-like channels of parallel and intersecting right angles, while rooms have multiple entry and exit points to defend or exploit. Things get very confusing very quickly. Your location goal is indicated on the map, but how you get there is down to you.

As per the tabletop game that shares the Space Hulk name, and from which Deathwing takes its inspiration, the ceaselessly energetic Genestealers (a predatory alien species) pursue you without pause. Their presence both forces your squad of Deathwing Space Marines to keep moving, and prevents you from recklessly pushing forwards. They are reason and fear combined into one.

Doorways can be sealed shut in a bid to protect your rear flank and limit the options available to Genestealers. Sealing up a passage is a double-edged sword, however. Blocking a doorway makes it much trickier to retreat from a skirmish, and it also limits the number of routes to reach your goal.

In order to help you rely less on the environment, you can build your squad around different classes of Marine. That's the promise, at least, although I've seen only the Librarian class firsthand, which can combine the use of weapons with psychic abilities. In single-player you're locked into playing as a Librarian, but in multiplayer co-op you can choose from other as-yet-undisclosed classes.

















You're free to build a team around a single class, but doing so makes progression much more difficult. Given the replayability promised by the size of the maps, and the adaptive nature of the Genestealers' pathfinding, it could be that you decide to challenge yourself on a specific playthrough by limiting your class options in this way. Only the hardened player is going to try this, but the dungeon-crawler underbelly hints that Streum is trying to attract exactly this kind of player.

Different classes aren't just useful for their range of attacks and skills, but also for mitigating damage. Damage is sustained by different sections of your armour, with your legs, torso, arms and head health being depleted in isolation from one another. If the arm wielding your melee weapon takes too much damage then you won't be able to swing it anymore, or if your legs are damaged then you move slowly.

Therefore, if you've built a one-dimensional team to specialise in a certain attack pattern, you're going to find it tough if one of them is rendered useless by taking too much damage. A radar on your HUD indicates where nearby enemies are loitering, giving you the chance to prepare and, if you can, heal up before rounding a corner, but it doesn't show what kind of lifeform you're approaching. Genestealers are the only type of standard enemy on show at Gamescom, but other varieties do exist and, presumably, force you to deploy different tactics and master different weapon combinations.

Upon entering the final stages of the demo I'm met with a larger, more powerful Genestealer that exhibits the same traits of being extremely fast and devastating when up close, albeit in a more advanced and dramatic form. Armour plating protects it and significantly reduces the damage caused by firearms, forcing me to get up close and personal to end its life—an eventuality made more pressing by the fact that up close is when it throws damaging green orbs at you.

Due to the fact that the armour adorning your body makes you move at a comparative snail's pace even when on full health, defeating the thing is wrought with difficulty unless you work as a team. Distracting it while your teammates attack it from behind seems to be the best option, although one of you should be on the lookout for the Genestealer grunts that appear in a steady, never-ending stream to protect its leader.

If you find the going too tough you can deploy a psy gate that transports you back to a predefined safe area, but these are limited in number, their quantity defined by the difficulty level you've selected. For sure, serious players are going to want to turn them off and rely completely on their penchant for pre-planning. Furthermore, the more psy gates you use the more your end-of-level score is reduced, so if you've grand plans to hit those top positions you need to avoid falling back on these get-out-of-jail-free teleporters.

Whatever the case, whether you’re the kind of player that might rely on tools like the psy gate or not, Deathwing is an impressive proposition. The scale of the maps, the level of challenge, and the bleakly charming Warhammer 40K aesthetic make for a game that harbours enormous potential, particularly for those seeking something to master with friends over the longer term.

To be honest, it's about time the Warhammer 40K universe had a first-person game genuinely worth playing, particularly for those who aren't obsessively dedicated to the source material. Let's hope that's what Space Hulk: Deathwing turns out to be.

Space Hulk: Deathwing is due out later in 2016, for PC, Xbox One, and PS4.