Kill Team Hivestorm review – special forces special delivery

Warhammer 40k Kill Team: Hivestorm is the first release for the new third edition of Games Workshop’s competitive sci-fi skirmish wargame. It’s a big box extravaganza packed with models and scenery designed to help players new and old deploy straight into the new edition. This Kill Team Hivestorm review will help you decide if you should sign up for the action.

Due to the way embargoes work on GW products and the fact the Wargamer authors don’t live anywhere near each other, we haven’t been able to playtest the Kill Team third edition rules. This review is based on a thorough read through, building the kits and painting as many of them as we could squeeze in before the deadline.

What is Kill Team: Hivestorm?

Kill Team is a sci-fi skirmish wargame set in the Warhammer 40k universe. Players command small special forces teams of elite operatives in close quarters missions. It delivers on cinematic spectacle, with warriors running between cover, clashing in head-to-head sword duels, and activating their unique special powers. It’s also designed for competitive play, and supported with ongoing balance updates from Games Workshop.

Games Workshop has stated that rules for all the Warhammer 40k factions in Kill Team will be available to download for free, but these weren’t available when we received the Kill Team review sample.

The Hivestorm box set is the first place that the rules for the game’s third edition are available for sale. It’s a bumper box, packed with terrain, books, tokens, cards, and two brand new Kill Teams. The elite Tempestus Aquilons represent the forces of the Imperium of Man, while the insectile Xenos Vespid Stingwings fight on behalf of the T’au Empire.

What’s in the box?

The new Warhammer 40k Kill Team: Hivestorm box set contains 22 models, terrain, core rules, useful tokens, matched play cards, dice, and measuring tools. The full box set contents are:

• Vespid Stingwings Kill Team, 11 models.
• Tempestus Aquilons Kill Team, 11 models.
• 14 pieces of urban ruins scenery for Kill Zone Volkus.
• Hivestorm Dossier, with lore about the war for Volkus, unique missions, and full rules for both Kill Teams.
• The Upgrade Equipment pack, which has measuring tools and placeable terrain like barbed wire and scaling ladders that any faction can purchase as mission equipment.
• Approved Operations cards, a full set of mission cards, Tac Ops, and maps for matched play.
• Dice.
• General Kill Team tokens.
• Tokens for the Vespids and Aquilons.

Model quality

All the miniatures reach, or exceed, Games Workshop’s usual high standards. These are mid-complexity kits: kids will struggle to put them together without adult assistance, and we suggest you dry fit all parts before attempting to glue them as there’s very little give.

The Vespid are fantastic, remarkably well balanced for being so top-heavy. Made almost entirely of organic surfaces and with little in the way of superfluous ornamentation, they’re easy to paint and will take Contrast paints well. The Tempestus Aquilons look great, but with plenty of trim and small ornamentation they’re a test of your hand-eye coordination.

The terrain is the real highlight of this box. There are enough buildings and ruins to make a very dense Kill Zone, and frankly it’s a good start to a full Warhammer 40k terrain set. The surface detailing is sufficient that a spray and a drybrush will be enough to make this look good, but you can go to town and make it look really swish.

The rules

First appearances suggest that Kill Team third edition retains all the core strengths that made the previous edition popular: you will command spec-ops teams in close quarters covert missions, using each operative’s unique skills to crack an objective and crush your foe. It’s a game that won’t take up much space or time, but will offer a balanced competitive challenge that tournament gamers will find particularly compelling.

The core of Kill Team is an alternating activation system, with one player and then another taking it in turns to pick an operative who will move, shoot, stab, complete mission objectives, and so on. The combat system, which sees players roll pools of dice to attack and defend, seeking out critical hits to trigger special powers of their weapon, remains as it was in second edition.

At its best, Kill Team feels like a knife fight in a John Wick movie – a whole lot of small, decisive, utterly lethal movements. The Kill Zone board is a confined space with little room to maneuver, your operatives are irreplaceable, and achieving mission objectives means letting up the pressure on your opponent. You’re never safe, always risking something, and always making tough choices. When violence erupts, somebody usually dies.

On such a small board it’s very easy to claim line of sight, even with a lot of terrain in play. This is where Kill Team’s clever order system comes in. Whenever you activate an operative you can choose between giving the model an Engage order, committing it to the fight, or Conceal, letting it make the most of cover.

While Concealed, a model that is in cover from an attacker is not a valid target for ranged attack – but it also isn’t allowed to initiate any offensive actions of its own. Picking an Operative’s order is a great little reward decision point, and it also means the Kill Team board is a far more dynamic landscape to fight over than it would be in similar skirmish wargames.

Compelling but complex

If Kill Team second edition had a great weakness, it was that its rules were easier to play with than they were to learn. Some of that was due to how rules were written and organised: the new edition certainly improves on how rules are organised, and the writing is generally pretty clear. But certain rules were also intrinsically unintuitive – and that’s still a problem in the third edition.

The Conceal order I described above isn’t the only thing that you need to bear in mind with terrain. First, there’s the basic rules for cover. A model that’s shot at while it’s in cover gets an automatic success on one of its defense dice. Nice and logical.

But if a model in cover is targeted by an enemy with a high vantage, they lose that cover save – also logical. Unless, that is, the model being shot at is both in cover and under the effects of a Conceal order. Remember, a Conceal order would ordinarily make the model an ineligible target, but against a shooter on high ground it instead grants a better cover save.

And that’s not all. If you make an attack that targets an enemy, for which the line of sight crosses heavy terrain that is not within 1” of the attacker or the defender, the target is said to be ‘obscured’. The attacker needs to discard one of their successful attack dice, and any critical hits rolled simply count as basic hits.

There’s a narrative basis for the ‘obscured’ rule, too – the rules reflect long distance shots that target a model that’s visible through a window, over a spar of rubble, or round the corner of a building, but which is far enough away from any obstruction that it isn’t directly behind a piece of cover. Which, yes, is a battlefield situation that could occur, adds tactical dimensions to a small battlefield, but is an absolute nuisance to internalise. Oh, and you can be obscured and in cover, under the right circumstances.

Individually each rule is logical and makes narrative sense, but what a heap of exceptions and case-specific interactions – and that’s not all of the rules for terrain. Then there are the many different weapon keywords to learn, with a slew of similar sounding names: Devastating, Brutal, Severe, Punishing, and more… Plus your Kill Team’s special rules, and the rules for individual models, any of which could interact with another part of the system.

Veterans of second edition will find a minefield of little changes until they adjust. For newcomers, this is just the price of entry.

A rules evolution

Having said all of that, and with the aforementioned caveat that this is based on a readthrough, not a playtest, I think the third edition rules are more streamlined than second edition.

There are minor simplifications: for example, all models roll three defense dice instead of having a defense stat, and all models start the game with a Conceal order which they can change as soon as they’re activated, for instance.

The rulebook is shorter and more logical, if not always intuitive. The game sequence for setting up a mission fits onto one page, which shouldn’t be a big deal, but if you’ve been around GW games for a while you know that it isn’t a given.

Kill Team second edition managed the rare trifecta of being a balanced game that was quick to play, worked well in tournaments, and still regularly generated moments of pure cinema. The new edition is an evolution of that core game, and there’s no reason to think that magic has gone away.

Narrative content

The backdrop for Hivestorm – a covert war on the planet Volkus that sees spec ops teams battle for control of a gun bigger than a city – is peak Warhammer 40k. Though the illustrations are relatively sparse, they’re all new, and paint a fantastic picture of this unique location. The core book is well illustrated, and the page layout has an even cleaner aesthetic than the already fairly restrained second edition rules.

Kill Team second edition’s campaign system, which frankly felt like a bolt on to the game, is gone. In its place the core rules contain two mini-modules, one for co-op or solo play, and one for multiplayer carnage. The Hivestorm Dossier comes with six missions themed around drop assaults, connected into a short branching campaign.

It’s not a huge narrative offering, but it all makes sense as an extension of the core gameplay, rather than the half-hearted progression system in second edition. The co-op mode should be a better way for experienced players to teach newbies than obliterating them in a head to head match – and as noted above, new players need all the support they can get.

Who is it for?

Kill Team is designed to support organised play. If you have experience of other kinds of competitive tabletop game, whether that’s Magic the Gathering store championships or the Pathfinder League, and fancy jumping over to miniature wargames, Hivestorm is a great entry point. It gives you almost everything you need to start playing the best-supported competitive miniature wargame around, except for glue and clippers to build your minis.

Returning Kill Team players upgrading to the new edition will most likely want the new Rulebook, Kill Zone Extras sprue, and Approved Ops cards: they’ll all be available separately. But the sheer volume of extra plastic you get if you buy them bundled in this box set makes a strong argument for picking it up.

However, as the rulebook contains rules for all previously published Kill Zones, and faction rules are being released online for free, this box set is optional.

Third edition Kill Team isn’t intended for narrative gamers, but the narrative elements do make it more compelling for casual gamers who enjoy thematic missions as much as tournament balanced ones. The lore is, as ever, peak, and the Hivestorm Dossier’s drop assault campaign has a cool gimmick: the co-op and single-player mode are also promising.

For first time wargamers this is a complete package, but a challenging one. The miniatures aren’t too complex to build, but the Aquilons require good hand eye coordination to paint well. The core rules of Kill Team are  presented better than ever, but some systems will still be a bugger to learn without assistance from a veteran. The two new Kill Teams included are also not the simplest to field due to their unique deployment and movement capabilities.

Verdict

Kill Team Hivestorm is a premium entry point to Games Workshop’s purpose-built competitive wargame. The rules and how they’re communicated have been refined from the previous edition, all for the better, but the game is still complex and sometimes a little unintuitive.

While Hivestorm has everything needed to play except for glue and clippers, both the rules and the miniatures are complex enough that total newcomers to the hobby should ensure they have the help of a local community before they invest. If you’re a returning player with the cash to spare, this feels like a no-brainer.

Source: Wargamer