Amazing game. At first I was super sceptical at the look and graphics of the game, expecting this to be a half baked city builder. However, it is an extremely novel and interesting combination of roguelike and city building. The city building aspect is lean and amazingly fit together. Building is not overly complex, supply chains actually achieve an objective and you can intuitively figure out what is and isn't important to you and the current goal. Each session is fresh and you don't end up with these huge, overly cumbersome cities that you can't keep a track of.

However, the city is just a means to an end. You need to complete a reputation gauge, which can be done through many different builds. How you extract, process, and leverage the natural resources in addition to the overworld regional tile buffs/debuffs determines your success. Will you trade to adjust resource flow or produce on-site? How will you feed and sustain the population through the ever-intensifying storms? Given a stable city, how do you then deal with the glade events and limited-time problems that need combinations of advanced resources to solve? The roguelike element is in the selection of building blueprints (randomised) which are necessary to combine raw material into more advanced components, which are necessary. "recipies" are that building's inherent efficiency with each production line. Your city needs to juggle sustaining residents, keeping them productive, expanding the city's industries, and whether to take a glade's resources and buffs for yourself or send them back to the citadel (which contributes to completing the level. Keep too many, and you may be cutting it too close and draw out the level into exponentially more punishing storm seasons. Keep too few, and you may not scale quick enough adapt to approaching encounters.

The overall gameplay loop is learning how to craft (or taking a best guess at) how to craft the optimal city for each biome and set of rules applying to that condition. This nets you a set of rewards based on the difficulty and number of tile effects valid for the city location you selected. You progress throughout a resetting overworld towards different seals, and rewards are spent on a tech tree. These permanent rewards also build up the aesthetics of both a personal home and a main hub city in the crater of a volcano. Opening seals progresses the story.

Campaign is cinematic and amazing, very good at delivering a grand 40k feeling. Soundtrack is similarly matched. However, the plot points themselves are pretty unimaginative. Core gameplay is good but becomes repetitive and meaningless after you reach max level and can use every ship. Allied AI pilot the most fragile eldar ships that they immediately use to ram ork battleships with, which make some campaign missions obnoxiously difficult. Second is better in almost every single way mechanically.

Does a good job of making the grey knights look and sound like crack units, and the astra militarum look like puny guys shooting puny guy piss bolts at the enemy. But here are my issues:

QoL is piss poor: no turn/animation speedup. No simultaneous movement commands on your turn. Camera pan speed slow and cannot be adjusted. Unskippable and pointless in-mission "cutscenes" while an audio file plays where your camera is locked and there is no gameplay. Why can't I turn or move the camera during a unit move? AoE highlights are unclear. Interactions with cover and terrain destruction (during a move) are unclear. No minimap. Double clicking a unit/location/objective should just jump me immediately to that spot. Why doesn't esc work on all menus, why does it work on some and on others I need to manually click?
Units are slow for maps that are way too big, you always feel like you're at a frustrating range where you're running just to get to the objectives.
Animation and graphics/art style look beyond goofy and unserious. They look like fucking snapchat avatars.
Writing is surface level, interactions with ship characters are meaningless and bland, and also make the commander seem frankly autistic with no ability to infer context or social cues, with no understand of anything that has just been said past the absolute shallowest surface level.
There is only ever one autosave. If you accidentally reload a manual save, a new autosave will immediately start and you will have reverted the entire game back to the time of that save.
Enemy and mission variety is non-existent.

Strategy RPGs are all about precision and the ability to be precise. Weapon and tech upgrades in SRPGs are rewarding and meaningful because the core gameplay and mechanics of each mission teach the player what each enemy and situation needs to "solve" them. Therefore, skills and upgrades become intuitively obvious. In daemonhunters, the interactions between unit types, weapon types, builds, and abilities don't seem deliberate or thought out, and feel very arbitrary.

The only way to play this game is to abuse Justiciar + Interceptor and delete everyone before your squad is bogged down. Ranged weapons are a waste of time. Alternatively, a single callidus assassin from the DLC is worth more than your entire squad.

Devs just don't seem to understand how to make a turn based strategy RPG. They seemed to just make a game that was separately an RPG, turn based, and had characters with skills.

Duels needs to be the focus of this game. I hit top 300 grandmaster rank at peak; its extremely unfortunate the development route they took. Can't blame them though. Duels you either win or lose, and the only person you have to blame at the end is yourself. Dominion/Brawl lets you convince yourself that you were always the real good guy and that its everyone else fault if it goes wrong. Needless to say those modes are far more popular than looking your responsibility over your own skills in the eye. Otherwise, an extremely precise and mechanically well thought out fighting game. At the highest skill levels, nothing needs to be up to chance if you're good enough and anticipate the opponent. There is no luck or tricky attacks, only figuring out the human behind the screen.

Also extremely toxic community which you unfortunately need to participate in if you want to get better. Like genuinely the number of people's evenings I ruined using voice and text chat is directly proportional to how good I was at the game. My favourite victims were the RPers who would salute in brawls and talk about being "dishonourable" when yeeted off a ledge, but then proceed to lose the 1v1 they demand 7 times in a row.

The hard truth about FH and life is that everything is run by mean people. There is no redemption or epic anime arc. The only way you can control your experience is to have the cold, hard, skills required to run things yourself.

My friends stopped playing with me after I learned how to parry 200ms light attacks 100% of the time.