Unreal Engine 4-Powered Warhammer 40K Deathwatch: Tyranid Invasion Lands On Mobile This Summer

We’ve seen some fantastic examples of the power of Unreal Engine 4, including Unreal Tournament, various virtual reality demos, and Dead Island 2. Now Rodeo Games is showing what the engine can do on mobile devices in a new partnership with Games Workshop.

Rodeo Games’ last title, Warhammer Quest, adapted a classic board game. Deathwatch: Tyranid Invasion is an original strategy title set in the Warhammer 40K universe with both a single-player campaign and four-person competitive multiplayer.

We were curious about what it takes to use Unreal Engine 4 on mobile. “We were very impressed when we first started working with UE4,” says Rodeo tech director Richard Brooks. “Almost all the features of the engine could be used on the mobile version. UE4 has very advanced graphics technology for many top-end platforms, but it has also made a lot of these features available for mobile. We have made the decision to use the full power of their state-of-the-art graphics engine in our game and a big challenge has been getting that to work on mobile the way we want it to.”

A number of mobile developers work in Unity, in part because of the ease of bringing a title to multiple platforms. Rodeo co-founder Ben Murch tells us that Unreal Engine 4 offers similar ease of conversion. “We talk a fair amount about other versions of Deathwatch,” he says. “PC comes up a lot, as you can really unleash the full power of UE4 with it. However, we want to focus on iOS first. Make that the best possible game we can, then look at other platforms.”

When Deathwatch arrives this summer, it will do so as a premium title. Players will be able to bring their space marines from the single-player campaign into multiplayer, and the progression system offers a risk-versus-reward structure rather than a permadeath setup.

Marines will start with fixed skills, but earn experience during battle. If they survive, that experience will be banked until it’s spent to unlock an ability. Some of those skills will require surviving multiple missions in order to afford.

“The kicker is that if your marine dies on a mission, he lives to fight another day, but his XP Bank is wiped,” Murch says. “This means that if you want the really expensive Abilities, you need to be slightly more careful on missions.”

Rodeo says that players will work to fill up a Codex with approximately 250 entries. These include wargear, relics, weapons, heroes, and more. Players will earn gear as they play, or they can purchase booster packs.

Gear and marines are ranked from Tier 1 (standard) to Tier 4 (extremely rare). Murch says that rather than make gear more powerful (and risk a pay-to-win scenario for those that choose to purchase gear packs), the rare items simply provide unique tactical options. Packs include random assortments.

You can check out the announcement trailer above. Deathwatch: Tyranid Invasion will be playable on devices dating as far back as iPad 4, iPad Mini 2, iPhone 5/5C, and iPod Touch 5.