Sunday Musings - SPACE HULK (Not That One)

As always, the idea behind a Sunday Musings is that Adam takes a concept and times an hour and a half to write it in. This week, we get HULKED….

You may be thinking about the more recent, direct translation of the classic Board Game. For that I am sorry, for instead, I've been thinking about the brilliant 1993 release that I played to death and back.

You have to remember, this was a Post-Doom but Pre-Quake world. The First Person Shooter was yet to become the be all and end all of gaming in the Nineties. The platformer was king on consoles, with PC gamers taking on various sim-style games. Doom itself was spawning a mass of clones upon the home computers* and it is into the world that Space Hulk made the jump from models to microchips.

It's no adaption in the manner of Boltgun though, Space Hulk is equal parts Dungeon Crawler and Syndicate-like as it is a FPS, a squad shooter with large elements of strategic thinking, as you delve deeper into the hulk hoping to not be shredded into fleshy tinfoil but the ever slavering jaws of the Genestealer. It's a game of nerve shredding fragility, as your squad of Terminators are far more vulnerable than first realised, even with the addition of Pauses (of which you only have a certain amount of time in each mission) to take stock and attempt to adapt your tactics. Each Terminator is slow and cumbersome, with every move having to be considered very carefully as a single misstep will have the Genestealers running through like a bladed train, with every corner being an exercise in rising heart rates. The pixelated graphics may look dated now, but they burst from the screen in a orgy of violence that sits well with me in this day and age.

We have the ability to play Space Hulk in browser now, which you can find HERE

*There may be a Simcity 2000 chat coming, if I can find a way to fit it into the hobby trappings

** CORPORATION on the Megadrive was particularly aces