How WH40K: Chaos Gate - Daemonhunters aims to avoid "analysis paralysis" by letting you carve up the galaxy
You may not have heard much about developer Complex Games, but the Canadian studio has a surprisingly storied history. Despite spending the last two decades building mobile and browser games for the likes of Disney, Nickelodeon and Zynga, their heart has always resided with the PC. "There wasn't a lot of game development in Winnipeg, so we tried to figure it out ourselves and spent a few years trying to build a PC game," says creative director Noah Decter-Jackson. Fresh out of college, Complex's first project was a third-person hand-to-hand action prototype that they pitched to publishers at E3 2003, an endeavour that Decter-Jackson describes as "phenomenally unsuccessful".
This led to Complex remodelling as a work-for-hire outfit, and their long track-record making mobile games. But in 2015, Complex launched The Horus Heresy: Drop Assault, a fast-paced tactics game in conjunction with Games Workshop. In the wake of Drop Assault's success, the studio saw an opportunity. "We had been wanting for a long time to return to our PC roots," he says. "So we pitched a core idea for a game to Games Workshop, because Drop Assault had been quite successful... and that's essentially how Chaos Gate: Daemonhunters came to be."