Warhammer 40,000: Speed Freeks PC Review (Early Access)
Summary: Warhammer 40,000: Speed Freeks is a decent, if a little lacking in gameplay variation, free-to-play, combat racing game that does a good job of updating the board game that it's based on.
3.5
Waaaaaagh!
Based on the tabletop board game of the same name, Warhammer 40,000: Speed Freeks aims to bring the high-octane (high-Orktane?) and brutal death races of the 41st millennium off the tabletop and straight onto Steam.
Speed Freeks takes Games Workshop’s vehicular combat board game and uses it as the staging point for a 16-player, free-to-play, live-service, multiplayer game where two teams of eight players duke it out in two game modes over six maps to control the wasteland.
Anyone vaguely familiar with Warhammer 40,000 and the licensed games that litter Steam and consoles, will probably be aware that the quality of these games tends to fluctuate. For every Dawn of War, Boltgun, and Space Marine, there’s a Kill Team, Eternal Crusade, and Warpforge.
Thankfully, Speed Freeks, at first glance seems to be on the better side of things.
Caged Element has done a great job of capturing the chaotic and unpredictable nature of the Orks that you play as. A race known for having the subtlety of a sledgehammer, often with hilarious results. Each of the battlefields is suitably ‘Orky’ and their trademark humour is brought across well thanks to suitably over-the-top voice acting.
As mentioned before, Speed Freeks is a relatively faithful recreation of its namesake. All the vehicles are accurately captured as well as the introduction of several new ones, with eight being available in total.
All of these vehicles are subtly different from one another, fulfilling different roles. Buggies are light and quick, with relatively low armor and firepower with larger vehicles bridging the gap up to full-blown tanks, with huge damage-soaking capability and firepower, but low maneuverability to balance this out.
Each vehicle has a long list of different challenges attached to it, these range from simply driving a set distance, to using abilities while at low health. Completing these challenges awards customisation options for each vehicle.
The customisation has a good amount of variety, with over 100 options available for each of the death machines, allowing players to make every one of them unique and their own.
Two modes are available as of launch, the confusingly titled ‘Def Rally’, which isn’t really a rally, or even a race as such other than right at the very end of a match. The second is the much more straightforwardly named Kill Konvoy.
Def Rally is essentially a territory control game mode. Teams fight for control of various points on the map. Once a team has sufficiently captured and defended a point, it moves to a new location to begin anew. Once all the points have been captured a short race to the finish line takes place. Points are awarded for capturing a point and holding it, with the most points at the end of the match declaring the winner.
Kill Konvoy, ironically is the closest of the two modes to being an actual race. Each team has a huge ‘Stompa’, a gargantuan, walking tank of sorts. These slowly make their way towards a finish line, some way from the start. Bombs spawn somewhere on the battlefield and players are tasked with grabbing the bomb and delivering it to the opposing Stompa. The resulting explosion sends any nearby Orks hurtling through the air and slows down the team’s advance. This is repeated until one Stompa makes it to the finish line.
I enjoyed both of these modes, though if pressed I’d probably have to say that Kill Konvoy was the one I enjoyed the most. The huge maps, bordering on the size you’d see in a Battlefield game, have some nice variety with the terrain they have on offer, all of which provide unique challenges when taking on the Stompa.
This being predominantly a multiplayer game, means that you’re going to get the most out of playing with other people. Both modes are available to be played solo against bots, but it doesn’t really do a good job of capturing the experience when played this way.
All of the usual live-service trappings are present and accounted for. The now ubiquitous battlepass and in-game store that rotates out items periodically make their mandatory appearances. To Speed Freek’s credit, however, the game is free to play. It would have been very easy to abuse the monetisation options due to this, which doesn’t appear to be the case currently.
Final Thoughts
Warhammer 40,000: Speed Freeks is one of the better entries into the Games Workshop-owned series. My only real criticism at this point is that it would have been nice to have maybe one other game mode to complement the two that currently exist.
The game ran perfectly on my system and thanks to a great deal of different options and upscaling methods such as DLSS and TSR, should scale well on most machines.
Speed Freeks has plenty of things to unlock and customise in the game, and assuming that the two modes of play don’t outstay their welcome, it could keep you occupied for a good while.
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