The Red Terror is coming to devour the planet Devlan, and only the brave Guardsmen of Spectre Squad stand in its way. But how does such an enormous beast fight in the skirmish-scale arenas of Kill Team? Today, we find out.
At the core of the Red Terror’s mechanics is its special datacard – or rather, datacards. Unlike other NPOs, this powerhouse flips between Hunt and Lurk cards, each of which describes different behaviour depending on whether it’s actively murdering your Guardsmen or loitering underground, away from their firepower.
When hunting, the real beast is unleashed, with brutally powerful attacks and an aggressive set of behaviour rules. Should it be injured enough to lose all its Wounds, it’s not incapacitated – instead, it flips into the Lurk stance and tunnels underground to regenerate its Wounds and return later.
The only thing holding the Red Terror back from slaughtering your entire kill team is the Activation Deck – a set of 13 cards that randomly generates an enemy unit to activate that turn. Of the 13 cards in the deck, some are the Red Terror, and the others are for the smaller beasties – the box set includes 10 Termagants and a Ripper Swarm to use as NPOs. Taking out the little ones means the NPOs skip an activation, giving your team a much-needed breather.
The Red Terror is such a powerful foe that, in some missions, your operatives aren’t even trying to kill it – instead, you’re working to keep it at bay while you complete your objectives, which vary across the scenarios from making a fighting retreat across the killzone to searching for biodata that will help you pin down the location of the monster.*
Take mission two, On the Trail, for instance. Here, the most dangerous Tyranid can’t even begin to show up until later in the game, giving the players a solid head start on destroying a series of xenos tunnels. The relative power of your ordinary operatives and the monstrous, vengeful slaughter-beast hunting them means you will have to run for the hills the moment it shows up, and possibly even distract it** as your operatives dash between their objectives.
Adding a threat to the game that can’t be overcome with normal kill team tactics – like shooting until the gun barrel stops glowing – is a great way to shake up your Joint Ops battles, and a real tactical conundrum for teams better at killing people than thinking their way out.
The missions in the Terror on Devlan Dossier link together to form a branching campaign, which is designed to be used with a Spectre Squad, but can be attempted by any kill team in the game. Will the elite Kasrkin have more luck than their Cadian colleagues? Can Mandrakes sneak up on the Red Terror? Will Raveners return their bio-brother to the reclamation pool?
Find out as you begin your desperate mission to hold off the Red Terror when Kill Team: Terror at Devlan sneaks into the pre-order queue this Saturday.
* In other missions, your objective is very much to try to execute the Red Terror.
** With the lives of your operatives!
