YMMV / Warhammer 40,000: Mechanicus

• Anticlimax Boss:
  • Overlord Szaregon, at the time of release, could be taken down pretty easily, as he only had a mere 30 hitpoints and lacks physical and energy shields. He was later patched to have 100 hitpoints, but his lack of armor or minions still leaves him vulnerable to massed attacks from the player's cohort. He's also potentially preceded by a chaotic Wolfpack Boss battle against whichever necron lords the player failed to catch, further highlighting Szaregon's relatively low threat level. Ekropis and Ubjao constantly summon minions, Mhelob resets the cognition gauge every turn, and Neftusk retains his shield generators. By contrast, the Overlord fights completely alone and has no special abilities beyond teleportation and a melee attack that hits multiple units in an arc.
  • The Sufferer is practically the same. Yes, it has 120 hitpoints but no armor, no initial support, and the flunkies it spawns aren't all that dangerous, either. A decently equipped cohort can destroy it in two turns flat without suffering more than some superficial wounds.
  • Lord Ubjao's Boss Battle is interestingly designed but still quite underwhelming. The Lord of the Flayed has a measly 30 hitpoints and no armor, hides behind an endless army of Flayed and gets stronger with every Flayed you kill. However, Flayed are a nuisance at best that can be simply ignored while you make a beeline for the boss. It gets particularly hilarious if you have a maxed-out Secutor and access to Kastelan robots, which allows you to summon a monstrously powerful support unit right on top of Ubjao. Chances are it'll stomp the boss into the ground before your tech-priests even reach him. Alternatively if you have the Tech-priest ability that fully fills the cognition gauge, and the canticle that does the same, it's entirely possible to get the entire party adjacent to Ubjao to murder him in one/two turns by just using cognition points to dash all the way up.
  • Grand Architect Neftusk. Grand. Architect. Neftusk. He cannot be damaged directly: instead, you must send your units to three shield generators at the north, west and east of the map and destroy them. As you are doing this, LITERALLY NOTHING ATTACKS YOU. The boss doesn't do anything but taunt you, there are no goons that harass your troops as you try to break down the generators, and the only threat that does appear are turrets that pop up after each generator is destroyed...turrets that have such a piddling attack range and damage they may as well not even be there. And then, when the pylons are destroyed, Neftusk doesn't at least start engaging your guys finally now that his defenses are down. No: he drops dead. TARGET_ELIMINATED. That's right, folks: the battle is The Bed of Chaos, but somehow even stupider. The worst that can happen is a bloated awakening meter, as you pile up your troops near Neftusk and send single units to destroy the pylons, expecting him to start attacking once the pylons are gone and feeling like a total idiot when he dies with a whimper.
    • What makes it even funnier is you're clearly intended to have to destroy his shield generators in order to be able to engage him, because his armor is too much to punch through...but if you have the Canticle that ignores armor, weapons that ignore armor or even just enough boosts to your crit chances (since Crits ignore armor too) you can easily drop him before destroying any of the shield generators, or maybe breaking one at best.
• Awesome Music: The game's soundtrack, by Guillaume David, is one of the best soundtracks for a Warhammer 40,000 game. The music is a pounding, eclectic mix of industrial beats, electronic music, and gregorian chanting that truly conveys what it feels like to be a member of the Adeptus Mechanicus and is also one of the most electronic 40k OSTs out there. It's also unique in this regard as while it is heavily electronic, it prominently features a pipe organ in its instrumentation. "Children of the Omnissiah" is ominous, dark, and mysterious, fitting for the Mechanicus itself, and the fast, racing, and heavy "Noosphere" is a perfect tune to mow down Necrons to with your Tech-Priest cohort.
• Demonic Spiders:
  • Triarch Praetorians. Their jetpacks make them impossible to pin down, and they use them to freely zap around the battlefield and target your more vulnerable units. Their attacks are also dangerous enough that they can't be simply ignored, and they are tough enough that you can't get rid of them easily either.
  • Lychguards, who in term of their function on the field could be considered Flayed Ones' bigger cousins. Like Flayed Ones they are melee fighters with a very predictable pattern, automatically moving to and attacking anyone who attacked them before. Unlike Flayed Ones, Lychguards are tough, heavily armoured and hit like a truck, especially after you whittled some of their health down. Their counterattack quirk is also much more dangerous than Flayed Ones' group targeting, as it can trigger any number of times on any attack action against them, essentially giving them a free turn every time someone hits them. Their behaviour is still very exploitable but if you miscalculate they will punish you greatly for it.
  • Enemy Xenarite tech-priests introduced in the Heretek expansion. They possess many of the same capabilities as your own techpriests, including powerful weapons, ability to attack multiple times per turn, as well as gadgets that allow them to repair themselves, evade your attacks with 100% chance or make themselves untargetable until they attack you first. Plus, they don't provide you with free cognition like necrons when you kill them, and on their hand eagerly drain cognition from sources on the map when they get the chance. Their one saving grace is that you don't need to finish them like with Necron units. Fortunately, you don't face them outside of a limited set of specific missions.
  • Destroyers are probably the nastiest thing you'll face early-game, and mid-to-late game they remain significant threats. Pound for pound, they deal the most damage of the enemies at range, and are burly enough to soak up a good amount of damage, ensuring they'll stay around to get at least one or two shots.
• Game-Breaker:
  • The Xenarite discipline introduced in the Heretek expansion. Its skills and gear grant a techpriest twenty hit points total and +30% critical hit chance, with one skill allowing the crit chance to increase further as the priest takes damage (+5% per lost hit point, totalling an obscene +125% at 1 HP). With such a high crit potential, even mildly-wounded Xenarites will routinely deal the max possible damage for any weapon they wield, ignoring armor and preventing slain necrons from reanimating. Blend with the Explorator discipline for a Lightning Bruiser that's impossible to pin down, or Dominus for long-range BFG crits.
  • The lowly Skitarii Ranger is a surprising powerhouse despite it's relatively low stats. First off, like all troops the unit is extremely fast, but it also has a quite solid range for it's galvanic rifle. The galvanic rifle scans enemies, making it a much safer alternative to scanning than using the techpriests starting lasgun or the Servo-skull, both of which can be put to better use elsewhere. Their second level gives them the ability to Disable enemy Necrons, taking away their primary mode of attack for one turn. This can be used to bait enemies into range and then smack them with a disable to essentially stun them, allowing your units to get a bunch of free hits in. Their final upgrade gives them the ability to always crit, turning them into armor-shredding fiends who dish out tons of damage. While they are squishy, their support and damage potential more than make up for their fragility.
  • The Secutor techpriest tree is pretty nutty if you max it out. The class is all about buffing troops and using them effectively in battle, and if you take up Khepra's missions frequently you can find yourself having some pretty strong troops. Three main skills stick out: Command either buffs every troop on the fields damage by two for a turn or increases both armor types by two for every troop for one turn, turning your troops into even tankier meatshields or boosting their damage further. Command Fire causes every single troop in range of an enemy to fire on them for 1 CP, basically getting any number of free attacks in on a single target. This is one of the strongest AlphaStrikes in the game and can obliterate anything short of a Necron Overlord if you have 3-4 troops in range to take aim. But the final skill is what really secures the power of this class: Reinforcements. For 1 CP, a Secutor techpriest can summon any reserve troops anywhere on the map instead of normally being nearby. This can set up so many ridiculous strategies and bait the Necrons into numerous traps. The thing is, since this ability costs 1 CP, you can actually use it to skip the CP requirement of certain troops, effectively reducing their cost of deployment to 1 CP.
• Goddamn Bats:
  • Flayed Ones. They act as basic Necron swarm-melee units but their behavior on the field is rather quirky. By default they are a bit passive and may even spend their turns doing nothing, but as soon as one of your units intentionally attacks a Flayed One, all Flayed Ones on the map immediately aggro to that one unit, ignoring everyone else in your cohort. Clever players can easily exploit this, sending Flayed Ones running in circles across the map away from more vulnerable units or lead them into attacks of opportunity. This predictability along with their flimsy health and mediocre damage makes Flayed Ones more of a nuisance than a genuine threat.
  • Deathmarks, Necron snipers with long attack range, capable of freely teleporting across the map and setting up Overwatch attacks, limiting your movement. Fortunately, their attacks aren't that damaging and Deathmarks themselves are rather fragile, making them easy to deal with.
  • Vargards have average health, armor and damage output, but their special ability "Swap" lets them instantly swap places with any other Necron unit on the field when that unit is attacked, taking the hit in its stead. Focusing down a specific target becomes difficult when there's a Vargard around, and next to impossible when there's more than one unless they're all killed first. This gimmick of theirs is what makes one otherwise straightforward Boss Battle one hell of a lot more difficult.
• It's Easy, So It Sucks!: One of the main criticisms is that the game gets too easy once players have progressed to mid-late game.
  • Even at the start. Several of the game mechanics make the game easier compared to similar games such as XCOM: Enemy Unknown. Troops being disposable means that there's no long term consequence to losing them, so using them as cannon fodder (a practice the game encourages) is always a good move. At worst you might be a mook short for the 1 to 2 next fights in the mission, which is trivial compared to losing a tech-priest. Secondly, Cognition Points make positioning trivial. Tech-Priests can cross the map, any distance, so long as they have the CP, and plenty of skills let the player have more CP than they'll ever need. Lastly, all attacks are guaranteed to hit (outside of rare skills that give a dodge chance), meaning it's harder to be screwed by the RNG because a trivial attack missed. Mid- to late game further diminishes the difficulty as your tech-priests now generate a ton of CP, have dozens of skills and options to let them act, and wield up to 5 weapons they can all use in the same turn.
  • As of 1.2.4 Augment update this is solved to a degree. Now the game allows you to make it more difficult. Without additional customization, giving you ability to change many aspects of the game, the default difficulty options modify:
    • Starting blackstone amount
    • Necron HP
    • Amount of necrons in battles
    • Amount of extra fights
• Memetic Mutation: "From the moment I understood the weakness of my flesh, it disgusted me. I craved the strength and certainty of steel. I aspired to the purity of the blessed machine." Like the reverse of the Downfall Hitler rant, this extremely metal narration is easily overlaid onto much sillier videos, such as kitbashing Barbie dolls or hand-digger toys.
• Narm: Your tech-priests' dodging animation, what with them completely bending backwards on their knees a la Neo before straightening up like nothing happened once the attack passes. The awkward way this synchronises with the attack that they evade only exacerbates the effect.
• Porting Disaster: The Nintendo Switch port is marred by bugs, among them a rather egregious one that prevented saves from being loaded, leaving players staring in confusion at the loading screen's spinning gear forever. It's since been patched, but players still contend with intermittent crashes, missions refusing to start, slowdown, and other technical hiccups both game breaking and mildly annoying.
• Self-Imposed Challenge: There's no in-game benefit for playing on difficulties above Easy or activating debuffs like the ones mentioned above. Achievements can be unlocked by doing so, but that's about it. However, a few canticles can only be unlocked by mildly restraining yourself, e.g. by not using any canticles in a certain number of missions (easy to do in the early game).
• That One Boss: Lord Ekropis. Every turn he will summon more and more units to battle - and unlike his fellow Flunky Boss Lord Ubjao who brings Flayed Ones, Ekropis summons stronger units like Immortals and an occasional Vargard. Dragging out his fight means you will be buried under necron reinforcements - but rushing Ekropis early on is also not reliable, as his Vargards (which he starts the fight with four of) will keep swapping him away from your attacks. This results in a very unpredictable and annoying battle that can turn against you even if you do everything right and has no elegant solution to it - ultimately the best way to handle Ekropis is to delay his mission until later when you accumulate enough powerful weapons and tools that will let you simply cheese his fight.
• Win Back the Crowd: For the last few years, Warhammer 40k games have been having a rough patch, with the best among them getting So Okay, It's Average reception. While not without its flaws, Mechanicus has been getting significant acclaim from both critics and players for its surprising gameplay depth, lore faithfulness, polish, and just high quality in general.