HARDDRIVEBY: WARHAMMER 40,000 BOLTGUN
In all honesty, this game was not made for me. I am not a Warhammer 40,000 fan. When I was first made aware of it, I thought it looked really interesting. Then I saw how much money it seemed to suck out of its fans.
“Even in debt, I still serve.”
I didn’t have that kind of money to burn back then.
Consequently, when it comes to Warhammer 40K I remain a Flirt.
The reason I’m starting with this caveat is that I am not going to be able to judge if it gets the feel of Warhammerverse right. I am reasonably familiar enough with the aesthetics that I can see why there are a lot of people who insist that Starcraft absolutely started as a Warhammer game*. But there is more to a fantasy world than aesthetics. Disney Star Wars looks like Lucas’ Star Wars but absolutely isn’t. Marvel Films looks like what they were making ten years ago but sure as hell aren’t now.
I can comfortably say that Boltgun uses the right names for things and the art design matches the Warhammer 40K universe. I am familiar with the phrases like “For the Emperor!” and they are present, but it would be pretty shocking if they weren’t.
Consequently, I am uncomfortable reviewing this as a Warhammer 40K game.
But what I am comfortable with reviewing is the game as a game.
Boltgun is retro-FPS a Xoomer Shooter**. It was built with the Unreal 4 engine but tweaked to resemble a Build engine game (albeit an Eduke32 version of the engine). The graphics are appropriately blocky and crispy, the definition is very sharp. As with any proper FPS, you are a lone Space Marine survivor on a mission to wipe out various forms of evil or given that this is Warhammer, worse forms of evil than yourself.
You start with only a chainsword, which frankly beats just having a knife. LMB puts you into bullet-time, then you pick your target and charge for a one-shot kill or keep sawing away by pressing V. But you won’t need to do that on the training mission. After you familiarize yourself with the controls and saw up some squishes you are presented with your Holy Artifact: The Boltgun.
The boltgun itself is by dint of marketing necessity a lot more powerful than the usual FPS first pistol. It gibs everything it can one-shot. It will run as an automatic if you keep the LMB pinned, otherwise, it will just be a single shot. The game is pretty generous with the ammo for it and your next weapon: The Shotgun.
The shotgun is nice and punchy and its sound design is very impactful, truthfully, I can say the same thing for all of the pew-pew in this game.
Next is Plasma Gun, then Heavy Bolt, Melta, Grav-Cannon, and Vengence Launcher. There are differences between them but they are kind of minor and if you are a Warhammer fan you are already familiar with them. Each enemy has a health bar and more importantly on the right side of it is a number that tells you how tough it is. An Auto-Gun Cultist you can tear-up with the bolt gun, if it’s a Chaos Marine you are going to need something heavier. Minor complaint: Plasma Gun locks you into a cool down animation but if you hit taunt you can switch weapons immediately. It’s minor.
It is not overly generous with the grenades because you get to carry a maximum of two. I suspect in testing they found that more than that was a game-breaker.
It’s worth trying to find secrets because those will contain powerups and you are going to need them.
Atmosphere of the game is in three words, metal as fuck. The music supports the atmosphere, and I can honestly say it could be worth the price of a separate purchase if your taste runs that way. The art design is very gothic.
For a price of $20, I was expecting a game with quite a lot less polish. Considering how many people got taken to the cleaners buying Redfall, Boltgun gives you a huge bang for the buck. Any other drawbacks are fairly petty considering what you’re getting for your money.
It does the all-important work of making you feel like you are an unstoppable killing machine. You have mass. You have impact. When you charge squishes, you gib them under your heels. If you fall from a height, it has bigtime shockwave damage. You clank and thud when you walk in a very authoritative manner.
It takes around ten hours to get through and the replay value is pretty decent.
Darklings: Which is a better buy, Boltgun or Dusk?
Dusk, no question.
Dusk goes to 11 and Boltgun hangs around in the 8.5 to 9 area. There’s some little things that needed to happen to take the game to the next level and they didn’t. For instance, each new monster should get a proper build-up. It should be a mini-story arc; introduction (you hear breathing), rising tension (breathing gets louder and you hear it growl), then climax (the monster attacks). Boltgun doesn’t do that, you just have something new to shoot. When you are entering a boss fight you should know it by the way the map draws you into it. Here you just ran into the boss arena.
And sadly, the boss fights are pretty lame. The bosses are just spongy as hell, also they don’t maneuver very well, so what should be the most exciting part of the game is just a chore to get through.
The difficulty isn’t really a problem, but I was surprised at how easy it was for the level I started playing at. I had started at Medium, got bored, and started a new game on High.
At the end of the day, these are just quibbles. If you love Xoomer shooters and have $20 to burn on a game, you won’t regret it.
I did ask a friend who plays Warhammer 40K to give it a try. He insists that if you are into Warhammer 40,000 it is a must-buy.
At the end of the day…
The Dark Herald Recommends with Confidence (4/5)
*For those of you that don’t know the story… Well, there are several stories about this, all of which are denied by Games Workshop and Blizzard. This is the one I heard from someone in the industry with second-hand knowledge of the events. I’m going to be saying ‘allegedly’ a lot here so bear with, me. Allegedly, Blizzard was a little rushed when they made Warcraft II, and the art designer cribbed from Warhammer. Allegedly, Games Workshop took legal action and followed it up with an offer that the then tiny Blizzard couldn’t refuse. Allegedly, the offer was build an RTS for us on somewhat disadvantageous, but not outrageously so, terms for you. Allegedly, Blizzard started work on a Warhammer version of Warcraft. And then something happened. Everybody guesses as to what. Lots of different versions of the story; everything from Games Workshop got cold feet and pulled the plug to a court decision got made that broke whatever legal sword of Damocles was hanging over Blizzard. All of the stories end with Blizzard tearing up the Warhammer story and inventing their own. But as I said both companies deny it.
**A much more accurate term than the B-word. As the only people playing them are Zoomers and Gen-Xers. I don’t expect the phrase to go viral but live in hope.
