I know absolutely nothing about Warhammer 40K. I know it exists, I know there’s space marines and the name of certain races and groups in the universe, and some of the chaos gods, but that’s really just absorbing random meaningless info from people I watch on the youtubes that like it. So I didn’t go into this game as a 40K fan. I just watched some gameplay videos and it looked fun.

So let’s go and see if it was, indeed, fun!

Developer: Streum On Studio
Publisher: Focus Home Interactive
Release date: June 1st 2021
Platforms: PC, PS4, Xbone, PS5, Xbox X/S (PC version reviewed)
Genre: Doomlike

I honestly don’t even know what the story really is. You’re a bounty hunter in Necromunda, making Martyr’s End your homebase. There’s not much there. Weapon vendor, doctor, bar owner and someone who modifies guns. You work alongside Kal Jerico, who seems to be a character from the board game and books. You’re looking for someone with a bounty on their head with Jerico’s help (well, more like you do things he asks you to), specifically someone who killed someone else that… I don’t know why he matters. You end up starting a big old gang war and stuff. Other than Jerico I’d argue there’s basically no characters in the game. There’s some enemies that the game thinks are important enough to actually talk sometimes, they’re not. Even the final boss gets a bit of a monologue for no real reason. Yeah she’s the final boss, but so little really happens in the plot it doesn’t feel particularly justified. Maybe 40K fans would get something out of the plot that I’m not.

Not much more to even talk about presentation-wise. The game looks pretty decent, you get to see Necromunda in all its… glory? There’s lots of machinery, most broken and decrepit, it looks quite cool with the futuristic ruins kinda look. I feel there’s some pretty heavy pixelation on the enemy outlines when your mastiff is detecting them, it sometimes looks a bit bad. Enemy designs aren’t particularly interesting, but based on their body shape/what they’re wearing/what they’re holding, you can tell at a glance what they’ll end up doing. I do find the voice acting to be pretty bad. Maybe it’s just the character I chose but she had a really thick clearly fake accent, and everyone spoke with basically zero emotion.

PC performance is a bit weird. Generally my PC (3700x, 3060Ti) was running it on ultra at anywhere between 120fps and 180fps (sometimes going above 200). Generally runs fine, but it had this really weird stutter that happened very frequently. I thought it was something with my PC somehow, but I looked around and other people were having that same stutter, some with better hardware than me, so it’s an optimization issue. There’s some experimenting with settings I could’ve done to maybe remove that (I heard not running dx12 helps). But the weirdest thing happened for me. I just upgraded the m.2 drive in my PC, from a meh Lexar m.2 drive to an XPG SX8200 Pro. For some reason, the upgrade almost entirely removed the stutter (it still happened but very rarely). This makes absolutely no sense. Even if the SX8200 is almost twice as fast as the Lexar one I took out, this shouldn’t affect gaming performance (except loading times, which it did a bit). Not too sure what happened. Might be a fluke. As far as consoles, I do hear the PS5 version runs like crap (people saying it runs at 35fps at points), but I can’t verify that. If that’s true that’s pretty unacceptable for an FPS game.

So the gameplay! Before every mission you start in Martyr’s End, a small fairly peaceful place within Necromunda. Before every mission there’s gonna be one or 2 NPCs you’ll have to talk to. Either the bar owner, Jerico, or some dude that knows where different factions live. Also you can pet the dog. And you have a few “stores” to deal with, of course. once you’re done, choose a mission and do it.

Missions are fairly straightforward DOOM-like areas. There’s a path you need to follow to get to the end. Sometimes the ending has a boss. The bosses suck. They do have some alternate paths and hidden things in nooks and crannies, so it’s always fun to explore. Exploring can lead to finding chests, which hold loot. More on loot later. Some areas require some pretty minor puzzle solving to get through, like hitting switches, or finding batteries to power generators.

As far as a moveset, you can move and aim and strafe around as you’d expect from a modern FPS. You can aim down sights. You can jump and double jump. During double jump you have a chance to avoid attacks. You can wall run. There’s very few areas in the game where this is required (if any, honestly I’ve almost never done it on purpose except for the tutorial). You have a chance of avoiding attacks while wall running and while jumping off the wall. You can slide on the ground to pass under certain obstacles. You can dash, either any direction in the air or side-by-side if you’re on the ground. And the last big thing moveset-wise is the grapple hook. You can use it to draw yourself to far platforms, or just move around faster. It’s required literally once in the whole game, so you’ll largely only use it to move faster or find chests maybe (or remove shields from enemies holding shields).

As far as fighting, you have up to 5 guns equipped. One of those guns is forced on you, it’s just the basic pistol. It’s shit, you find better guns literally in the tutorial. But you can never unequip it. Why? Anyways… Guns come in many forms. Autoguns, grav guns, grenade launchers, plasma pistols, stubbers and various other things that you might know from 40K. They tend to function like many kinds of guns in other games. Fully auto guns, semi-autos and such. Enemies tend to have decent HP so you need to shoot them several times to kill them, even with headshots. That’s because this is a bit RPG-ish, so guns have damage values and such. Many enemies also have an energy shield of sorts. Hitting in the head does have a higher chance of crits, so you should do that as much as possible. If an enemy gets stunned, you can get close to them and do a DOOM-style glory kill. The animations for that suck and really you might as well just keep shooting. I find that when I do it, after the animation is done it moves me a few feet away from where I started for some reason, kinda awkward. You also have grenades if you press Q which is a weird button for grenades. They’re rarely as good as guns but they do hit a lot at once. You can heal with F if you have medkits, though you don’t find medkits in levels so the 3 you buy before missions is all you get. You have a different way of healing, based on your bionics (more on that later). And finally, based on your bionics, you may have special attacking skills. These might be good, I don’t know. The problem with them, on PC, is that they kinda suck to use… maybe if you have a really fancy mouse with lots of shortcut buttons you could map them to keys that make sense, as the basic keyboard setup is to place every skill on a separate key, from 1 to – over the letter keys. This is… really awkward. If you could, like, equip 3 and set them to 1, 2 and 3, that would just be inherently more useable. As it is I decided not to spend money on these upgrades because the guns are so strong it’s not even really worth doing.

So Bionics are basically machine upgrades for your human body. There’s multiple characters. Brain, energy shield, arms, legs and probably one or 2 I’m forgetting. These cost money (eventually a decent amount of it). The main level for each category gives you a boost of something may it be HP or energy or something, and it allows you to get the sub skills under the main ones. So leveling up the arm lets you level up the Grappling hook, for example. Some of these upgrades are passive skills, others are active skills as I described above. Everything can be upgraded up to 4 times, making it better each time. A focus on the Voice Implant upgrade is useful because it gives you bonus money. One of the upgrades that I forgot the name of is the most important, it’s the healing one. Basically, it allows you to heal for a bit of time after getting hit by shooting enemies. It makes it pretty hard to die. Since medkits are limited to 3 at a time and you can only replenish them at Martyr’s End, you really need the bionics for healing. Your dog, a nice big Mastiff, can also get bionic upgrades. In battle he’s a bit useful as he can attack enemies, and he also allows you to detect enemies even through walls. Upgrades to him make him faster, stronger, tougher and able to detect things further. It’s pretty useful.

The Artificer shop is the only really useful place in Martyr’s End other than the doctor. This place allows you to equip the archeotech you find on missions to your guns (which will increase your damage a bit, sometimes with different elements which I’m sure is meaningful… maybe?), as well as completely customizing the guns. You can switch all sorts of parts up. You can add a charm, which gives a chance for enemies you kill to drop credits. You can switch stocks, muzzles, sights, grips, magazine and other things based on weapon types. These can change all sorts of things about how the weapon will function, from accuracy to damage to stability.  This is pretty cool, though I do have an issue with it that I will highlight soon.

So… loot. There’s 5 types of loot you may get. Weapons (4 categories: Basic, Pistol, Heavy and Special). You can equip up to 4 weapons. 2 slots for Basic, Heavy and Special combined, 2 slots for pistols, and 1 slot for the shitty starter pistol you don’t want but that the game doesn’t let you unequip. There’s Lucky Charms, which I’ve explained for weapons. They all do the same thing. There’s Archeotech which I already explained. There’s Status Items, which you have only spaces in your inventory for, and you can equip 3 of them. Those give various boosts from better loot bonuses to crit chance to armor to HP and more (as well as some elemental resistances). Then finally there’s armor. Armor sucks. I mean, it’s useful, it boosts your defense. But there’s literally just one kind of armor. Armor will give you defense, yes, but also a few other bonuses at random (similar to Status Item bonuses). You can equip one armor at a time, of course, but you can carry 4… for some reason. Loot comes in 4 forms. Regular, +1, +2 and +3. +3 are obviously the best, but also very rare. For armor and status items, not only will the be better, but they’ll likely have more and stronger stat bonuses.

The reason I feel the loot system is a bit weak is the gun customization. I love that you can customize guns, but the Artificer has all the custom parts from the start and you just need to pay for them. I figure it would be really cool to be able to, like, find unique stocks and muzzles and such that the Artificer doesn’t have access to, this would make gun customization even funner. Also having just one type of armor is a bit weaksauce. Would be cool to have more types of armor and maybe having more armor slots for like, arm armor and shoulder armor and such.

At the end of a mission, you get to decide what to do with the loot you found. Basically any item you don’t keep in your small inventory gets sold off. So you look at everything you found in the mission and decide if you want to upgrade any of your equipment, and sell the rest. And at the start of a mission you get a screen to buy items. There’s medkits and grenades which you’ll want to get. There’s treasure maps which cost 12k but make the drops in one chest better and there’s another item type that does the same thing but not as well. And there’s things that deactivate potentially-trapped chests. This screen is the only place (other than a similar screen in the area where you can test your weapons) where you can change your equipment, it’s a bit odd. Considering you find guns and armor and such during missions, it’s weird that you can’t easily switch them out until you come back to Martyr’s End.

The post-game is pretty dumb. There’s side-missions you can take. They’re generally pretty easy “kill X number of enemies” or “Find X thing” kinda things. They take place in maps you’ve already played in the main missions, rather than original areas. You can do those over and over if you want, get more money and buy all the bionic upgrades I guess. That’s the post-game. Lame missions and getting achievements if you like wasting your time I guess. Yaaaaaaaaay. You get respect or something from factions if you do their side-missions. No idea what that does 😀

Overall

I had a pretty good time with this. The shooting is fun, the upgrades are decent, there’s gameplay variety if the kinda-meh control scheme for the powers doesn’t bother you too much, the combat is really fast and frantic… it’s interesting.

How I described it when I started playing it was “a budget version of DOOM 2016 combined with a budget version of Titanfall 2, with a sprinkle of Borderlands’ loot except you can customize the guns”. And now that I’m done with it, I gotta agree with that early assessment. The combat has the modern DOOM speed and takedowns and something similar to its healing system. It has the Titanfall 2 wall running and sliding and the weapons feel a bit closer to TF2’s than DOOM’s. And there’s loot that in a way I find better than Borderlands (and in some others that I don’t). It’s a fun mix that mostly works but that also doesn’t come close to how good those elements are in those games.

The game has plenty of issues. The takedown animations are pretty bad (and when they finish you tend to move a couple feet away from where you started), having a shitty pistol forced to be equipped on you all the time is really stupid, the loot system needs a bit more stuff (like more armor types and actual gun part drops), the bosses are pretty awful boring bullet sponges, some missions don’t bring you back to the homebase so you can’t restock before the next one, and the controls need some work as far as the special abilities (because using the numbers at the top of the keyboard is a bit unwieldy). It definitely could’ve done with some work, but at the very least this is a good base. Maybe a sequel would add more to it and fix all the little bad things.

I recommend this game on a discount. I don’t know how 40k fans will feel about it as a 40k game though, hopefully some 40K fans have reviewed it to talk about that aspect of it.