Warhammer 40,000: Boltgun

Just finished the first chapter on Exterminatus and I am not convinced I can be bothered going any further. Maybe the 40k nerds will find some enjoyment in it, but for boomer shooter nerds, it's just kinda average. It's there. It exists. It's a game. - Visually, the game is a mess. The enemy sprites aren't great, and by default they're covered in a pixellation filter that makes them look even worse. The footsoldiers and humanoids are all visually very indistinct, and some of the demons (fireball guy + big fireball guy) can appear identical as well. Most enemies are ranged in some capacity, including all the low-tier chaff enemies, and almost every projectile has both a sprite, particle trail and an impact effect. Most of the players bullets explode on impact, and enemies explode into chunks of blood and gore when hit or killed. Arenas are quite large and often both dark and shrouded in a tinted fog. The end result is YOU CANNOT SEE A ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ THING! Up close hallway fights are just a mess of impact explosions and giblets, and long-range fights is just lobbing bullets in the general direction of any enemy tracers. You honest to god cannot see what you're even shooting at most of the time. There's no thought process involved. No target prioritization. Just hipfire randomly into the crowd. - Difficulty wise, it's an absolute snorefest. I completed, on the hardest difficulty, only the first chapter, so maybe it kicks up a bit later on, but I honestly just walked through enemies with my eyes closed. The average room is just chock full of health and ammo and enemies, which when killed then explode into more health and ammo (and in some cases enemies). The sheer amount of pickup spam, in addition to making the game just too easy, can make it hard to see pickups that truly matter. Try finding a medkit when the battlefield is littered with glowing ammo bundles. Want a hint? Check the nearest storage container. Half of them are open on one end with 200HP of health and 100 armour, and they're EVERYWHERE. Each arena has the equivalent of a half dozen megaspheres just laying around. - Level layouts are horrible. I assume this is a fault of the WH40k roots, but levels are huge, often symmetrical, linear and everything just looks the same. You'll notice the copy-pasted rooms as quick as the third level. Every level is the same dark, industrial halls and courtyards full of crates and cargo containers everywhere you go. Some people will handwave it all by saying "But that's 40k!", and maybe that's true, but it doesn't make the game itself any more interesting. And don't bother looking around for anything either; There is nothing interesting to find off the beaten path. No visual storytelling, amazing vista, cool moment or hidden easter egg. At most you'll find some ammo you don't need or a secret, but on that note; - Secrets suck. The majority of secrets in this game are not actually secret; They're just power-ups sitting in the middle of an arena or in some other obvious place. Some secrets, however, are just behind a random wall you need to interact with. I guess the Wolfenstein3D system of the early 1990's doesn't need to be improved upon. Regardless, you'll want to find these secrets to get the associated achievements, which means either putting a lot of attention into exploring the very unremarkable and unrewarding levels, or watching some youtube guide at 2x speed. It's a massive waste of time just to get some powerup that gets immediately used, which contributes to the.. - Meta-progression problem. There is no meta-progression in this game. In games like Heretic, Duke3D, Ion Fury, Hedon etc, you have a limited inventory of powerups you can use at any time. It made exploration (most of the time) rewarding because when you found a powerup you often got to keep it and hold on to it for as long as you needed. I absolutely loved secret hunting in Ion Fury and Hedon because the developers actually put effort into crafting their levels; I didn't need to use a guide to skip the process because the process itself was enjoyable. Not the case in Boltgun. Now a lot of people will say "But this game is a homage to Doom and Doom didn't have an active inventory.", and that brings me to the second point. In Doom, resource preservation was a thing. If you wasted all your rockets and flipped the exit switch, you're going into the next level with no rockets. In Boltgun, your health, armour and ammo are set to a default value at the start of each new level. As a result, time spent doing anything except walking toward the exit is time effectively wasted, because you aren't taking anything with you to any future level. Whatever choices and micro-decisions you made in the level go right out the window. - There is no story. Well that's mostly true. You're sent to... somewhere... to kill things because heresy and so on. You have a skull that flies around that 'speaks' in pointless observations like "Door locked. Find another path. Go down." Thanks Skull, I never would have considered using this nearby elevator after seeing the door blocked by a dozen cargo crates. I am glad you are here. He doesn't actually say words but instead dumps it into a chat log in the top-left corner of the screen. As a result, you're not going to see what he has 'said' most of the time, and you're also rarely going to care. Other than the skull, there's an old woman that spoke once at the start of the chapter and once at the end, and not a single thing other than that. No characters in game, no lorebooks, no visual storytelling, no cinematics. Nothing. In short, the combination of the low-difficulty, long repetitious levels and no real need for mental stimulation just makes the game feel remarkably bland and padded out. You're just walking forward, grinding through rooms full of enemies (that you're barely aiming at and cannot visually distinguish) for 15-20 minutes each level. Repeat until you're ready to stop playing.

tl;dr Fast, simple, and consistent retro shooter fun, it has no pretentions or ambitions beyond that and benefits from that simplicty. Weak navigation tools and some repetition hold it back, but the core loop of moving fast and deleting enemies is solid. Player context Played through the main campaign on Emperors Mercy difficulty, will probably start the Forges of Corruption DLC soon, and tried Horde mode (wasn't really my thing). Boltgun sits as a companion piece to the events around the THQ/Saber Space Marine game timeline, starting after Space Marine and much before the events of Space Marine 2. It deliberately goes in the opposite direction of Space Marine 2: much lower narrative focus, no squad play, no cinematic pacing, and no multiplayer pressure. Malum Caedo fights alone, in first-person, charging into enemies like Doomguy on meth rather than letting yourself get swarmed like Lieutenant Titus. Retro visual style can be adjusted. Movement is fast, with weighty impacts, chainsword melee, and no fall damage (thank the Emperor). Ledge climbing is a modern gaming inclusion, and works cleanly. The Good Combat loop is very strong. Movement feels great: fast traversal between enemies, but still grounded rather than floaty. Movement is comparable to the king of boomershooters Dusk, if a tad slower but weightier. Enemy variety felt strong early: you are introduced to nurglings, cultists, Chaos Marines, Chaos Terminators, plague drones, champions and more. But as soon as you hit Chapter Two you realised the game frontloaded almost all the enemy types from the very start. Unlike older shooters where you drop starting weapons immediately, here loadout swapping stays meaningful throughout. All the weapons remain relevant throughout, and all are fun to use. The boltgun and shotgun were my reliable defaults when exploring the maps, swapping out to different tools when the situation demanded it.. Enemy “rating” system pushes weapon choice. Shotgun works well for grouped low-tier enemies, but higher-tier units encourage Plasma or Melta guns. You find temporary buffs throughout most of the maps, and the buffs work differently on each weapon. This system works, but I thought it felt unitiutive, was not well explained and adds unnecessary friction. Frag and Krak grenades are everywhere, don't avoid using them, even the humble frag could do decent damage to Chaos Marines. Vortex grenades are best saved for bosses. Enemies turning on each other due to accidental friendly fire was one of my favourite things in Quake, and it's here too! Taking a leaf out of Nu-Doom level design, maps are mostly hallways in-between the set piece arena fights, where you and waves of Chaos filth are locked together until you are the last man standing. You win by prioritising enemies, using the right tools for the right enemies, noting location of powerups, health and armour. Verticality is consistently useful, fun and adds dimension to the maps. I enjoyed the Chapter 2 map biomes and environments most. Malum Caedo has some character moments through animations and taunts without overdoing it. The Bad Performance is slightly underwhelming. Around 110–120 FPS on my hardware despite simple visuals, fog-heavy limits to view distance, and a retro style that should scale higher. And yes, I did check settings to ensure FPS wasn't limited to 120. As mentioned before, enemy variety drops off after the early chapters due to front-loading. Sound design is serviceable but repetitive. Enemy audio barks and soundtrack loop quickly. Chapter pacing becomes repetitive in places. By chapter 3, frequent greater demon encounters start to blur together and slow momentum. The Ugly No automap. Navigation relies on memory and directional markers. A navigation path option (which was added later in a patch) helped here, but it does not replace a proper automap like Doom or Descent. Exploration and secret hunting suffer as a result. Conclusion Boltgun is not trying to be complex or ambitious. It is a straightforward shooter that prioritises movement and combat clarity over systems or narrative. Compared to many modern entries in the subgenre, it holds its own mechanically. It compares very strongly to even the better Boomer Shooters that started almost a decade ago. I feel no strong pull to replay for secrets or completion, but the core experience works well in short bursts. Do not expect depth beyond what it shows early. Expect a competent, focused shooter that knows exactly what it is doing and stops there, and ends before it started to outstay its welcome.

Auroch is a great company from Bristol. This game is really fun. The most satisfying gibbing and for me a nice kick to the nostalgia. On the flip side, it's like they had two level designers with opposing philosophies, one made really fun levels with arenas and good pacing and another made labyrinths with very poorly signposted paths and key hunting. I really love the good levels, but man the bad ones DRAAAAAG as you wander around the utterly empty, identical halls trying to find the narrow gap that's actually the way forward.

This game is ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ sick and violent, I got it to get into Warhammer, 0 regrets, if you wanna get into Warhammer get this game and kill some bastards

This is game pretty meh but I'll start with the positives: The artstyle and music are pretty good, movement and gunplay is good and the controls feel solid and responsive. (Also since I don't know warhammer and it's story very well then I'll just be focusing on the game and not the story, but I will say the story cutscenes look nice and are animated well). Here are my critiques: The levels and their layouts are really boring and most of them just blend together. The game doesn't try anything unique in terms of gameplay elements and every level is literally just collecting keys and killing the same dozen enemy types over and over and a lot of the guns feel pointless and gimmicky. My biggest complaint is the difficulty curve, actually it's more of a difficulty straight line that shoots right into space. The first 3 or so levels were pretty simple and straightforward but suddenly the game treats the player like they're in the late game and starts spawning 10 enemies at once and this trend never dies down, the game just decides that from now on every single level will just keep going up and up in difficulty with hundreds of enemies to kill per level. At a certain point it becomes impossible to focus due to the amount of ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ on screen, shooting at you from every angle. The difficulty doesn't feel earned because none of the encounters feel thought out or memorable, they all just boil down to cheap enemy spam with no cohesion. This game was a headache to play so it gets a 3/10

Despite having "gun" in its title, it misses the mark in being a great retro FPS. My main gripe is that a lot of levels look the same, are a bit long, and the boring soundtrack makes them even more forgettable. The same can be said for the enemies, in which most of them are not fun to shoot or get shot by. Boltgun is only okay, and there are way better games out there, where you can shoot demons as a space dude. I hope Boltgun 2 is one of them.

My first Warhammer experience, and a solid, if not overly safe, Boomer Shooter. The gunplay, sound design, and pixel art sprites were strong, and the presentation overall was good. The level design was underwhelming, being bland arenas bridged by linear hallways, and the environment art was generic. Despite an attempt to create interesting gameplay mechanics with the chainsaw, charge, and taunt, their implementation was superficial. They never felt like core aspects of the experience, and you could remove them from the game and nothing would really change. The enemy variety was good, but the boss variety was abysmal. Be prepared to fight the same three unengaging bullet sponges repeatedly – an issue large non-boss enemies also shared (I’m looking at you Plague Toads). There was no discernable attempt at characters or story, meaning its lack of exceptionality never affected my experience. The Forges of Corruption DLC was great, and an improvement from the base game. The environments were a lot more grand and beautiful. The higher intensity and additional weapons also made it more engaging. However, the lack of a weapon wheel, despite having a maximum of ten guns, was a baffling exclusion. If you enjoy the base game, this DLC is an easy recommendation. Ultimately, whilst it wasn’t exceptional, the game was fun, and I enjoyed my time with it. I recommend this if you enjoy Boomer Shooters, even if they don’t innovate or stand out.

[H3] A brilliant first impression paves the way for a repetitive grind that seemingly never ends. [/h3] Opinions are divided on Boltgun online, but when you first boot-up the game you’ll probably think “Hey, this is pretty good!”. The art design is gorgeous and feels like a remaster of [i]Squad Command[/i], the outrageously underrated PSP tactics game. The huge number of detailed, handcrafted assets build out the world, and the environments change colour regularly to keep things visually fresh. One of my favourite visual details is the idle animation: where your Space Marine character will pull out his Codex Astartes, a mix between the bible and The Art of War, and begins flipping through the pages. The very first weapon - the titular Boltgun - feels like it could punch a hole through a shipping container. Ammo is plentiful and many enemies will simply explode the moment a bullet touches them. The controls are tight too, despite commanding the space hulk, much like driving a high powered supercar. The look and feel of Boltgun is absolutely spot on. Sadly, the tedium begins to set in before the first chapter is over. There are [i]hundreds[/i] of enemies crammed into each level, and fighting them isn’t particularly engaging. Enemies will either blow up into red mist immediately upon touching you, or take enough boltgun bullets to maim a horse. Bullet sponge enemies get increasingly tiresome as the game throws more and more at you, making each corridor last longer than the previous, slowing the pacing to a crawl. By chapter 2 it seemed unfeasible to even attempt killing every enemy in a level, and I just began sprinting through each stage only shooting what I needed to progress. Enemies aren’t placed in interesting positions - just spammed everywhere. This lack of intentionality is most keenly felt in the level design. Boltgun’s levels feel like a handful of assets thrown into a blender and the end result emptied onto a 2D map. Barrels are randomly placed in corners of the map, there are very few puzzles at all, and secrets are indistinguishable from regular armour and weapon pick-ups that you’ll encounter naturally. There’s also no downtime either - it’s constant waves of enemies until you’re onto the next. Every level, stage and chapter is too long for its own good, and everything is cluttered with [i]things[/i] for things-sake. Boltgun is a good first draft of a game. The artists have done a fantastic job building the W40K universe and, mechanically, Boltgun is sound. Serious work needs to be done on the pacing and mission variety, however, if the sequel is to interest me. We need lower enemy counts, more interesting level design, and the introduction of meaningful downtime to create the game this ought to be.

[h1] Warhammer 40,000: Boltgun: 100% COMPLETION REVIEW [/h1] [hr][/hr] [code][b]If you love completing games, take a look at our [url=https://store.steampowered.com/curator/44890520/]curator site. [/url][/b][/code] [hr][/hr] IT IS I, MALUM CAEDO! MY LOVE FOR THE IMPERIUM IS MATCHED ONLY BY MY HATRED FOR THE HERETIC! YOU WILL DROWN IN YOUR OWN BLOOD! FOR ULTRAMAR!!! Definitely a gem among the sea of boomer shooters of this era. It's not the best boomer shooter ever made, there's a few problems, like the repetitive environments and overly tanky enemies, but the word "badass" doesn't even do this game justice, it's heretic purging at its finest! Boltgun has slower movement since we're a space marine in bulky blue armor, but one can simply toggle the Sprint key on. There's some story I think, but it's just there to justify the heretic bloodbath. Going in without being a Warhammer nerd is fine, we're here to make the Emperor proud. Boltgun takes place in the wake of the 'Grimskull War' on Forgeworld Graia, if that helps. There's three Chapters and the DLC, Forges of Corruption. It doesn't overstay its welcome, it's a fairly short journey. There's secrets that are actually power ups, and speaking of which, they're absolutely necessary to make it through the Exterminatus difficulty, which in turn makes Boltgun reach its true potential. Don't get me started on Horde Mode, that one in the same difficulty makes anyone put their gamer pants on! Highly recommended for any boomer shooter enthusiast.

The game is okay. It does most things either kinda mid or decently and few things exceptionally. The biggest issue is how the movement and enemy projectiles work with the map design. They chose the old-school approach where you retain a lot of momentum after stopping and can often slide several feet forward. Along with having much less air-control than most "Boomer Shooters" this makes the player feel big and weighty but not at all nimble. Which is fine but the maps can be very tight and full of little props that can make movement frustrating . The game often forces you into arenas to fight and while I can tell that I'm meant to run around and bring the fight to the enemy it's often better to just look for chokepoints. Especially on exterminatus difficulty. This is made worse with how several of the enemies projectiles work. Many enemies fire slow inacurate fire with an attempt to lead their shots. [list] [*]Inacurate fire means you need more room to move or side-step and many maps make this hard. [*]Leading shots cause more frustraion as enemies don't always seem to do it but when they do it just feel chaotic and a bit cheap. [*]Slow projectiles means I'm often waiting for shots to hit terrain before I can get back to shooting enemies. [/list] This means the best thing to do is often camp corners and kill enemies at distance which doesn't at all feel like how the game was envisioned. Feels like the devs that designed the gameplay and the devs that made the maps were making seperate games. I'm guessing playing on a lower difficulty and tanking shots made some of these problems less apparent. I played on exterminatus and while I didn't have much trouble it exposed some of the games cracks and made the game feel like a slog at times and a little undercooked. I hope they figure some of this out for the sequel. If you like 40k and FPS games than it's not bad on a sale but there are a lot better "Boomer Shooters" to play on Steam.