Warhammer 40,000: Boltgun

You prefer Ultrakill because it reminds you of Doom Eternal I prefer Boltgun because it reminds me of Doom The Dark Ages We are exactly the same

I don't know man... on paper I should've loved this. I love Doom old and new, I loved Dusk, but this one... I felt like I got the gist after level one and all they had to offer from there was bigger swarms and longer battles. Game has two songs max. Somehow this made a repetitive experience even more repetitive. Game has two scenarios. No monsters, or all monsters lobbed at you in circular arena. Maybe they mix up how many dudes come at you of one ilk or another but the game plan is the same: Ride out the bullet sponges and don't stand still. 80% of enemies are just shooting things at you. Don't really vary up how you play. And the one odd duck, the dasher upper guy, they somehow made wildly frustrating. Pros: Looks great and plays great! They just didn't know how to give their game variety and I didn't feel too motivated to "git gud." Ah well. Good luck on the sequel y'all!

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.

游戏挺好玩，不过不知道为啥皮肤越来越红力量还变大了

[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.

战锤+复古Doom 射射射的游戏，堆怪严重，爽确实爽，但是到后面就陷入虚无和迷茫的状态，不知道为啥要进行下去了，就弃坑了，也许跟我不是战锤粉丝有关吧····

瘟疫蟾蜍和神选勇士今晚就瞬移到你设计师被窝里

My therapist says I should deal with my anger in healthier ways. The Emperor disagrees tho.

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.