Warhammer 40,000: Boltgun

This game fills me with anger and simultaneous nothingness - None of the guns feel fun - Story feels flat even as someone who knows the basics of Warhmammer - Levels feel tedious to go through - Visuals range from boring to an eyesore - All enemies are boring to fight outside of the one boss I fought and Black Legion Chaos Marines which don't feel balanced. There are way better boomer shooters you can play that are cheaper even when this game is on sale.

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.

It’s… alright? I don’t know. The game lags and stutters. This, in itself, in a fast-paced game, is a deal-breaker. You will die when the action peaks because the game is lagging on you. Or the elevator will bug out, and you will fall down, or an enemy gets stuck somewhere. -The music is non-existent, just… ‘metal’ noise. This is almost half the game: the music, especially during action. Imagine DOOM without music… yeah, not great. - The maps are either good or awful, it depends on the level. The upside-down castle was a highlight, and so was the desert, because I like deserts, but the whole first chapter is purple corridors. - At the start of the game, the maps are linear, and I like that more than a wide arena where you have to press N to find your way, and almost every level has this ‘go find red key to continue’. And there’s no map to look at and decide where to explore or where to go. Was creating a map really that hard, or goes against their vision for this game? Why would it be? - ”Secrets”: this might be the worst one yet. Each level has 6 secrets, which consist of max ammo, better ammo, or a weapon upgrade, and there’s no way to find them unless you spend 20 minutes extra checking every corner of every area of the level. Again, a map would have helped. To make it worse, tying weapon upgrades, which are essential to progress because enemies get stronger and more numerous, to optional secrets is quite the decision. - Another deal breaker for me in games is enemy variety, or the lack of it: a human with a gun, a big human with a gun, or a blue or pink beast. Add to this the fact that it is a pixel art style game, it’s almost impossible to tell who I am shooting at a distance. The real problem with this is that they are the same shapes and behaviors in every level: enemies charge brainlessly at you or stand there and shoot… There are like 10 unique enemies total. You beat a boss, then he is reintroduced later for you to beat him again: I despise this, not only hate it, no, I despise it. Everything special about the boss and its original encounter is meaningless now since I’m fighting him again. - ”Purge” encounters: all of a sudden, while playing, your screen is flashed red, and the music changes, and you are locked in a room with endlessly-spawning minions and a couple of real enemies to kill. This feels like another optional thing, like Slayer gate challenges in Doom Eternal… except they are mandatory here, you are stuck till you clear the area of heresy. - One final annoying thing is how some pickups, especially armor and health, do not get picked up unless you absolutely walk over them precisely, which is plain annoying. Furthermore, in big fights, I just want to be healed right away, there’s no time to pay attention and walk over pickups with deadly accuracy. You can’t walk by them, or near them, you must go over them or hug the wall if they are near a wall. Again, DOOM, in there, the pickups are automatically gained when you are in their vicinity. Now, the game does have nice things going for it: the movement is slick, your marine bunny-hoping and dashing straight through enemies, landing from a height shakes the ground, straight out of Doom the Dark Ages (or the other way around), the guns feel nice, running and blasting heretics with a shotgun up close and personal is fun. But. Eventually, once the novelty wears off, it gets really boring. There’s virtually no story to keep it interesting, no discernible objective, no map to collect the secrets and upgrades which makes you stronger and thus more fun to keep playing, no nothing… just run and shoot your way through the level, which is fine for some people, but for me this is just thankless toil, and then on top of that you have all those issues mentioned earlier making this game a boring slog.

食之无味弃之可惜，刚开始两小时还有新鲜感，而后无趣涌上心头，平庸是他最小的问题，糟糕的武器平衡，脚滑的移动手感，简陋的近战攻击，无法取消的换弹，彻底没活的堆怪，存档点的设置问题也不小，只有嘲讽还稍微有点意思，但没有任何用处；如果在2016年之前推出他将无疑是优秀的，但现在是平庸的

If you need a game that provides good, mindless fun, then Boltgun should scratch that itch. Think of it as Doom Eternal with pixel graphics. 6.75/10

Absolutely amazing boomer-shooters. Interesting maps, strength mechanic is pretty fun. Fights are fast paced and even the mandatory arena sections don't feel like that much of a slow down. 9/10.

A fun retro style shooter game. Has nice variety of weapons to combat different enemies of different strength levels. Movement is good and easy to get used to. Some levels can get chaotic in Exterminatus difficulty in a fun way. DLC offers 2 new fun weapons to your arsenal, and the final boss for the DLC... sure is something.

I can recommend Boltgun, because it isn't necessarily a [i]bad[/i] game, but it does have plenty of tedium and incohesive gameplay design. As a fan of 40k and an even bigger fan of retro and retro-throwback shooters, it's a mixed bag of cool 40k weapons and designs along with rather uninteresting execution in utilizing those. Much of the game is running from arena shootout to arena shootout with hallways of a few enemies between. You'll see the same handful of enemies and use the same 3 or 4 weapons for the first couple of hours. That does get a couple more weapons added on much later, but the slow grind to get there doesn't feed into any excitement or motivation to do so. Though, for that time, the titular Boltgun is satisfying to use against softer targets in the initial chapter. There are few levels where the design is just counter-intuitive. One being a large, open area with a singular, slow moving elevator or mag-lift to get you across a canyon. They dot the sides of the arena with some collectibles and enemies, but jumping to them means trekking back and waiting for that elevator to come back. In a fairly fast-paced game, those slowdowns are excruciatingly noticeable. The game can also sort of be broken by playing it like Quake, utilizing bunny hops and momentum to make every engagement feel a little mindless, especially as enemies become bullet sponges. There [i]are[/i] some interesting 40k quirks in there. Some fun taunts that make for a funny moment. But, don't expect a deep or meaningful story or an "Astartes Sim". It's just a mindless romp through some pixelated 40k arenas. That's not a bad thing, but it's going to leave some wanting a lot more.

Boring...

No idea what the story was but gameplay is fun. Only downside was massive FPS drops during final fight.