It's a perfectly good boomer shooter that nails both the 90s shooter and 40k esthetics. It does exactly what you'd want it to do. But I wound up having to put it down for a few weeks about halfway through the single player campaign (I was traveling and away from the sole computer I could play it on) and when I returned, I didn't feel compelled to play more of it or finish the campaign. I'm sure there were probably a couple more enemy types to see, maybe a weapon, definitely a boss or two. But I felt like I'd already seen what the game wanted to show me, and understood what the game is about, to the point that I'd prefer to invest time in some other game instead. Certainly the barely-there plot didn't demand resolution.

I don't know if that's a critique of this game in particular, or the boomer shooter thing in general. I think it's worth noting that this game is very clear about what it wants to accomplish, and it really nails that. The developers should be congratulated as far as that goes. But beyond the nostalgia factor, the sensation of playing the shareware Knee Deep in the Dead again, there's just not that much here.

One other, more specific critique: the game gives you a chainsword (classic bit of 40k gear) and attendant melee mechanics, but I don't think they work. I never got a handle on charging up the chainsword and then using it, and it never felt like it did enough extra damage to justify the risk of using it versus a more conservative strategy of firing from behind cover. I think melee combat in this game needed more work to make it easier to use and more powerful.

Zero bolt, lots of gun.
Warhammer 40,000 BoltGun is a satisfying boomer shooter that delivers a repetitive but enjoyable power fantasy. BoltGun is best played a few levels at a time as to not burn out on its mow them down gameplay loop.
Firstly, I must say I have very limited knowledge and experience in the Warhammer universe but quiet a large history in the FPS and Boomer Shooter genre. That said I quiet enjoy my BoltGun playthrough as it delivers a fast passed, kill everything, super soldier experience. Theres something particularly satisfying about the loud footsteps stomping around as you chainsaw your way through demons and monsters mercilessly. The weapon feel was nice but I wasn’t a huge fan of the limited variety and the lack of any new weapon types. Unfortunately, you will quickly realise that your arsenal is nothing new and is quiet generic in the Boomer Shooter market.
The level design and variety was quite nice and you get to explore some unique locations that I quiet enjoyed. However, there were a handful of occasions that I found myself turned around and walking back the way I came due to the graphical style or lack of directional prompt. Occasionally BoltGun expects you do to some very mediocre platforming when the level design seems to hit its lowest but thankfully this is not very regular.
In summary if your looking for more Boomer in your Shooter and needs more games to fill the void, then I definitely recommend giving 40k BoltGun a go especially for the low price of Game Pass.

Closer to Doom 2016 than older shooters with its arenas, and how both work, but that's fine, I guess.

Tedious, not in difficulty, but in level design. A simple automap would've made the experience way more enjoyable (there's even the otherwise useless skull servitor accompanying you), as the samey corridors really do blend in, and found it quite easy to miss a switch/terminal, and kept going in circles. Took a look at the various forums, and looks like I'm not alone here. Was playing on hard difficulty, and found the overall difficulty to be just fine. Sometimes Aspiring Champions positioned right behind a gate would make me groan, but whatever.

Also not a fan of how the machine spirits secrets/upgrades work, wishing they persisted across missions, but maybe got taken away between chapters (if they have to be taken away for balancing reasons), but it's a power fantasy, let me be obscenely strong.

Otherwise, shooting & movement felt nice, and the trail of gibs you leave behind is neat. You can somewhat zip around the arenas utilizing the Chainsword Charge. Neat. On a side note, found it amusing how Melta got made into the super shotgun. One more thing, the damage feedback's kinda wonky.

Apart from one Legendary Ambull fight, where the boss got stuck on some boxes, I didn't find any bugs.

Tldr: This game almost only consists of big arena fights. If you like that this game will be amazing for you. If you prefer more linear shooters this game will get tedious very quickly.



I really would love to like this game but unfortunately I can't. The weapons are meaty and chunky, hit feedback is amazing because everything explodes into tiny pieces and the taunt button is amazing too.

There is just one very big problem for me: the fact that this is an arena shooter through and through. I don't mind an arena fight every now and then in my shooters, but this game is arena after arena after arena after arena. It gets boring and repetitive very quick and it also feels very lazy compared to the level design of other shooters.
Also I definitely miss a map in this game because the levels can get really confusing at times.

Played just under 2 hours and while it certainly isn't terrible (really enjoyed the presentation and the guns felt good to shoot), there was something off about the gameplay. Surviving hordes of enemies at the end of a mission where they spawn in gradually with no real indicator of progress felt bad. You just had a mark at the top of the screen saying Purge the Heretics, and had to shoot the same enemies spawning in for what always felt like an excessive period of time. When I think back to why Doom worked for me it was frequently the level design that gripped me. In Boltgun, at least from what I played, it never felt all that fun to explore. Just walking down hallways shooting really easy to kill AI. If it gets better that's great, but after two short sessions I've felt no desire to revisit this game.

Some of the most satisfying weapons I've ever had the pleasure of wielding in an FPS. I just wish that the Chaos Space Marines were a little bit more threatening in order to better sell the power-fantasy that this game otherwise executes upon wonderfully well. An option to increase enemy projectile speed could also be nice. Even on Exterminatus the game is quite comfortable to complete and arguably too easy, though this is also largely in part to the frequent checkpoints minimizing frustration. I can already see that trying to pull off deathless clears in some of these long missions will be a nightmare.

It felt great to finally have an arsenal that plays super well with the crosshairs disabled after the disappointment of Wrath A.o.E.'s pistol and shotgun lacking trajectory feedback.

I eagerly await more 40k FPS outings done in this style. I wish this had a map editor and mod support. Would be pretty cool if Focus Entertainment/Auroch Digital were flooded with requests by the community...

Oh yeah, quick tip; sustained Heavy Bolter fire prevents Aspiring Champions from entering phase 2.
Ditto with the pinkies.

- Muerte a los herejes!!! -
Que buen juego, es accion pura desde inicio hasta el final con oleadas de enemigos que hasta en la dificultad Normal son muy sofocantes y las boss fights se pueden hacer muy duras tambien. En general casi todos gusto solo 3 cositas no, y fueron:
1) tener que conseguir siempre las leaves xd
2) se volvia muy monoto siempre pelear en lugares muy cerrados contra las emboscadas .
3) la poca variedad de enemigos despues de cierta parte del juego.

This game is an odd mix of both surprisingly polished and pretty underbaked. The basics of movement and shooting feel really good - the heavy stomp of your boots, the feedback of each weapon fire, the way you zip to enemies with the chainsaw or charge through them with your dash. It's a great foundation that, unfortunately, doesn't ever really get built upon.

The chainsaw is a good example of this wasted potential. It's a sick melee attack that pauses the flow of combat for a second and allows for some very rapid movement/i-frames, but it rarely feels necessary to utilize those things. It doesn't go full DOOM 2016 glory kill with it, so it ended up being pretty rare that I actually used it.

There are other examples of these kinds of shortcomings. The surfacing of the "strength" stat on weapons is an interesting choice, and feels like it could have led to some strategic decision making if there had been, like, literally one more stat to factor in, but as it is, you're just making the same "stronger enemy = stronger weapon" choice you'd almost certainly be making anyway. Similarly, the level design can be a bit repetitive, with a lot of geometry copy/pasted into sprawling, labyrinthine designs, that ALMOST feels intentional in a dungeon-crawling sort of way that very nearly worked for me, but the lack of a map prevents the levels from daring to be truly massive mazes.

All that said, I didn't have a...bad time with it, overall? Once I accepted its limits, it became a passable game to catch up on some podcasts to for a few hours of mindlessly running around blasting enemies and not bothering to find all the secrets. Unfortunately, it's more just boring than bad, which is maybe my least favorite thing to feel about a piece of art.

I went into boltgun after watching some glowing reviews on Youtube and unfortunately I did not leave this game with the same emotions or thoughts as those youtubers did (No hate though love those fellas, pancreasnowork especially) there were several reasons for this.

First being the level design because my lord is it atrocious at times you don't have a map for this game which just doesn't make sense as a design decision.

There's an emphasis on verticality in the game and tons of backtracking due to you having to get keys and other doohickeys, I think an ideal compromise would have been a realtime updating map as you move around but no map at all makes it super frustating to reach locations you've already seen.

Combat is quite good in the first act. You get new weapons almost exactly when the weapons you already have start getting old but the enemies you fight don't really evolve to compensate for all the weapons you have even accounting for the weapon reset that happens each act as you get all your weapons very quickly. This weapon reset thing is also very annoying as each time it happened it almost felt like you were starting the game AGAIN, this was not only frustrating but made the game last way longer than it should have.

Third was the movement, it was fast which is always cool but honestly in a genre that this game claims to be part of which always has insane movement tech this game lacks...anything of the sort except the dash you get from the chainsaw and the put-myself-into-a-bad-spot charge which is super useless past the first act.

In conclusion, if you ever want a game that you can mindlessly play while some guy on youtube talks to you about how boomer shooters are cool and internally feel confused as to you why you're continuing to play one that would have probably benefited tremendously if it actually straight up copied things from it's betters play this one!

Take “boomer shooter” out of your vocabulary; the term has been rendered meaningless.

I knew this entire little sub-genre of first-person shooters was cooked the second that the joint advertising teams of Games Workshop and Focus Entertainment all came to the conclusion that “boomer shooter” is a marketable enough selling point to tie your multi-million dollar IP to. If, indeed, it ever did mean something, it doesn’t anymore. What a boomer shooter is, in a post-Boltgun world, is “a shooter with pixel graphics”. That’s all. And if that’s all that it was — just a Doom Eternal demake — that would be forgivable. But the reality is that Boltgun is a completely miserable experience made by people who have zero fucking clue what they’re doing, chasing after trends without so much as an inkling of understanding as to why those trends are popular in the first place. Sure, fuck it. The new Doom games are gory shooters. Throwback games made popular by studios like New Blood seem to sell well. All we need to do is put the two together, boom! Free money! Paint it all in space marines and warp and chaos and we’ll be billionaires before breakfast tomorrow. How hard could it be?

I can’t fucking stand Boltgun. For some ungodly reason, someone in charge decided that the best people to put to work on a first-person shooter would be a crack team of board game and strategy developers from Auroch Digital, all of them completely unqualified to get to work on a project such as this. Consider this your first warning sign, long before you even boot up the game; why would Focus hire out to the studio behind Achtung! Cthulhu Tactics and Beermaster: Beer Brewing Simulator to make what’s intended to be a fast, brutal, tightly-paced shooter? Is it because they genuinely believed that these were the best people for the job, or was it because some tiny management-game studio from Bristol wasn’t asking for as much money as the next guys who knew what they were doing? I don’t blame Auroch, necessarily; I know what it’s like to be way in over my head under the guidance of a boss who doesn’t know enough to understand how badly I’m fucking up.

Boltgun is a game of numbers, and not of much else. “Suit your weapon’s strength to an enemy’s toughness rating,” reads one particularly cheery loading screen tip. As requested, I take aim at a Level 3 Nurgling with my STR 5 Boltgun, and the taste of bile in the back of my throat gets harder to ignore. Locking your reticle on an enemy will give you every detail about them you could ever want to know: their name, their level, total health, current health, social security number, bank password, browser history, the works. You swap between the weapons on your hotbar and each of them tells you the exact strength and name of the equipped gun: STR 4 Boltgun, STR 3 Meltagun, STR 7 Plasma Gun. Poke around levels for long enough and you’ll find secret pickups that’ll boost the power of your weapons, adding all sorts of little tags like “Kraken Round Magazine” and “Dragonfire Round Magazine” or “Machine Spirit Upgrade”. Your HUD gets flooded with all of these details, paradoxically taking up so much space on the screen that it’s near-impossible to read any of it. One pressing question remains, throughout all of this:

Why?

What do we gain from having all of this worthless fucking information on the screen at all times? Seriously, what the fuck is the point? I don’t need to know the enemy’s level. I don’t need to know exactly how much health they have. I don’t need to know a numerical value for how strong my weapons are. I don’t need to know what type of ammo I’ve got loaded into my boltgun. I don’t need to know the maximum amount of health that an enemy could theoretically have. I don’t fucking need any of this. How are you getting lapped in your UI design by the original Doom, a game that came out three fucking decades ago and realized then that you didn’t need to tell the player all of this completely fucking worthless information? If you didn’t know before playing that Auroch were strategy game developers and not people who make shooters, this is what gives it away; such a fucking obsession with showing numbers to the player in a situation where they’re worse than useless.

And none of this would matter, really, if the game were fun. If this was all just pointless, ignorable set-dressing for a game that otherwise works fine, then I could forgive it. I can’t, though, because Boltgun commits the mortal sin of being abjectly fucking boring. This might be one of the most pathetically easy games I’ve ever played, even with the difficulty cranked as high as it can go. Enemies feel like they’re shooting at you only as a formality, firing projectiles that move in slow-motion across the screen that’ll land in a different zip code so long as you strafe left. This is true for just about every enemy that can fire something at you. All of them are so sluggish that it’s as if they’re only pulling the trigger at you because they’d get fired and lose their health insurance if they didn’t. The flamers might be one of the most unintentionally hilarious monsters I’ve ever seen in a game like this; I think doctors test for brain activity by whether or not you’ve ever taken a hit from a fireball a flamer has thrown at you. You could only ever get clipped if you were comatose. Exterminatus difficulty does seem to make projectiles go a bit faster, and spawns more numerous and more powerful enemies, but I imagine most people who have played a game before could do most of this in their sleep. Not because they’re god gamers, but because Boltgun never stops drowning the player in goodies.

Pickups are peppered fucking everywhere in all of these over-long levels, littering the floor with every single type of ammo, every single grenade, and more health and armor kits than anyone could ever possibly need. There’s a section on the right side of the screen dedicated to telling you which pickups you got, and you should get used to seeing it be filled with nothing but “Boltgun ammo full, Boltgun ammo full, Heavy bolter ammo full, Krak grenade full, Health full, Health full, Health full, Boltgun ammo full, Plasma gun ammo full, Health full, Heavy bolter ammo full, Shotgun ammo full, Health full”. Outside of Exterminatus difficulty, I don’t think you ever even need to switch weapons; you get so much ammo for every single gun that you’ll never get so much as an opportunity to run a weapon dry. Armor needs to drain to zero before enemies can start dealing direct health damage, and armor caps out at 300(!!!!!), meaning you’ll always have plenty of +100 health kits to backtrack for in the unlikely situation that your foes manage to break through your 300 armor and get to your 200 health. I walked out of every stage with more supplies than I walked into them with, even after certain stages would force me into a minimum of four purges before I was allowed to move on.

In addition to your usually loop of finding color-coded keys and unlocking color-coded doors, Boltgun takes a page from the new Doom titles with the purge mechanic, where all of the doors lock and you aren’t allowed to progress until you’ve killed everything inside. New enemies will constantly spawn in, so it’s mostly just an exercise in strafing around and firing at the teleport particle effects. Enemies spawn in slowly, and the purge arenas are often big enough that you’ll be running around trying to find where the fucking enemies actually are so you can shoot them and progress. A big part of what makes these encounters so slow is that enemies spawn in waves, where more of them refuse to teleport in until you’ve killed everything from the first wave; there’ll be some shit gunner who dies in three shots from the Boltgun meandering around two continents away, and it’s up to you to go and find him so that you can get the momentum going again. There’s no challenge, there’s no pressure, it’s just blindly wandering through these enormous arenas trying to figure out if everyone else went home and didn’t tell you.

A part of me is grateful that this is on Game Pass, because it means that I didn’t need to spend a cent of my own money beyond what I was already paying to find out how atrocious this really is. The other part of me is annoyed, because I never would have bothered trying this out had it not been offered to me as part of a package deal. The only thing it cost me was my time; the one resource I can never get more of. What a complete and utter waste. You know a game is really bad when it ignites the flames of existential dread. There were so many better things I could have done with my time, and I instead allowed this game made and marketed by clueless people to suck it all away and leave me with a taste in my mouth like I ate two servings of dirt. The bar for Warhammer games is on the fucking floor. Do yourself a favor and try to forget that this even exists. I’m sorry for writing this review and reminding you of it if you’d gotten it out of your mind.

I can offer no greater condemnation than by stating that this is a sprite-based game with vertical mouselook.

I'm gonna be honest, this games first act is boring as shit. The first few levels are actually really enjoyable, because it really does make you feel like a juggernaut mother fucker just plowing through dudes who can barely touch you and you blow them apart in a few shots with a VERY satisfying weapon (I'll get to that), but the arenas quickly become very stale, and very little is done to provide any real sense of challenge. That ends around halfway through however, and some of these arenas are so well put together, and so visually intricate that dancing through waves of enemies and during them all to paste with your bolter becomes a delight. The weapons of this game are phenomenal, each of them is super satisfying to use and feel very powerful. The audio of the game is so excellent, replicating the retro aesthetic of the visuals while having a more modern polish to it. This is a really fascinating game, and I can easily recommend it to anyone who enjoys shooters. Might even make me a warhammer fan, but to be honest probably not lol