The bargain-bin version of Id Software's latest outing, Necromunda: Hired Gun has some fun moments, but does nothing to distinguish itself from its (reasonably priced) competition.
Necromunda is a fast-paced linear shooter. two biggest influences seem to be Nu-Doom and Rage 2. Like Nu-Doom, the game is a linear, fast-paced shooter that generally funnels from combat arena to combat arena, occasionally breaking up the monotony with a bit of platforming. Like Rage 2, you have a variety of superpowers that you can upgrade throughout the game, including slo-mo and wallrunning. There's a bit of Borderlands in here as well: in between missions, there's a hub world where you can buy upgrades and sell your gear.
Those two games are awesome, and it would seem that mixing both of them and throwing Warhammer 40K in the mix would result in something even more awesome. But instead, the result is less than the sum of its influences. In fact, I'd say that the game it most resembles is Cyberpunk 2077. Not only does the gunplay resemble playing Cyberpunk with a lot of augs[1] activated, but, just like Cyberpunk the entire thing has a half-baked feel. The game tries to be a quasi looter-shooter (like Cyberpunk 2077 does), but none of the loot is particularly interesting, and I gave up even worrying about upgrading weapons about halfway through and still steamrolled through the game. The shooting just feels off; I can't put my finger on what is wrong with it, but it gave me the same vibes as Cyberpunk 2077. I don't feel motivated to install the game and figure out why it didn't feel right. The shotgun is awful; grenades were awful, and I never understood the point of summoning the attack dog. There's a terrible mechanic inspired by Doom's Glory Kills whereby you get health whenever you use an (overpowered) finisher on an enemy. But this is also somehow tied to your taking damage, so how much you heal is dependent on how much damage you've just taken...I think. It was never clear to me in playing it. Finishing an enemy would sometimes give me a little health and sometimes give me a medium amount. Maybe on paper it sounded goo-
From the Wiki: [The default Auto-Sanguine ability a]llows recovery of health for a short period of time after getting hit
The more damage you inflict and the more enemies you kill in this short timespam, the more health you recover.
Yeah, that's stupid.
By the time you get to level 5 you've seen all the enemies other than bosses; even Far Cry 3/4 have better enemy variety than this game. The graphics look pretty decent and there are some cool environments, but these cause a major problem for the wallrunning. It's not totally clear what surfaces are wallrunnable and which ones are not. In a PS2 game, this would be obvious because the textures and objects would be very clean and simple. Anything that you could run on would most likely be flat and look flat. However, in this game there are a lot of surfaces that are bumpy and uneven and sometimes you can run on them and sometimes you can't. I don't know what makes you able to wallrun on some and not the others; I'm not sure that the game knows. Sometimes I would fail to wallrun on a completely flat surface and othertimes I would sprint happily along some ornate monstrosity and it was never clear to me why wallrunning worked in one case and not the other.
The slo-mo is lame too, and trying to use the slo-mo and the wallrunning in tandem was more frustrating than cool. The quality of the story sits somewhere between "80s anime OVA" and "drunkenly explaining Warhammer 40K lore in the bar at 3:00 am." Instead of just sticking to a simple, but reliable plot, the games writers instead crafted an utterly confusing and convoluted storyline that requires fairly extensive background knowledge of Warhammer 40K to even come close to understanding. As best I could grasp it, you play as a glorified errand boy doing the bidding of some guy from the Warhammer 40K comics so he can accomplish...something. There's a bunch of political maneuvering by bad guys who we don't really know about and don't care about. Characters drop a lot of names that we are expected to know. It's like The Phantom Menace, but a lot worse. A simple revenge tale, or a find-the-MacGuffins-before-the-bad-guys-do romp would have been a much better fit. I'm not going to be sad when a slam-bang action shooter has a weak story, but if the story is going to be shoved in my face on a regular basis, I expect it to be good, or at least comprehensible. And the game really does shove it in your face: in addition to cutscenes, you have to talk to two or three flavor characters in the hub world before you can play the next mission.
I definitely enjoyed parts of this game, but it has so many poorly-made elements that I can't really recommend it to anyone. It's not that the game is dreadful (it's hard to ruin fast-paced shooters), but there are so many better games in the genre that are worth playing.
Notes to the devs:
1) If you're going to include wallrunning, make sure it is clear to the player which walls are fair game for running. Please.
2) The limited inventory was a good design choice. After every mission, you can choose which loot to keep in your (very) limited inventory, and everything else is automatically sold. This keeps you from amassing piles of junk and wasting time selling it. Wish more games did this.
3) I do not wish to play any more games where I have to violently kill female NPCs. Call me old fashioned, but I can't enjoy brutally sticking a knife in some chick's face or gunning down a lady. I just feel like I'm doing something wrong. Yes, I know that there's some arcane 40K lore about the all-women gangs of the Underhive or something. Fine--let me play as one of those characters, then. Or just tone down the violence.
Necromunda is a fast-paced linear shooter. two biggest influences seem to be Nu-Doom and Rage 2. Like Nu-Doom, the game is a linear, fast-paced shooter that generally funnels from combat arena to combat arena, occasionally breaking up the monotony with a bit of platforming. Like Rage 2, you have a variety of superpowers that you can upgrade throughout the game, including slo-mo and wallrunning. There's a bit of Borderlands in here as well: in between missions, there's a hub world where you can buy upgrades and sell your gear.
Those two games are awesome, and it would seem that mixing both of them and throwing Warhammer 40K in the mix would result in something even more awesome. But instead, the result is less than the sum of its influences. In fact, I'd say that the game it most resembles is Cyberpunk 2077. Not only does the gunplay resemble playing Cyberpunk with a lot of augs[1] activated, but, just like Cyberpunk the entire thing has a half-baked feel. The game tries to be a quasi looter-shooter (like Cyberpunk 2077 does), but none of the loot is particularly interesting, and I gave up even worrying about upgrading weapons about halfway through and still steamrolled through the game. The shooting just feels off; I can't put my finger on what is wrong with it, but it gave me the same vibes as Cyberpunk 2077. I don't feel motivated to install the game and figure out why it didn't feel right. The shotgun is awful; grenades were awful, and I never understood the point of summoning the attack dog. There's a terrible mechanic inspired by Doom's Glory Kills whereby you get health whenever you use an (overpowered) finisher on an enemy. But this is also somehow tied to your taking damage, so how much you heal is dependent on how much damage you've just taken...I think. It was never clear to me in playing it. Finishing an enemy would sometimes give me a little health and sometimes give me a medium amount. Maybe on paper it sounded goo-
From the Wiki: [The default Auto-Sanguine ability a]llows recovery of health for a short period of time after getting hit
The more damage you inflict and the more enemies you kill in this short timespam, the more health you recover.
Yeah, that's stupid.
By the time you get to level 5 you've seen all the enemies other than bosses; even Far Cry 3/4 have better enemy variety than this game. The graphics look pretty decent and there are some cool environments, but these cause a major problem for the wallrunning. It's not totally clear what surfaces are wallrunnable and which ones are not. In a PS2 game, this would be obvious because the textures and objects would be very clean and simple. Anything that you could run on would most likely be flat and look flat. However, in this game there are a lot of surfaces that are bumpy and uneven and sometimes you can run on them and sometimes you can't. I don't know what makes you able to wallrun on some and not the others; I'm not sure that the game knows. Sometimes I would fail to wallrun on a completely flat surface and othertimes I would sprint happily along some ornate monstrosity and it was never clear to me why wallrunning worked in one case and not the other.
The slo-mo is lame too, and trying to use the slo-mo and the wallrunning in tandem was more frustrating than cool. The quality of the story sits somewhere between "80s anime OVA" and "drunkenly explaining Warhammer 40K lore in the bar at 3:00 am." Instead of just sticking to a simple, but reliable plot, the games writers instead crafted an utterly confusing and convoluted storyline that requires fairly extensive background knowledge of Warhammer 40K to even come close to understanding. As best I could grasp it, you play as a glorified errand boy doing the bidding of some guy from the Warhammer 40K comics so he can accomplish...something. There's a bunch of political maneuvering by bad guys who we don't really know about and don't care about. Characters drop a lot of names that we are expected to know. It's like The Phantom Menace, but a lot worse. A simple revenge tale, or a find-the-MacGuffins-before-the-bad-guys-do romp would have been a much better fit. I'm not going to be sad when a slam-bang action shooter has a weak story, but if the story is going to be shoved in my face on a regular basis, I expect it to be good, or at least comprehensible. And the game really does shove it in your face: in addition to cutscenes, you have to talk to two or three flavor characters in the hub world before you can play the next mission.
I definitely enjoyed parts of this game, but it has so many poorly-made elements that I can't really recommend it to anyone. It's not that the game is dreadful (it's hard to ruin fast-paced shooters), but there are so many better games in the genre that are worth playing.
Notes to the devs:
1) If you're going to include wallrunning, make sure it is clear to the player which walls are fair game for running. Please.
2) The limited inventory was a good design choice. After every mission, you can choose which loot to keep in your (very) limited inventory, and everything else is automatically sold. This keeps you from amassing piles of junk and wasting time selling it. Wish more games did this.
3) I do not wish to play any more games where I have to violently kill female NPCs. Call me old fashioned, but I can't enjoy brutally sticking a knife in some chick's face or gunning down a lady. I just feel like I'm doing something wrong. Yes, I know that there's some arcane 40K lore about the all-women gangs of the Underhive or something. Fine--let me play as one of those characters, then. Or just tone down the violence.