Necromunda Hired Gun Review - 6/10
Following the mixed reception of Focus Interactive's previous Warhammer 40,000 game, Space Hulk Deathwing, I was hopeful but cautious for the release of Necromunda Hired Gun. It looked good, but would it play good? Deathwing was an awesome looking and incredibly immersive and detailed world that was just not a lot of fun. Necromunda Hired Gun promised an entirely different combat system and a host of different enemies and hopefully would prove to be more enjoyable while retaining the awesome level and art design that Focus Interactive put into Deathwing.
I can tell you right off the bat that the art design for Necromunda is exceptional. Multiple times while playing through this game I was forced to stop and look around in awe at my surroundings, details would catch my eye cause me to pause and I would repeatedly spend time lingering in areas just to soak them in long after all the enemies were smears of bloody paste on the ground. However before I got to that point I had to deal with an immediate and pressing problem, the audio. The sound balancing in Necromunda is just... bad, really bad. The dialogue is almost impossible to make out against the rest of the sound effects and to make the game playable I had to go into the game settings and drop all of the audio levels save dialogue down to about 50% and then double the volume of my speakers to compensate. The result worked alright but it's a ridiculous thing to have to do to make the dialogue discernible in a video game. It also did not bode well for the rest of the sound design in the game. Sound effects, guns, grenades and what not all sound alright but nothing is exceptional and the music left very little impression on me either, this is not a sound track I'll be listening to while painting minis anytime soon.
The combat also took some getting used to. The weapon design and initial setup made me think that this was going to be something of a cover or stealth mashup system like Deus Ex or Cyberpunk but no, stealth is really not particularly viable or practical and cover doesn't help all that much. Instead this game wants you to play more like Titanfall or Doom, zipping and wall running all over the place, spitting lead like bullets are free or something. Run and gun and keep blasting until everything is dead. Incoming fire? No problem, just shoot the enemies more than your being shot and you will heal more than they can damage you. Hired Gun gives the player an ability that lets you heal an amount of HP related to the damage you are inflicting for a few seconds after you have been hit by an enemy. Popping an Orlock Ganger's skull from across the arena with a sniper rifle does nothing for you, blasting an Ogryn in the face with a plasma gun just after it smacked you with a power fist though? Massive health bump.
To be fair Necromunda Hired Gun does not pull this off as well as Doom Eternal or anything but the result is enjoyable. I spent most of the second half of the game rocking around with a decked out Heavy Bolter just spitting lead at everything that moved and obliterating waves of enemies in hails of mass reactive death. It took a while for me to get used to treating massive Ogryn brutes, Ambot killing machines and Genestealers as opportunities for easy health and not critical threats that should be run away from but once I got used to the system I found it rather enjoyable, if not particularly nuanced or strategic. This is not a Tom Clancy combat experience of cover, fields of fire and room clearance tactics, this is more like Just Cause, where the player is encouraged to slingshot all over the arena unloading and swapping weapons constantly and never staying in one place for very long. I played the game on the normal difficulty and once I was well enough outfitted I had few problems staying alive and spent more of my stim revives on instances of falling to my death down some chasm while exploring than I did to big nasties killing me. Only a couple of the bosses in the game proved a challenge but even then not much of one. If you are looking for a laid back time blasting goons and monsters this combat system works just fine, if you are looking for more of a challenge then you will find it lacking.
Which brings me to the story. Again with this game it is just adequate overall but it also feels a bit disjointed and incomplete. The cut-scenes are pretty bad, the animations are stilted, the camera angles are pretty bad and the dialogue similarly sub-par. Multiple times I found a cut-scene ending and regaining control of my character in a completely different room/arena than I was previously with no idea how I got there or what was going on precisely. The story appears to tie into the novelized stories about Kal Jericho but not having read those novels I was a bit lost to follow some of the plot points or see any potentially obvious twists coming. The ending was a kind of funny and expected twist but overall the plot was not good but it wasn't horrible either, it was mostly just barely there. A loose excuse to move the player's bounty hunter from combat arena to combat arena on the most minimal of explanations and the shakiest of logic.
Fortunately those arenas are in a word: spectacular. From a massive Goliath fortress under assault by Orlocks and threatened by a massive Cthulu-like tentacle monster hanging above it to a city-sized train or a corpse-starch factory the levels in Necromunda Hired Gun are some of the best designed environments I have seen in a good long time. Multiple creative paths, hidden areas and interesting obstacles break up levels that are all wildly unique and divergent. Some are close and constricted, moving through dark tunnels and dank caverns, others are open and spacious, ruins carved open by disaster or industry and filled with hazards and pit-falls. Some are awe inspiring, some are terrifying, all were interesting and memorable. I almost don't want to gush about them very much because I want everyone to enjoy the novel experience of encountering these levels for the first time personally, I would almost say Necromunda is worth playing just to experience the environment of the levels.
But with that said it comes time to come up with a rating for this game and it's hard. On the one hand the level and art design are both like nine out of ten performances, the combat is a six or a seven if it's your kind of thing, while the plot is a four or five at best and the audio design is a two or a three. This game does some things really well but other things pretty badly. I would still overall say it is a big step up from Deathwing and an improvement on every front but that Focus Interactive really, really needs to hire some better sound design people, audio was a problem in Deathwing and remains so in Hired Gun and it needs to be fixed going forward.
So where do we stand? I would say that Necromunda Hired Gun gets a 6/10 from me. It's good, not great, and it has some glaring problems that mar an experience that definitely has a lot of stand out moments and amazing art design to experience. If you are a fan of Necromunda or the 40k setting in general it is worth playing, though probably best to pick up during a sale or after the price has come down a bit. With that said I'm going to leave you with some of my favorite screen shots I took from just a handful of the various levels in the game, enjoy!
Comments
Post a Comment