Warhammer 40,000: Fire Warrior

I've played a lot of bad shooters. The trophy holder I had in this category was Chaser until I touched this true gem. This game is magnificent, what can I say? Here are some of the issues: 1) The mouse is bad. The mouse acceleration feels like a parabola like it was made for a console stick with a huge deadzone. There is an option for autoaim in the launcher it is mandatory to play the game if you want to shoot people even 20 feet away. I cannot understate how bad it really is. If you do not use autoaim it's easier to strafe to correct your aim rather than move the mouse. I would legitimately prefer keyboard turning. 2) The sound is so compressed there are many games on floppy disc that sound better. The game is only 1gb to download and if this really was a PS2 game it makes no sense to me why this would be. 3) Any change you want to make to options can only be done in the launcher. This include keybinds, mouse sensitivity, resolution... The ingame option menu has exactly ONE option in it - "effects volume". I turned this down because in addition to the sound being poor quality the voices are also exceptionally quiet. I'm not quite sure it did anything until I restarted the game. And as far as the actual game? Terribly linear (as in actual corridor), AI is dumb as bricks, and bullets fly out of your guns at 45 degree angles. This is a game for masochists or people who enjoy meme games. Otherwise just don't do it.

This game is an early console port. Mouse aiming feels really weird and it feels like you are constantly fighting with the cursor to aim. On top of that, bullet accuracy is abysmal. The spread is ridiculous on most guns, and with the heavy hitting guns, most of them have a really slow time between shots, so if you miss, you are screwed (and you will miss). Melee? Useless and awkward to even use (press F to switch to melee with an animation, press TAB to switch back to your gun). Grenades? Great if you can carefully throw one, but they trigger an animation with a pause before throwing so you have to stand still to accurately throw one as you get shot in the face. You have to enable auto-aim in the launcher. I spent six hours playing this game with it off, and when I finally rage quit one too many times after unloading a clip on an enemy at near point blank range only to see half of the bullets miss. it completely changed the game. Did it change it for the better? No, it just prolonged my suffering. Even with auto-aim enabled, the game will still find new ways to infuriate you. Bullet accuracy is still an issue. Too many bullet sponge enemies that can kill you in one or two hits. Large areas without ammo or health. Enemies teleporting in on you and blasting you in the face with rockets (and don't bother using the rocket launcher, super slow reload time makes it awful to use). Multiple enemies teleporting behind you like some bad anime meme. Insta-kill forcefields that spawn right as you walk into them. Spending 30 minutes making your way through an area only to be one shotted and thrown all of the way back to the beginning. The game goes from bad FPS novelty to awful infuriating BS.

The game is not as bad as many reviews on the web will tell you. Most of them are still from around the time the game was released, and yes, at the time it wasn't so great. It was a console port (back in the day that was a bad thing, nowadays every shooter feels like a console port anyway) that used game mechanics that were somewhat outdated at the time, which is not so terrible today - after all, other games aged with it. I bought it when it came out (I wanted the limited edition Firewarrior mini) and enjoyed it quite a lot. For a Warhammer 40.000 fan it's worth having in their collection. Just expect to be ditching the Tau guns at the first chance you get, most of them are awful. I remember using autoguns, lasguns and bolters most of the time.

Yes, the engine sucks and the aim assist is there for a reason, but there is still a lot going for it. The unit designs are beautifully recreated for the time and the weapons are as badass as ever especially the last few. There is some variety in gameplay as you will need to be good with automatic weapons as well as snipers and heavy launchers. It is worth it on sale for sure.

Fire Warrior starts, runs, and can be closed without errors. That's the most positive thing I can say. Everything else sucks. The guns all feel weak or messed up in some way (the Bolter is so slow and has so little impact both you and the AI can dodge it at will), the enemies soak up shots while running around like idiots, the animations are terrible (the slow and tedious death animations are legendarily bad), you'll hear the same 3 lines of dialogue so often I was already sick of them after playing for only 5 minutes, every level might as well be the same brown corridor for how collectively uninteresting they are. I bought this game believing that, as a 40k fan, I could extract some fun from this mess. I was wrong.