Warhammer 40,000: Fire Warrior

Ok the negative.... The AI jump around like its a 80s disco beat... hit collision is crap... graphics crap.. and some of the levels are a pure pain in the ass....but I seem to always come back to it.. The positives..... Like someone has already said "its nostalgia" and I love it..playing it again now and even with all its negatives....I will continue to play it..... Oh dont forget there is the narration from Tom Baker (the best Dr Who) in the game as well. This makes up for the underwhelming boss battle at the end....

... and it still isn't. It's not the worst of the worst, but when I played the disc version it was just no fun. I was not alone with my opinion, 15 years ago I payed for the disc version as much as it costs now and it wasn't a good investment back then either. If you are curious, wait for a sale.

Y'know, I remember all the critics saying what a pile of crap this was back when it first came out, but for some reason my friends and I were all super insistent this was great and they just didn't know what they were on about. It's a Warhammer FPS! What a wonderous thing! Who cares about some polish, we can play as... oh. A Tau. It was easy to overlook such things, let alone actual gameplay flaws. As it turns out, the professional video game critics were absolutely right, and us 13 year old kids were not actually experts on game design. It's just a really bland, crappy game, and that's at best. It doesn't even follow 40k lore all that closely. Probably the best thing you can say about it is that it's technically aged fantastically - it's exactly as mediocre as it was 20 years ago, and accordingly isn't really actually that dissapointing to come back to in the era of modern FPS'. Literally the only reason to buy it is because you're also going to buy Star Trek: Elite Force in order to play them side by side and marvel at how Star Trek, generally one of the most hippy-dippy sci-fi franchises in the world, somehow manages to make a violent shooter that is orders of magnitude better than this one, which comes from arguably the most ridiculously militaristic and violent sci-fi universe out thre.

Well, it would have been OK given it's age and it's purely console look and feel. But 3 persistent issues just totally kill the game. 1. Controls: something is just out of whack here. You feel like you are playing with d-pad instead of mouse. The 'mouselook' is like following predefined directions with incremental moves. Looks like something is totally wrong with aiming while moving. 2. Gunfights: shots have unbelievable dispersion level and you don't actually understand if the enemies are hit or not. Enemies dying sequences are too long, so they just limit your field of view. Considering these (points 1+2) issues the gunfight once gets intense is ultimate torture. 3. Sounds: all effects are as good as for 8 bits 11 khz with a great distortion. Voices are too low. Results you don't understand what's going on and what you have to do. No sound level options are avaliable. Why didn't I refund? Because I was warned before and I do collect Warhammer games. At any rate I don't see buying it at least without significiant discount.

The old version of Fire Warrior is pretty much broken on modern operating systems, but this version fixes several bugs. No more failures to install, no more broken options menu locking you to auto-detected settings. You can actually play this again. It's a solid shooter with good level design and a challening difficulty curve. Yeah, it's old, so you'll be collecting key cards and other old shooter tropes of that nature. But some of us actually like the old retro shooting mechanics. I'll take keycards over "modern" quick time events any day. This is a skill based shooter you can actually play without it holding your hand or trying to sell you micro transactions. And some of the battles get pretty epic. This version works well up to widescreen 1080p, which is better than the original, but seems to have issues at 1440p or 4k. On those resolutions, the hud glitches and turns into a big blue mess on the left of the screen. Hopefully this is patched. If not, a game this old doesnt lose much from running at just 1080p.