Necromunda: Hired Gun

It's a shooter. That's about it. The shooting mechanics are fine, the guns have a lot of oomph and the enemies spill their guts nicely. Vivisector became a great game on that basis alone, so why isn't this one? I have no idea honestly. Maybe it's the arena-like levels that get repeated over and over again. Maybe it's the lack of enemie variety. Maybe it's the lackluster story. Maybe it's the general feel of the mechanics. I played it for some hours and thought I could enjoy it, since I'm really a fan of medicore shooters. It turns out it was just too medicore for me.

Doom 2016 on Necromunda. The plot is clasic 40k, the gameplay is fast and intense, and the voice acting is great (British not Seppo so that is nice). yes it is janky and yes it is a bit buggy but it feel like the old board game to a tee. it is the violent silly quick smash fest i was hoping for.

Positive: - Shooting itself feels great. Weapons have impact, sound and look great, and enemies actually die when you shoot them, which is already a massive step up from the often mentioned nu-Dooms. Great fun shooting suff in this game. You can also bring up to 6 weapons with you, compared to the usual 4. - The amount of movement you can achieve here is pretty nuts. Double jumping, slides, wall running, you name it. And you're going to need it, because the enemies are fast and can be quite deadly. - World and level design feel decidedly 40K-ish. Negative: - Truly atrocious UI, obviously made for consoles. Menus within menus, constant pointless clicking to do the simplest thing, transition screens... BLEH. You will probably soon find yourself dreading having to do any inventory management. A UI this bad on a PC should be criminal. - The loot. Honestly feels pointlessly tacked on and the game would have been better off without it. All it does is make you spend more time in the hell that is the UI. Did you just find an upgrade? Time to spend 3 minutes tediously swapping the weapons and moving attachments to the new weapon so that you can deal 5% more damage. Weapons should have just been pre-set, would have made no difference but reduce the tedium. And would also prevent situations where you have OP weapons compared to enemies you are facing. You can also find armors, charms, weapon upgrades, but it's all extremely superficial. - Side missions. They get boring after an hour, but you have to grind them at least some amount, because you need the credits from them for upgrades. They have you run through campaign levels you already beat and the enemies in them spawn constantly, so it just devolves to speedrunning the objectives while ignoring enemies. Essentially, the core of the game is great, but there is just too much unnecessary bloat that detracts from the experience. Even through all that, I'm still giving this an 8/10. Better shooting than the new Dooms

Apparently this game was advertised; but I saw none of it. Just one day popped onto the GOG homepage and I was shocked. I thought that Darktide had failed and the assets got reused - but no! It's just a brand new 40K FPS outta nowhere! I had just been thinking I want a straight-forward single player game without all the open world baggage that gets tied to every game these days - and though N:HG has some RPG grinding attached, it feels alright so far!

The campaign with some side missions took only about 11 hours. The game ran at 135fps on Epic settings, with a GTX 1660, but the last or second last level was so unstable it made my PC run out of video memory even on medium graphics. I'd like to like this game, but it is not deep in Warhammer lore and the gameplay loop is really simple.