Necromunda: Hired Gun

Hired Gun's developers have obviously played a lot of very good shooters. The game is filled with design influences from recent entries like Doom Eternal, to older titles like Crysis. Their problem seems to be that the team knew when they saw a mechanic or feature that worked well, but don't seem to understand why any of those things worked. So the final design doesn't feel coherent. Instead it's a 'if we put enough things that are cool in the same place, the result *must* be cool too.' And it isn't. The final straw for me was being in a dark cave, surrounded by a respawning horde of big, fast melee enemies that were *also* black, firing the gun the game had just given me that filled the screen with bloom and particle effects, and spamming the melee button to regen health in between shots. And when I finished with that? Going into a platformer puzzle level in a game that uses a lives system instead of saves. The game is reasonably stable, and looks very pretty when it isn't trying to blind you with sfx, but there are so many options that do the actual gameplay better that there isn't any reason to spend time with this if you aren't desperate for the setting.

The good: Fun to zip around with the various movement mechanics (grappling hook, double jumping, dodge, wall running) without forcing the game into becoming an obnoxious platformer (looking at you DOOM Eternal). Customization of weapons and cybernetics. You have a dog. You can pet the dog. The OK: Graphics are fine. The voice acting is serviceable. Finished the game in about 8 hours and probably won't start it again. Gunplay is decent. You can fast-forward past cutscenes and dialogue. The bad: I couldn't bring myself to care about the story or characters. The random missions were repetitive and boring (and easily exploited for a lot of in-game money). Animations are sometimes janky. Sometimes it feels like they just spawned more enemies instead of doing something interesting. Many customization options feel a bit half-baked and not really impactful (elemental resistances and damage bonuses and loot drop rate bonus all feel unnecessary for a game this short, unclear what armor does etc) In short, if you are itching for a Doom-like fast paced shooter and you have 8 hours to kill it's worth picking up at a discount.

First pérson shooter with franctic combat and fas paced mocvement, set in the WH40k universe, what's there not to love? Well, unfortunately many things, the game is not bad, but is full of weird design decisions that drag it down. - Enemies blend in with the dark enviroment, you will see them when they have already replaced your bones with lead, this is aggravated by the fact that enemies will spawn out of thin air, so you will get ambushed often (really, the world is filled with pipes, vents, hatches and doors, but enemies just pop into existence). There's an option to outline enemies but oonly works when they are far away,, aka when they can't hit you anyways - 90% of the enemies use hitscan weapons, so no matter how fast you move you will get hit - apart from the limited health kits the other way to heal is to take damage and then kill enemies , which defeats purpose of trying to not get hit - Weapon balance is too balanced, a Bolter does a little more damage than a regular rifle, but has slower fire rate and a smaller magazine, so it balances out, and worst of it all, the heavy bolter does barely more damage than the bolter, but is even slower so it balances itseld (in short your entry level rifle is the best weapon because more bullets mean more chances of critical hits) this is terrible and probably heretical if you ask any WH40k fan. - There's no inventory/stats screen readily available. - The faction system is pointless and side missions are only useful for a while, until you buy all your bionic upgrades. At the end the game is heavily carried by the visuals, the music the sound design, and your dog. And even though it was fruistrating most of the time, there were a few times I was having fung jumping and grappling all over the place,, finishing off enemies to keep myself barely alive. My recommendation, pick it up on discount, because this cake is undercooked and is made with some weird ingredients (and to think it was even worse at launch)

It has been fun to play. The combat is satisfactory and the sounds are great. However, I think this game lacks in some areas. For instance, the graphics are very "dirty" and confusing. Most of the time, I can't see the type of enemy because they are just a smudge on the screen. Other games like Deus Ex have sharper sprites. I understand this might be a design decision. Until now, it seems that customization doesn't matter a lot. I love the level design, really immersive, but I don't like the takedown animations, they are a bit clunky. Overall it is an OK game. I don't regret buying it, but I will probably forget it once/if I finish. Finally, I can't understand anything from the plot, but I guess that is ok for the game genre.

Like every Warhammer or 40K game, it's kinda good, and kinda meh. I got the game for $6.61 on an email subscriber discount, so I can't complain. But I will! I don't think they had time to properly balance the enemies at max difficulty. On the second to hardest difficulty, everything is easy as hell. On the hardest difficulty, it's easy as hell too -- until it's not. If you try to play up close and personal, like the game wants you to, you will be annihilated, especially on some of the boss fights. Some boss fights are hilariously fast. This is with a maxed out character and some 5K hours in Quake Live / Quake 3. The grappling hook is lame. Mostly only works on fixed ledges, there's no inertia or control like the Titanfall 2 grapple. You honestly had better control with the UT 99 grapple. This is really minor, but for me it's an irritation. 1999 was over 20 years ago, yet we can't figure out grappling hooks in FPS. The game doesn't know what it wants to do. The game doesn't know what it wants YOU to do. The game wants you to play like Doom Eternal, yet design choices punish you for it. There's a large progression system. You don't need it. There's a faction system, with 25 factions. They're virtually useless. You have 7 powers, eventually. You don't need them. You have a dog. You don't need him (his CC and spotting are real handy though). You can hold 6 guns. There's no pocket reloading. During long or intense fights, if you swap on empty, you will eventually have 6 empty guns. You have to pull out and reload each one individually. This brings the action to a screeching halt, the Benny Hill theme starts to play, and you run around reloading guns like a buffoon. Somewhat like Ultrakill, the game has a proximity heal system. When you get hit, if you damage enemies close to you, you get some healing. It doesn't seem to work all that great, and if you're low, you can't heal this way unless someone shoots you first, which likely will kill you.