Warhammer 40-K9
Hired Gun, from even before I had seen a single screenshot, had my attention. This was largely due to the impressive image of the game’s cover; a mercenary and his cyber-enhanced dog. Sometimes, marketing or a good cover can sell you on an idea, Hell… it’s worked for books for decades. However; fully taking advantage of bringing that idea to life in a meaningful way is another story altogether. From Space Marines to Vermintide, to Chaosbane, I’ve been a fan of the variety of scope of what the Warhammer 40K brand has brought to video games. Hired Gun is my first drop into the world of Necromunda, a world developed by Games Workshop to dive into the seedy underbelly of humanity, across the wide and diverse Warhammer 40K universe.
Necromunda: Hired Gun is often a joyful bit of chaos, zipping around the battlefield, moving from encounter to encounter at such a breakneck speed that it reminded me about my time with Doom Eternal, a game that is clearly its inspiration. Here, you can double jump, wall run, dash, take on a bit of platforming, as well as a grappling hook that allows you to lunge incredibly fast at said platforms or any enemy you see. The pace at which this game moves is fast, and while it did struggle to remain at 60fps, with a few areas dipping well below that, my time on the Series X was largely positive, and the developer is aware of some of these low-performance areas and is looking to address them as soon as possible.
While the framerate for physically moving around the environments is pretty damn fluid, the weapons themselves vary as sniping for example, especially with long-range scopes, is damn near impossible as the gap from moving the crosshair is several feet, and when you’re trying to hit a moving target, even when you are motionless, it’s nearly impossible to track anything due to how stuttery the aiming is. Some of the more chunky guns also take up a lot of real estate on the screen, and the bouncy nature of the gun firing can often block your view entirely. This makes your view extremely busy, especially with all the effects popping up on the screen, to even see what you’re aiming at.
Hired Gun is a fast-paced shooter with an almost endless supply of enemies that if you stop for even a moment, you're likely to end up as red mist on the under-side of some large mechanized opponent’s boot. Levels are large and spacious, and have an almost insane verticality to them, allowing you to take advantage of all your mobility options. Now, for as unimpressive as much of what Hired Gun has to offer, zipping around with the grappling hook is a blast, and can often take a boring encounter and give it an energized life to it. Now, most levels have a variety of hazards to avoid, especially bottomless pits that should you fall in, and have a Stimm in reserve, it will pull you back out and onto solid ground, usually back into the thick of the action.
Oddly enough, it is in the thick of it where you are more likely to survive, all thanks to your execution kills, similar to Doom Eternal’s glory kills. These close-range attacks are easy to pull off as you simply just need to get in close. Regardless of the chaos around you, these make you invulnerable for a short period of time as you perform them. Enemies will often line up and swarm you, making for a buffet of death as you move from eventual corpse to eventual corpse, stabbing, shooting, and cutting your way through the lot. I’ve taken entire environments doing nothing but this, and as you gain back health and shields from many of these attacks, surviving was almost always guaranteed. While they are often slick, the animations for them are not as impressive and it’s very easy to clip through environments and in one instance, I was actually trapped on the other side of the wall after I performed one of these kills. Reloading the game helped, but regardless, there is a lot of little bugs like this within the confines of Necromunda.
One such bug is enemies would stomp me, causing me to fly halfway across the map, only to teleport back where I was hit, and that little bit of hesitation of what was going on was more than enough time to see huge cuts into my health as enemies wouldn’t care about me getting my bearings. I had encounters where I was being bounced around so much, teleporting so often, that I had to reload the game just to try that encounter again. This happened about five or six times, which is about as often as the game crashed for me. I also found the wall-running to be almost too clingy as even jumping next to a pillar or a wall you simply wanted to jump next to had my character running around them and this would often have me running or jumping next to some very dangerous gaps in the floor.
The story places you as a mercenary out for a big payday. The game opens with you almost dying during a botched job, then sees you essentially brought back to life and outfitted with some mechanical enhancements care of a Rogue Doc, working under the cause of one Kal Jerico. It seems that you and this mysterious Jerico have a common goal, to take out someone called the Silver Talon. While there are a few other characters that show up or that you'll at least talk to along this 8-10ish hour journey, that is more or less the entire story. Sure, you also have a character called the Shadow, but for as mysterious as this character is, the resolution with him is left in a way where you’ll simply have more questions that the game has no interest in answering. In fact, Jerico himself is a character that is written as if the writer had no idea how to explain much of what is going on.
There is some talk about other gangs, and starting a gang war of sorts, but hardly any of this leads anywhere and feels like hollow context to place your character in a random environment and have you shooting things. Honestly, the story is simply here to push the action along and never amounts to anything coherent or engaging. In fact, you could randomize any of the levels with any objectives you have and the story wouldn’t change one single bit. Not a single level here serves the story in any way whatsoever. The dialogue and voice acting are also just not there, almost feeling at times like much of the story was cut or that lines were repurposed under a different context. Most characters also wear a respirator, making their dialogue often muffled and hard to understand and seemed to be a shortcut to limit the number of mouths needed to be animated.
Most missions place you back at Martyr's End, regardless of how deep or far you travel. This is a gritty and dirty location that acts as a hub for the like, picking up missions, talking with the bartender, and visiting the Rogue Doc to enhance your Bionics or two locations to purchase guns or to upgrade them. You can also take your enhancements out for a spin in the Gladiatorum, but apart from the tutorial in the early moments of the game, it never felt like an area that feels worthwhile to even visit again, despite the Mystery Science Theatre 3000 style doors being pretty damn cool. It's a shame this area never changed or evolved during the story or opened up with more NPCs, or something that made it more impressive as the game went on. This world feels perfect for an expansion such as that and more given to it, but this game just feels like it’s holding back.
Apart from your story missions, of which there are 13 chapters, some of which are maybe a half-hour long, you can also take part in side missions that vary on their objectives. Some have you destroying fans, enemy leaders, defeating waves of enemies, and more, all within the confines of levels from the campaign. These are decent enough if you enjoy the combat, but do lack substance as being something different from what you’ve done several times already. While there is a tab for Factions, and your ranking with them, this seemed to be something here only for earning an achievement, as it’s not really clear as to what this does other than just existing or keeping track of your side mission progress.
Weapons themselves consist of pistols, plasma guns, autoguns, shotguns, stubguns, bolters, gravguns, and more. They fall into a few categories that you can equip for a mission, and each of them are moddable through the Artificer, a crudely bizarre man who allows you to add charms, scopes, muzzles, and various other trinkets that you’ll earn during your missions to make that gun pop a bit more. It’s not a vastly detailed or in-depth system, as you are only really tweaking each gun to have small improvements and making that gun just a tiny bit better than a complete overhaul. Despite my issues with some of the bigger guns taking up too much of the screen, some are great to use, feel solid in their shots, and pack a punch when you connect, it’s just a shame that the execution kills are often more reliable than any gun you can equip.
While guns can be purchased with the credits you earn on a mission, you’ll also find lootable chests hidden around each level, including a ton of rewards that offer various resistances and perks, or armor to keep you alive. You can equip several to an equipment bar, but you’ll only be able to equip a few for each mission. Also, the mission results screen where you’ll sort what loot you want to keep at the end of the mission, and what to sell, oddly enough didn’t have a single tutorial when you first encounter one, making you wonder what the game wants from you as there is no indication on the screen about what is going on. It’s an odd choice to leave the player hanging without a clue on what to do, considering it is the player’s first experience with it. While you’ll grasp it eventually, I’ve seen several reviews or playthroughs online with players confused for a few moments on how to proceed.
While you’ll start most missions being guided to a certain location, or joined up with some of the cast at the end of a mission, you’ll be joined through each job with your loyal Mastiff. Your dog, which works off a cooldown, is useful as it will highlight all enemies within range for you to get an idea of where they are, that and he will often seek out enemies if you wiggle and squeeze your squeaky toy to get his attention. Often; however, he would just sit there, at my side, or get in the way of my shots. Still. his ability to highlight enemies on the map greatly outweighed his usefulness in battle. To make him better in said battles, should he actually seek out someone to maim that is, you’ll need to outfit him with Bionics of his own, changing your good boy into a very good boy as you’ll equip him with a steel jaw, metal paws, and various other enhancements, making him far more effective in staying alive, savagely ripping apart enemies or increasing the range that his abilities can cast out to detect enemies.
Like him, you’ll also outfit yourself with your own tiers of Bionics, everything from being faster, jumping higher, health regen, to abilities that allow you to slow down time, blasts that erupt from your hands to wielding your dagger to cut into your target. While the powers are cool and can add a bit of variety to combat; instead of executing a stacked line of enemies over and over again, I only found the powers to really benefit the last two fights in the game, at least to where my survival truly depending on their use. The second to last fight, for example, has you attempting to dodge an attack that can almost one-shot you, and slowing down time mechanic became instrumental in keeping me alive, for as cheap as the fight was. While the last fight was drastically easier, using the powers kept me from being overwhelmed with all the chaos that encounter brought with it. There is also a lack of slowing down time as you fumble through the weapon or abilities wheel which causes you to often select the wrong thing if the action is a bit too chaotic. Games like Rachet and Clank freeze the game entirely so you can weigh out your options, but Hired Gun wants none of that and some encounters suffer for it.
If there is one thing that Necromunda: Hired Gun has going for it, it is its visuals. While the game is not a next-gen masterpiece, there is a very well put together aesthetic in its visuals, environments that are massive in scale, decked out in a gothic metal cathedral of skulls and fire. The way certain environments are lit, and the fog that can blanket most encounters are often stunning, even if many locations are a bit less so in their simplicity. While the character models are nothing to really brag about, the environments themselves are very impressive, giving off a dark and moody tone, with metal, rust, and fire just about everywhere. There are certainly some boring and unimpressive locations sure, but they are thankfully very few and are usually short encounters or just passageways to the more bigger and bombastic locales.
Necromunda: Hired Gun had an idea about a kick-ass mercenary with a cyber-enhanced dog, and it nails that perfectly with some cool powers, mobility options, some impressive set pieces, shooting that is often better than it is not, but fails at almost everything else. The story is incredibly lacking, with objectives that are often just a rinse and repeat of killing everything in front of you. The cast of characters could be interesting, but they leave them far too mysterious for their own good as if they didn’t have a plan on how to use them effectively. There is a solid game here, even a potential franchise, but the game needs to be more than just being Warhammer 40K’s version of Doom Eternal and giving the game its own personality that it consistently fails to show us.
Developer - Streum On Studio. Publisher - Focus Home Interactive. Released - June 1st, 2021. Available On - Xbox One/Series S/X, PS4/5, Windows. Rated - (M) Blood and Gore, Intense Violence.
Platform Reviewed - Xbox Series X. Review Access - Necromunda: Hired Gun was purchased by the reviewer.