Warhammer 40,000 Boltgun review – purging heretics like it’s 1996

The latest Warhammer 40,000 game is a retro shooter that looks and plays like Duke Nukem 3D… and it’s kind of fascinating.

At the moment, Disney is being very selective about who it gives the Star Wars and Marvel licences to, only picking top developers to work on games in genres that they are already well known for. With that logic you get the creators of XCOM working on Marvel’s Midnight Suns and Ubisoft making a still unannounced open world Star Wars game. Games Workshop’s approach is rather different: they take a shotgun and fire it at a wall filled with a list of developers, and in many cases publishers, you’ve never heard of.

Although they’re trying to increase the frequency, Disney’s approach means we’ve only been getting new games once every few years, but as the recent Skulls event proved there’s a dizzying array of new Warhammer games planned at the moment, in every genre imaginable. This quantity over quality approach certainly can’t be criticised in terms of variety and yet still the most memorable Warhammer 40,000 game is the aging Dawn Of War series.

The upcoming Space Marine 2 is a rare example of a big(-ish) budget action game but for now there is Boltgun: a purposefully old-fashioned first person shooter reminiscent of the likes of Doom and Quake. It’s thick-headed and ugly, in a way that neatly parallels the fascistic world of Warhammer’s various unsympathetic factions. That’s a smart and interesting idea, but it still leaves the question of whether it’s actually an entertaining game or not.

The way in which the purposefully retro gameplay and visuals are used to represent the world of Warhammer 40,000 is a fascinating choice, that shows just how much artistic potential is lost in video games by the endless obsession with photorealism. Boltgun would be completely uninteresting if it looked as good as Space Marine 2 et al. and yet ultimately it is still meant to be a fun first person shooter, and that’s where the conflict begins between entertainment and art lies.

It may seem odd to talk this way about a game based on such a purposefully brutish concept as Warhammer 40,000 but, as the franchise slowly creeps towards mainstream acceptance, it’s often forgotten that, like Judge Dredd and other Thatcher-era sci-fi properties in the UK, there was a significant satirical edge to the world-building as it was originally presented.

The fact that everybody is the bad guy tends to get lost nowadays and so it is with Boltgun and its very straightforward tale of a Space Marine Sternguard being sent to a purge a planet (the same one from Space Marine) touched by Chaos by brutally murdering every heretic you come across.

Although Doom is the first obvious point of comparison (especially in the way you end levels, oddly) the two games don’t really have much in common in terms of specifics. You couldn’t look up and down in Doom and the level design, especially vertically, was extremely limited. However, in Boltgun you can look around freely, like a modern shooter, and the level geometry and graphics are much closer to Duke Nukem 3D or Jedi Knight.

In truth the game’s gameplay and visuals – which often include quite advanced lighting effects – aren’t directly analogous to any particular era of gaming. Much like indie platformers such as Shovel Knight, which pretend to look like NES games but are far more advanced than anything actually released for the console, Boltgun is merely reminiscent of the mid-90s era of first person shooters rather than being something that could have actually existed at the time.

It all works in context and the gameplay is certainly simplistic enough to seem like something from the 90s, as you trundle around each only slightly non-linear level, blowing away everyone you meet. All the enemies are just 2D sprites but they explode in an impressive shower of gore, to paint the landscape with their offal. It’s just surprising that the music which accompanies this is so unremarkable, when a good heavy metal soundtrack would’ve heightened things even further.

As well as the titular bolter you also have a chainsword attack, that automatically locks onto and dashes you towards a nearby enemy, plus grenades and a barge attack. In the fiction of the world, Space Marines are supposed to be one-man armies and Boltgun absolutely gets that across, but it does mean that enemy encounters lack tension and quickly become repetitive.

Because the game is trying to ape 90s style shooters there’s also a general lack of complex set pieces, of the sort we’re used to today, with most enemies simply milling about randomly or occasionally bunching up in groups. They have so little AI that most of them can’t even manage the first person standard of running at you in a straight line. That is all part of the retro conceit, but it gets old after only a short time.

There is an attempt to add some variety via Purge mode, which works similarly to gore nests from the reboot of Doom. Here, an infinite wave of enemies start attacking you, within a set area you can’t escape from, until you take out specific targets. It does show off how solid the game’s mechanics are, but it is a bit of a one trick pony and can get frustrating when you’re after just one specific enemy in a sea of grunts.

Another problem is that the Boltgun itself is just too useful. There’s actually a range of other weapons, including a shotgun, a plasma gun, and a sticky grenade firing rocket launcher, but under normal circumstances there’s not much need to use them. The game tries to manufacture an excuse, by using stats – taken from the tabletop game – for weapon Strength and enemy Toughness, but all this really means is that you keep the bigger guns back for bigger enemies, which is not exactly a complex tactical decision.

There are other neat touches taken directly from the original game though, such as the armour you pick up, which otherwise works exactly the same as Doom, being called Contempt – a very literal interpretation of the Space Marine mantra that ‘My armour is contempt.’

If you’re a Warhammer 40,000 fan there’s lots to enjoy in Boltgun and the low asking price excuses many of its foibles. If anything though it’s more interesting as an examination of how far first person shooters have come in the last 30 years and the pros and cons of making licensed games. So while it’s not a great game in its own right there are plenty of reasons to find Boltgun interesting and we’re glad we got a chance to experience it.

Formats: PlayStation 5 (reviewed), Xbox One, PlayStation 4, Nintendo Switch, Xbox Series X/S, and PC
Price: £17.99
Publisher: Focus Entertainment
Developer: Auroch Digital
Release Date: 23rd May 2023
Age Rating: 18

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