Warhammer 40,000: Boltgun

爽！为了帝皇

Finally, the time came, when I installed Boltgun and played it, after buying it years ago. I had a pretty long break from FPS, so I was excited to start it off again with Boltgun that I admired from its screenshots and videos from the Steam store page. And of course, ratings were also pretty good. So let us begin. I set up my common FPS controls in the game, looked in the graphics settings if there were some max settings and the I discovered something like „how pixelated should the enemies be?“ or „How much bloom should be applied?“. I thought, why would I know? Am I the art director of that game? I do not know, why does the game not know? I set it to very pixelated and without bloom. Then I entered the game. Walked around, the first opponents, the first weapon pickup, the graphics, the sound, the atmosphere, all seemed very nice. As I expected and as I would expect from a game with such a universe in its back. The enemies exploded in blood cloulds, the starter gun felt nice, I played on the highest difficulty, so there was a lot of things to shoot. First thing I start to notice is, that the enemies tale some hits, they are a little bit spongy, so the fast game play is being a little bit thwarted and I have to plan to stand in front of the enemies and shot them for an amount of time while dodging them and all the projectiles from all the other opponents. Which is a little bit hard. But ok, then it is that way, it is hard work. That is ok, it is an FPS and not a military shooter. Then, the opponents become more and more in numbers. There is plenty of ammunition, sometimes a little bit sparse health, but it is still pretty nicely doable. The opponents become more varied and stronger, and more spongy. So i have to plan routes around them, approaching them multiple times. The gameplay is becoming a little bit stale, because it is always the same approach and always the dance. The levels are very open and it is always like facing the enemies front off. It starts to feel like a mowing the lawn. The levels take loooong to complete. 20 minutes like for the second or third level. Uff. It is getting a little bit exhausting. And since it is to repetitive, not in a good way. The levels start to become divided into different arenas. I enter an arena, enemies are spawned into it. I am supposed to wildly run through those arenas or somethings, but this is not possible, because of the spongy opponents, which I cannot kill fast and the enemy projectiles, which are not hit scan but fly nice slow, but the enemy weapons have a certain random spray, so the the projectiles fly a little bit random though the room, so I cannot dodge reliably. So the tactic is, find a space, which can be nicely defended and kill like a gazillion enemies. The enemies become more ans more spongy. Up to amount which is not funny anymore. Since I cannot fight them in the open and dance with them, i have to peek around corners and shot, which has to be perfectly timed and super shortC since the opponents react quick and some projectile is always flying into your direction, through all of the arena. This is becoming so bad, that it is becoming a chore and a little bit boring. I enter one arena, where the best tactic is to stay right where I entered it and wait for the enemies to come to me and then kill them. Only afterwards when everything was killed I can explore the arena. The game is becoming exhausting, not very rewarding, not very varied. The secrets are in open spaces. The new weapons do not convince and they do not allow you to play the game differently. The game loop stays the same. So it really starts to feel like exhaustingly cleaning the levels from the opponents. Like vacuum cleaning a room. It is not fun. Then I also realise, the game does not feel like a „boomer shooter“. It wants to look like Doom or Duke Nukem 3D, but the problem is, it is not a 2.5D world, it is 3D. The 3D is more like 3D, while the sprites are 2D. It does not go together. The sprites are hard to recognize, because they are too detailed, too dark and too far away. This is also a problem of the game. The distances in which I am supposed to fight enemies are one time very far away, like too far away, since this is not a military shooter, but also very close, not too close, but what kind of mouse sensitivity would want to choose? Fast for close range or slow for far range? It is hard to combine both, so distance fights become clunky, because you have to position the mouse very precisely, for which it will have to high sensitivity, which you need for close range. After like 2 hours or so, the game is not fun anymore. There are so many design mistakes, which make the game like a 5/10 or something. Maybe even a 4. Which for me is very sad to see, since I was super excited and happy that Doom finally gets siblings. But the games quality is so far away from Doom, that I would rather not even would want to compare the two. Boltgun is something, which is surprisingly soulless and surprisingly boring and uninteresting and exhausting. I am not sure if am able to finish the game. My life time is too valuable to throw it into bad products, even if they are from my favorite genre. I was hoping for a real „boomer shooter“ revival here, but I got very disappointed.

shooting heretics feels great

有了导航和无敌 照顾路痴手残玩家 必须推荐

Boring...

FOR THE EMPEROR

Can tentatively recommend if you like 40k and/or retro shooters. Great idea, an OK execution, fair amount of unrealized potential. I enjoyed my time with it, but it felt around two to three hours too long. Half of that is probably due to me dying in all manner of ways. :) --- Pros --- + Retro shooter and 40k are a match made in heaven. + Art style is both a good fit and nice, atmosphere and tone feel appropriate. + Dedicated taunt button. + Extensive accessibility options; it is nice to see back things that were previously available via cheats in the olden days, like god mode and such. There is no reason why any single-player game shouldn't include those. --- Cons --- - Can get repetitive closer to the end. - Rather small selection of enemies, given a vast array of choices the universe provides. Even among daemons and CSM, Khorne and Slaanesh are completely MIA, so are unique-ish CSM things like posessed, berserkers, noisemarines, raptors, and such. DLC does add a few more enemy options, but I played without it, and it looks like new additions don't expand the variety by much. - Item pickup felt wonky, some wider error margins would be nice; quite a few times I ran over an item and then got surprised that it was not picked up. - Melta felt underpowered. :( - Cannot ride any screamers; my disappointment was immeasurable. --- Neutral, missed opportunities --- = Taunts don't do anything gameplay-wise; would be nice if they would add something small, like a temporary boost of contempt, or force enemies around to take more damage for a few seconds, or something else along these lines. = Chainsword kills should probably drop things like health and contempt at a higher rate than regular ones; they even might already do that, but it really did not feel like that in the moment to me.