It’s easy for most to roll their eyes at the thought of yet another Warhammer video game given how many of them are released in any given year. It’s easy to feel fatigued by the amount of 90’s-styled ‘boomer’ shooters that are now on the market also. I really hope these optics don’t harm the launch of Warhammer 40,000: Boltgun, because it’s not just one of the best Warhammer video games ever, it’s also one of the best shooters I’ve played in years.
Taking place in between 2011’s Warhammer 40,000: Space Marine and its upcoming sequel, Boltgun puts players in the power-armoured boots of Ultramarines veteran Malum Caedo as he rampages across the same planet featured in the first game in search of… a thing.
Look, what little plot there is really isn’t important, all that matters is that Caedo has a mission, and if completing it means violently exterminating thousands of heretics and daemons along the way, that’s all the better to him.
Warhammer 40,000: Boltgun
Where Space Marine featured a third-person brawler-shooter hybrid style of play, Boltgun opts for a quite traditionally DOOM-like first-person experience. Constantly dodging fully visible enemy bullets and energy blasts is key to survival on all but the lowest of difficulties, and doing so while dishing out punishment in return is a skill that players will be expected to learn very quickly.
Fortunately, Caedo’s tools for dispensing violence are all thunderously satisfying. The titular boltgun itself, an icon of Warhammer 40k lore, has never felt as good in a video game as it does here. It is every bit the absurd machine cannon that it’s supposed to be. It’s the first gun you find in the game, and it turns most human enemies and lesser monsters into a red mist in a single shot. Special ammunition types are discoverable in levels for those who wish to explore the tiniest bit off the main path. This ammo massively upgrades and alters its firepower and while these buffs disappear when you empty the clip, they do make it so that one could conceivably – and I think quite satisfyingly – clear pretty much the whole game using just the boltgun itself.
In choosing to play this way you’d be missing out on the utter delight of every other ridiculously over-the-top firearm though and given how liberally the game distributes ammo for the breadth of Caedo’s amassed arsenal, players really are encouraged to constantly switch out their weapons depending on their situation or mood.
It’s not just with firearms that Caedo distributes death. Melee kills can be executed with a crashing swing of his chainsword at any time. They don’t dispense healing as they did in the original Space Marine or the modern-era DOOMs, but they do make him invulnerable for a second or two while locked in with the target. Caedo can also perform a charge move on a short cooldown that’s capable of completely destroying lesser enemies, and his sheer size and weight mean he can hilariously pancake them too when falling from a height. The developers at Auroch Digital have done an impressive job in making Caedo feel and sound in every way like a 7-foot tall, genetically modified and fully armoured beast, and I was majorly impressed by how they managed to make him feel significantly heavy but also appropriately nimble.
The campaign itself will run you around 10 hours, split across 3 chapters with 8 levels in each. The diversity of environments is impressive, and each provides a good mix of tight corridors, open areas, mazes, and killrooms that lock you in until every enemy is dead. Their design is generally terrific, but every now and then I found myself frustrated by just how devoted Boltgun can be to its 90s sensibilities. There’s no in-game map whatsoever, and often the path forward is obscured just enough to leave you walking around in circles for several minutes.
One level at the tail end of the first chapter has you platforming through an Escher-like room using teleportation doors to get around. It’s incredibly cool for the first few minutes, but the randomisation of where these doors take you becomes grating fast, and frankly I’m still not actually sure how I navigated my way out after half an hour of effort. Fortunately, this particular idea isn’t one that’s repeated.
The game looks and sounds absolutely fantastic. Enemies are all pixel-perfect 2D sprites, brimming with the same character as their physical miniature counterparts. The soundtrack by Matthew Walker is a rollicking rollercoaster of lo-fi electro-rock which perfectly compliments both the carnage-filled and explorative moments of the adventure. Rahul Kohli’s performance as Caedo is a constant delight, and the game allows the player to drop grimdark one-liners at the press of a button any time they wish.
This has absolutely no effect whatsoever other than to make the person doing it smile, and I respect the feature enormously for that fact. Kohli is a massive Warhammer fan himself, and he clearly had a ball delivering the most ridiculous statements about heresy and Imperial righteousness in as appropriately ham-fisted a way as possible.
That’s really the overall impression Boltgun left me with, in fact, an appropriately ham-fisted ball. Boltgun manages to strike a wonderful balance between the silly and serious sides of both its subject matter and genre trappings, and I majorly commend the folks at Auroch for walking that line so deftly. It’s a game well worth a look for both retro shooter fans and Warhammer ones. I really hope those dismissive of the recent glut of games in both of those categories can give it a chance because it’s truly one of the best representations ever of both of these things.
Warhammer 40,000: Boltgun was reviewed on PC using digital code provided by Focus Entertainment.
