Warhammer 40,000: Boltgun Reviews

Honestly had a lot of fun playing this game. Great 90s vibe and the soundtrack is wicked.

Fun game, but a bit too long for its own good. I'd either add more content towards the end or shorten it, as I got a bit bored towards the end of the 2nd part. Still, worth a good sale's price.

Dumb, good fun. Gets a bit stale in the later levels, could use some QoL such as weapon choice wheel.

Boltgun is a great boomer shooter, and I believe the first to establish itself as such. It has no modern additions (e.g talent trees, perks etc) but just the essentials. A set of an increasingly more efficient weapons and a set of an increasingly more annoying enemies to shoot at. Is it good? Absolutely. But - as every boomer shooter - it can be annoying unfair or straight up outrageous. I had problem with the difficulty, the pixel art that hinders your sight, the reliance on secrets to boost you up (but I always find AFTER the battle is done) etc. It has some quality of life additions, like the navigation path system, and toggling infinite health in the menu , also may help boomers like me get through the most annoying parts without dying minute after minute. So in a sense I see the charm and the quality in this game. But on the other hand it kinda throws me off. Still a good buy.

Amazing gamefeel and art direction, love the gunfights.

Boltgun is a good game for most of the time you spend playing it. The combat is really satisfying and the movement feels great, and it's very authentic to the Warhammer 40k experience, but the deeper you get into the campaign (if you're playing on hard difficulty like I was) the more you start to see the seams come apart with bad bossfight arenas and gimmicks instead of challenges. I bought 40k Boltgun + the expansion pack on sale and I'd recommend the whole thing when it does go on sale. Auroch Digital & Focus Entertainment are pretty generous with the discount and for $14 you can't really go wrong with Boltgun. [h1]Extended thoughts[/h1] I can't stress enough how good it feels to just do basic FPS things in Boltgun. There's some decent airstrafing you can do and dashjumping feels good for crossing distances, and it feels very in-line with how superhuman space marines in 40k are. There are some tricks you can do with dashjump + airstrafe + homing melee attacks that add a really nice level of movement skill to the gameplay. The game gives us all of the 40k fan favorite weapons plus some more niche ones; the bolter and heavy bolter have really satisfying sound + animation, the homebrewed imperium shotbolter is a nice take on a shotgun, the rocket launcher has truly big explosions, etc. I think the armor ratings do a disservice to the flexibility of the weapon pool. It's the same kind of system that DOOM Eternal used where instead of doing simon says with weapon colors, you have to use a weapon that has a damage rating that's greater than or equal to the armor rating of the enemy. Playing on hard difficulty, this translates to a lot of "wtf that did almost nothing" moments when you're experimenting with weapons to see what will let you conserve ammo for big threats. Additionally, this is really all the game has going for it to separate itself from the original DOOM. This is a double-edge sword in that this is a great facet if you haven't played a lot of DOOM but sucks if you have and also played other DOOM inspired games or even custom .WAD levels. Each chapter starts out really well and has a bunch of really cool and challenging levels, but you can tell that the dev team was cooking hard for the beginning and middle and then couldn't tie it up that well for each chapter's end. I think one of my favorite levels was the [spoiler]Grand Elevator[/spoiler] and it's a truly incredible arena. Some of my least favorite levels are in Forges of Corruption, one thing that stood out to me was that levels became a lot more cramped and hallway-ish with designated "box" arenas as I went through the campaign. I will say that it was really damn cool to fight a [spoiler]Lord of Change[/spoiler] for the first time and then just have it be a common mini-boss for the rest of the game, same with the [spoiler]Great Unclean One[/spoiler]. Talked with fellow 40k fans as I played through Boltgun and the consensus we've come to is that while having Nurgle and Tzeentch team up is a neat pairing gameplay wise, it's weird lore-wise. The game doesn't leverage traitor marines and traitor guard for Nurgle at all which is a bummer. I think they got pretty close with the basic enemies in Boltgun but there are a lot of annoying nits. For instance, the traitor champions having plasma gun blasts is kinda stupid because they're based off of the pinky demon from DOOM, but the whole reason the pinky demon is balanced is because it's a useless dip that's a walking target when engaged at range. The traitor champion being able to resurrect should be enough of a challenge to deal with. Conversely, I really like the way they implemented Terminators in Boltgun because they have a ranged and melee version, and the melee version is a teleporting pinky demon which is a crazy good take on modifying a DOOM enemy. The fights against [spoiler]the sorcerer[/spoiler] honestly sucked past the first. I think the very first fight where you have to [spoiler]ascend the arena and make use of portals and ledges to snipe him[/spoiler] are cool, but with an action-driven game like Boltgun where you get to truly go fast and get into the fighting instantly, I'd say having some form of the infamous "yellow paint" would have actually been a good application of it. The fights against him get progressively less fun. The last mission in Forges of Corruption is the cheesiest and least-fun level I've played since the all-blue level in DUSK, just constantly respawning enemies without any kind of tact. All that said, I'll likely buy Boltgun 2 when it goes on sale. There's just enough that makes Boltgun 1 fun that would keep me interested and the bangin soundtrack helps mask some of the issues while playing, but after dealing with some of the later levels in Boltgun 1, I'd rather wait.

Buy it on sale. Enemies are stupid ammo-spongy, and they deal a ton of damage to you. Terrible balancing. Glad I only paid 10 bucks for this shit..... Spawn rate, system, and HP values are just stacked against the player. Before you say "get gud"... maybe let that be known in the first 2 hours where I can refund the purchase..... Even completing chapter 1 is less than 1/3rd of players at writing. Edit : Finally beat the second chapter of the game... 16.6% of players have at time of writing. If no one can beat your game, you're doing it WRONG. Nobody wants to play a game that they can't win.... Auroch digital needs to be called out for this. As should their publisher. - THE WHOLE POINT OF PLAYING AS A SPACE MARINE IS A POWER FANTASY YOU FUCKING IDIOTS......... I did something that literally 80% of people CAN'T do..... If you want only the 20% of people that can, which turns into the 5% of people that will even bother.... You're just being predatory..... And you deserve whatever reputation you get from my review. Auroch Digital deserves to be called out on this. I hope no one ever publishes any of your games anymore.

The gore and violence levels are there, but the rest isn't. Environments are uninspired and repetitive, and the "purge" sections felt a little too frequent. You shouldn't be bored in a 40K-themed shooter.

I finally finished the game on Hard difficulty PROS The game itself is really fun and does what it sets out to do well. On their own, most enemies felt fun to have to dodge their projectiles, especially cultists, their bulllets were just slow enough to be able to dodge out of the way if you were careful The soundtrack and art design were great. They really did an amazing job with making the retro graphics look as good as possible CONS The more I played it though, it quickly turned into a major slog. Especially in the 2nd and 3rd chapters, everything began to seriously overstay its welcome. Everything from the greater daemon fights to the sorcerer to every single different type of enemy, just was repeated over and over again until killing them felt like annoying chores. At some point in Chapter 2, I started saving in the middle of fights so that I wouldn't need to go back if I died - I feel like that's a sign that the game is too much of a slog. Purges in particular went from an exciting free for all to a monotonous chore I had to get through Some enemies are just not fun to fight at all, especially the Aspiring/Chosen Champions and Plague Toads. The former feel incredibly cheap and just serve as an unnecessary shock in tight corridors and in the middle of battles, the latter are just bullet sponges that you can barely dodge the attacks of. A significant amount of enemies, daemons in particular, just started to feel like bullet sponges in general Every boss fight was repeated 3-4 times and it got old very fast, considering each Lord of Change or Great Unclean One fight was identical to the rest A lot of the power ups seemed to be placed in a way that I always found them after a major battle was over. I also feel like their powers were not always adequately explained Overall, this game was fun, but just went on for way, way too long, repeated far too much and relied on cheap tactics for too much for me to fully recommend this game. I'd give it a 6/10 if I could. Get it on sale if you like boomer shooters or retro FPS games (or 40K)

If Brutal DooM and DooM Eternal had a baby that would be Boltgun. High speed, high mobility with lots of arena fights similar to Doom Eternal but also mixed with the more grounded combat of the original DooM and some tighter corridor fighting so it isn't always just a big open arena battlefield.