Universe Warhammer 40,000 has tremendous potential for creating video games in a wide variety of genres. However, the company Games Workshop distributes a license to everyone in a row, which affects the final quality of a number of promising projects. Suffice it to say that only two first-person shooters have come out in all the time, and none of them can be called competent. Unfortunately, Necromunda: Hired Gun continues this tradition.
Responsible for the development of a French studio Streum Onwho is literally obsessed with board games. Her debut project is a very strange shooter with RPG elements. E.Y.E: Divine Cybermancywhich is heavily inspired by Warhammer 40,000. The franchise’s ears were sticking out from everywhere: demons, a bifalized analogue of the Inquisition, Mars, and even a reference to Space Hulk.
The second game of the studio is Space Hulk: Deathwing – already used the official license from Games Workshop. And this is the second shooter in the Warhammer 40,000 universe. The concept was taken as a basis Left 4 dead, but the quality left much to be desired. Despite the excellent art, the project suffered from many bugs, the story turned out to be insipid, and the gameplay turned out to be lopsided. Everything was so bad that the developers released an updated Deathwing.
It would seem that Streum On should draw certain conclusions. But the limited budget, lack of diligence and the small size of the team played a cruel joke on the French again.
Necromunda: Hired Gun takes place on a giant hive world called Necromunda. The player takes control of a mercenary who was hired to search and destroy the killer who eliminated a member of one of the trade guilds. In the process of completing the assignment, the punitive squad is ambushed, and the main hero / main heroine miraculously survives the carnage and receives new augmentations.
Unfortunately, the story at Necromunda turned out to be incredibly boring. Characters are poorly remembered, conversations are boring, and the developers barely use the potential of Warhammer 40,000. A simple player who is not familiar with Games Workshop products will not even understand how the Necromunda gangs differ from each other. Even a mediocre strategy Necromunda: Underhive Wars coped with the task much better.
Gameplay project Streum On is a shooter looter that combines elements of DOOM Eternal and Titanfall… The players have a hub – a small settlement End of the Martyr, where you can buy equipment, replace the modules and amulets installed on weapons, and also upgrade the active and passive skills of your character and your cybermastiff.
The character is trained to double jump, can quickly move around the map due to the grappling hook on his hand, run along the walls, and also use several abilities. The main skill is the summoning of the above cybermastiff. The Toothy Robopogh lights up nearby enemies and attacks them.
There are many more additional skills, but the player can quickly use only one (the rest are available through the radial quick access menu). For example, a mercenary can turn on slowo, auto-aim, go into berserk mode with a knife, stun an enemy, and so on.
The levels in the game turned out to be quite large, and the developers are trying to push to study them. Loot will drop out of enemies, but rarely, so you need to look for chests with equipment hidden in the location. Some of them are mined, but traps can be defused by purchasing special tools and special cards in the hub that increase the value of the loot.
The problem is that when you receive loot, you cannot see it. It is allowed to change weapons right on the spot, but it is allowed to change full equipment only in the hub. The inventory itself is crooked. For example, special amulets and modules for improving weapons have quite a lot of storage slots, but only a few slots are available for weapons. The player has as many as three slots for storing armor, which is not particularly needed, as well as four slots for amulets, of which only three can be used at the same time.
With weapons, too, not all is right. Simultaneously, the character carries two assault rifles (for example, a bolter and a plasma gun) and two pistols. But there is also a fifth slot, reserved for the default stub pistol, which is not even allowed to be replaced with a better version.
Streum On’s strong point is the work of the artists. The locations turned out to be very diverse, allowing you to assess the specifics of the world of Warhammer 40,000. Giant railways, huge statues of the Adeptus Astartes, the mysterious tunnels of the Underhive, some kind of dump, Gothic buildings, caves with phosphorescent mushrooms, neon trading settlements, logistics centers. All this is superimposed on the local flavor. AI is banned in the Imperium, so most of the technology is based on servitors – biocomputers created from prisoners, slaves and criminals who have had their identities erased. To make the elevator move, the protagonist beats up the servitor, and the emaciated carcass of a man sticks out of the steering wheel of local barges.
The peculiarities of the universe even affect the counting of money that is credited after the mission. The “imperial tithe” is deducted from the total amount – the tax at the expense of which the Imperium exists. The reward is influenced by how many times the player has resorted to treatment with stimulants that allow the character to be resurrected on the battlefield (extra lives), how many chests he found, how spectacularly he dealt with enemies, and so on.
