Picked up Necromunda: Hired Gun on sale during the WEEK OF SKULLS.
I'd seen this come out a while ago but honestly there were too many games to play, and I've dithered on getting it several times. I've already watched several reviews of it and they were all middling to good.
But with Darktide coming eventually I figured it was the time and...
Well it's only the early game. The long-term meta of play has some issues, but setting all that aside...
Good lord. The environmental detail is simply stunning. Streum On (Eye: Divine Cybermancy, Space Hulk: Death Wing) continue to make hands down the best and most absurdly detailed and flavorful 40k settings. Every single inch of the game has beautiful, crisp details. It's the kind of obsession where you'd not be surprised to look at a rivet and see that it's a little skull. It's a gorgeous game....mostly.
Character models are similarly really detailed, but then you see like an ogryn....and it's this flat, almost baby-like texture work. Smooth and without features compared to the richly designed gangers and other NPCs.
The game is going for a fast-paced DOOM-like combat, where it wants you up close. You get an overshield recharged by pickups, some instant health packs, and can replenish HP by doing damage to someone that just hurt you. It has melee insta-kills you can use at close range, although unlike DOOM they don't refill you.
Just like EYE, there's.... a lot going on in the game in terms of features, sort of all over the place. Lots of weapon customization, from scopes to stocks to foregrips, muzzles, magazines....augmetic enhancements to your bounty hunter for new abilities, better health, the usual. There's wall running, slow time. You even get a Cyber Mastiff pet to sick on dudes, although tbh it already feels like a mechanic I'll forget to use.
It sounds pretty great and some of it is, but then there's big ol weird cracks in design that leave me scratching my head after the first mission. There's chests to discover in each mission that yield guns and two different kinds of trinkets for equipping to your person or your weapon. But at the end of each mission, it only lets you keep 1 type of each gun you found, and a limited amount of trinkets. The rest gets converted to cash. Guns and trinkets have semi-randomized properties, so the same kind of pistol can have significantly different stats between different drops. The same kind of pistol might in one version have better range but less handling, while another drop is the opposite. And the way you manage your loadouts feels clunky and rough, the number of screens you have to go through and the way they look. There's definitely what I would call some Euro Jank here, of a very familiar kind from Space Hulk: Deathwing and even EYE.
The story is so far kind of hit or miss, and seems somewhat needlessly complicated up front. It pretty much hot drops you into the middle of Necromunda gang politics & warfare with a murder mystery of some big wig as the reason you're there in the first place. If you really know 40k and Necromunda lore it'll all flow pretty well but I imagine someone ignorant of 40k would just be like...."Ok, I don't know what any of this shit means, on to gunning people down." It feels like a game made for 40k fans and less for general audiences.
All that said, I'm really looking forward to getting into more of it. It's yet another quirky game from Streum On but it delivers the roleplay atmosphere. As an RPG shooter I'm not quite sure where it stands yet. I started on hard and it definitely already put me to the test in the first level. It expects you to move quickly through difficult terrain while continuing to shoot, and your enemies do not patiently sit in cover and wait for you to kill them. Lots of times I'd zip into cover to reload and just catch a break and guys would follow me right into my hiding spot and continue blasting me. I turned off a lot of conveniences like auto-reloading and enemy outlines to make the game feel grittier and be tougher...and yeah, it's both of those things.
Anyways, I'm pretty f***ing immersed so if you want an amazing 40k setting to get immersed in and blast some gangers, give it a look.