Necromunda: Hired Gun

 

Necromunda Hired Gun is a first person shooter set in the Warhammer universe. I don't know too much about Warhammer but I do know a bit about first person shooters. It was developed by the same developers as E.Y.E.: Divine Cybermancy, a game I kinda liked when it came out, so theres that. The Steam page and basic information its a standard single player campaign, and I will basically play any FPS game with a campaign so I eventually picked this game up.


Starting off it gives a few brief cutscenes setting the premise that youre as the name suggests, a mercenary hired to do various tasks. You surprisingly get to select a character, and theres lots of them. Its unclear if choosing a character changes the story in any way, there are males and females so I'm guessing it at least would change the voice acting. I suspect its the story no matter what character you choose, though. I just picked the guy thats on the box art.

Then you have difficulty selection, 4 of them, the last difficulty says its "Impossible". I just choose 'Normal' mode.

Then there is a short tutorial segment showing you the movement controls, dashing, wall running, sliding, the controls are fluid and fun to use the movement especially is smooth and fun to slide around.
You have a dog companion with you in the game, who you can spawnn with a button press, he then exists for a short duration and also highlights enemies around you, then after a duration goes away and goes on a cooldown.

It's clearly inspired by new Doom games like Doom 2016 and Doom Eternal. You can Takedown enemies which goes into a short animation and you are invincible during it. When taking down enemies you get health back, also when you kill enemies in a short distance you get health, I think you get more health the closer you are to enemies too. Other than that its a fairly standard FPS game, except its not really a cover based shooter its more an arena shooter jumping all around sliding and moving constantly rather than standing still in one spot. You can aim down sights and carry many weapons, like 6 weapons I think. You're mostly going up against human enemies ogre type enemies, dogs, and different kinds of sort of mutated humans. Sometimes there are these mech enemies you have to kill that are quite bullet spongey but at least change up the combat.

The game has pretty cool cutscene instances where some new group will show up or some new enemy will be introduced and it kinda looks epic and hype.

After the first short level segment you arrive at the games main hub, Misery's End. This is a place you'll go back to after every mission. Here you can buy upgrades , talk to a few different NPC's , and select the next mission. Its a nice place to return to, and it helps break up the games pacing into clearly defined segments and also gives you something to look forward to, to go back and buy upgrades and new weapons and attachments.

From there, the game has 13 total main missions. Which does not take too long to finish if thats all you're doing. I beat the whole game in one sitting, 5 hours. From the mission select screen, you can also select side missions, but they seem to just be segmented areas of the main missions with generated fetch quests, I didn't really bother since all doing them accomplishes is getting you some more money to buy upgrades but I never felt short on cash ever.

The bulk of the games missions take place inside factories or industrial type settings, lots of vertical climbing and platforming segments, which at times can be a bit annoying to navigate and also get boring to look at. Theres not really any very memorable standout moments all of the enviornemnts tend to blend into eachother. There are some more cave type levels, a train level, but thats about it. The missions could of used some more highlight moments or different exciting areas because it starts to get a little stale but its not a huge complaint.

Of course most of what you'll be doing is shooting. The combat has highs annd lows. While the movement is fun, with smooth controls and lots of different abilities, such as at one point in the game you unlock a grappling hook which is quite fun to use zipping around the game, although it seems very arbitary where it will let you hook, some surfaces for seemingly no reason wont let you hook onto them - but the combat can sometimes be a mixed bag. It often feels spammy, with some bullet sponge enemies, and the takedown mechanic in particular is just very janky. Since the main way to get health back is by killing enemies, and the closer you are the more health you get (I Think) , it means at one point I realized the best thing to do is to just constantly spam the takedown button and run towards enemies because many bullet sponge enemies will be instantly taken down at 50% health and you can chain back to back takedowns which you are invincible during those animations. This makes the combat feel quite cheap and gimmicky, and even worse is that the takedown animations are more often than not broken than working. Floating enemies, animations playing in the wrong spot, suddenly clipping abruptly back to normal, the takedowns are just a mess. They try to be over the top and flashy but they do not have the polish to back it up. I don't even really like the Takedowns from modern Doom anyway, its not really to do these constant kinda quicktime actions watching short cutscenes constantly.

Also the way the death system works is odd. If you die, you can still revive 3 times a level (or more) with these Stim items. I never once in the entire playthrough actually died 3 times and ran out of Stims. I don't know what happens. Do you just fail the entire mission and have to do it all over again? I mean I guess thats kinda cool and high stakes high tension gameplay but it just never got challenging enough to where I cared. Maybe I should have highered the difficulty, I don't know. The game was quite easy. I died like, twice the entire time.

Besides that, I didn't really find that many of the guns that fun to use. Sure theres a lot of different guns, and theres even a sort of loot system where you can find different tier guns with different colors, some of them saying +1 or +2, you can buy guns and attachments back at the main hub, but many of them felt weak or not fun to use. I tried this pump action shotgun which seemed totally worthless, I tried a few different pistols which were equally bad, I mostly just used this yellow assault rifle the entire game, an item I bought very early on. It was +1 and thats about it. Carried me through the whole game. Besides that gun, I used this plasma gun but it barely had any ammo ever still it felt okay. Besides those two guns I never found other guns that satisfying. There was a Sniper rifle I tried, but it kinda felt worthless since this isnt really the kind of game you can stand around and zoom in scoping enemies. Still, I like that the game has so many weapons, has a weapon store, and even tried to incorporate some more RPG mechanics with its store and even finding chests around the game to pickup loot, but the weapons themselves were kinda lackluster at least from what I used.

The other kinds of items and loot are varied, you can walk around the levels opening chests picking up all sorts of stuff like Charms, different body armors, rings, and other. At the end of each mission it gives you a screen showing you all the loot you found and which ones you want to keep, you only have so many slots to fill up. The rest of the items you dont take will be sold automatically. The loot is quite basic, though, its just like equip one body armor that has a +armor stat, equip 2 rings, usually with like, +5hps or % crit, equip a charm to your gun with a small buff to find more money, stuff like that. Its not all very significant at all. It almost just feels like its all pointless and is only put into the game just so the game can say it has RPG mechanics, its all kinda shoehorned and undercooked. Sure it made the game a bit more interesting, its just not very fleshed out, and by the end of the game I never had anything I cared about and none of it really mattered anyway. The different weapon tiers have a slightly noticable impact, like going from +0 to +2 purple gun I felt more damage but thats about it.

You can add attachments to your guns but I didnt really bother for most of the game either, at one point I customized my main yellow assault rifle and just started at the DMG number and put on attachments until it went up, wasnt much more to it than that and I didnt really notice much of a difference anyway. The implant upgrades are probably the most impactful part of the things you can purchase. You go to the surgeon doctor at the main hub and there you can put implants in various parts of your body; Arms, legs, head, lumen, etc. Although honestly I still didnt find too many of these to be appealing. Mostly what I gravitated towards was simply upgrading my legs for faster movement speed which was immediately noticable and significant. Then I just started to get whatever increased health, and increasing the amount of health you get when killing nearby enemies. Then I started to upgrade the R.Field which is basically your armor shield. By this point the game was almost over. The other stuf you can get are various abilities like Slow motion ability, a shockwave blast, lower recoil when wallrunning, shooting different things from your hands, this perfect aim thing which I guess automatically shoots enemies for you (which I didnt wanna use), and other kind of novelty gimmicky abilites. Honeslty I didnt really use any of the abilities at all, I just upgraded my health, shield, and movement speed and thats kinda it. The abilities again just feel like they were thrown in there jsut to say its in the game, they arent needed. You can even upgrade your dog, who also has multiple ability trees, but I didnt even bother the entire game. Maybe that was a mistake on my part, but it just wasnt interesting enough to care about and the game was easy anyway. Around the end of the game I quickly glanced at the dog tree and it was just stuff like lower cooldown and more dog health and speed, etc.  I hardly used this dog for most of the playthrough and didnt even realize it highlit enemies until halfway through the game, just didnt really find him that necessary although its a neat little addition.


That's pretty much the bulk of the game. You enter a mission, run towards the objectives usually turning some wheel or opening doors, reaching some area or killing enemies, beat the mission, select loot, go back to main hub and buy upgrades. Its kinda annoying how after every mission it makes you talk to multiple NPC's and the dialogue is very drawn out and just boring to me, the story is just dull and I quickly stopped giving a shit about what anyone was saying. Maybe its because I'm not well versed in Warhammer lore, but these characterrs and the stuff they were saying was all in one ear out the other for me and it started to sound convuluted and just dull. I started skipping and skimming through conversations only a few hours into the game and just wanted them to stop talking. Theres a bartender lady which was kinda interesting to talk to but even she got dull pretty quick too. The main NPC you talk to looks like some guy straight of some japanese manga which was also kinda offputting and he talks all pretentious I couldn't really care.


Some of the missions are really hit and miss though. Some are fairly standard and decently enjoyable, clear out rooms, survive assault, take down a boss, but others have stupid inane objectives like going around picking up fuses multiple times searching empty rooms for them to put into some generator, which repeats throughout multiple different levels. Other levels have you start off infront of a big locked door doing nothing but walking around a big empty room trying to open the door, like why? Its just a waste of time. This other level introduces this cool Alien type monster but they only exist for like 10 minutes and never show up ever again? That was disappointing.

Really though after a certain point it all starts to blend into eachother and I'm just going through the motions. There are at least a handful of boss fights, usually just against some other human enemy that acts all cocky and badass and is a bullet sponge so you go in circles mag dumping them for a minute or two, the ogre enemies especially are kinda funny and amusing they almost look like Shrek or something. After like halfway through the game I started to just run past many enemies instead of fighting them all and it worked since the movement is so robust, you can just grapple past waves of enemies slide past them, you get double jump etc, so many segments of the game you can just run right past which is a bit awkward. The game is just all around a bit janky, not surprising since its the EYE Divine Cybermancy devs, multiple times I got stuck inside walls, broken animations, or just enemy AI glitching out.

Much of the game was just spent holding down mouse button 1 on my assault rifle dumping hundreds of bullets into enemies, the gunplay feels satisfying enough, with hit markers letting you know when you shoot enemies, but the level design like I said can just be a bit dull. Though the whole Warhammer atmosphere and setting is kinda badass, the music is rocking metal music the whole time which again feels really Doom inspired.

The last two missions you get captured and cant go back to the main hub so theres only 11 missions where you get to really interact with the main hub and upgrades system, theres a few boss fights towards the end that were a bit challenging and fun, then you get to the last boss this lady inside some kinda cathedral arena who shoots green gas where you cant really see shit which was a bit stupid, the anime guy congratulates you and you go back to the main base and surprise he puts out a hit on you and the game ends - end credits. You can play after beating the campaign, theres not much to do besides those (I think) randomly generated side fetch quests.

So thats Necromunda Hired Gun, maybe one of the most painfully average games I ever played. It does some things right, the movement is fun, the combat can be satisfying enough, it shoehorns in some lackluster RPG mechanics and upgrades, but the actual level design and campaign and story just isnt very engrossing and not memorable coupled with all the jank. Its a decent playthrough for a weekend but beyond that its unlikely to stay in your head for very long.

6/10