Necromunda: Hired Gun
Copying from the best? It was Doomed from the start
Visiting a bar where everybody knows your name isn’t much fun when it’s because there’s a bounty attached. There are no friends in the world of Underhive. A lawless place run by gangs, where house loyalty is worth more than a cold pint and good banter, Warhammer 40K’s newest videogame setting is also one of its most interesting.
Some of what makes Necromunda so inspired is transferred into Hired Gun’s first-person shooting. Whether you’re scurrying across the rooftops of a city-sized train or exploring an ancient temple built from skulls and cloaked in smoke, any game that can convince you a Baroque-style town can be built inside a vast cavern on the shores of an acid lake can’t be all bad.
That bar? That’s the Martyr’s End, and it’s a place where your customised hero, male or female, can mingle and pick up contracts. It’s where you meet the campaign’s mission-giver Kal Jerico, and pay a visit to the bartender for gossip, or to the doctor to upgrade your mods and abilities.
WHAT’S UP DOC?
Thick atmosphere and an off-the-books doctor can’t save Hired Gun from its shortcomings. The influences on the game shout off the screen: wall-running from Titanfall 2; a close-kill system reminiscent of Doom; and a health refresh setup borrowed directly from Bloodborne – kill an enemy that shot you to earn a modicum of health. The game proves fun but never reaches the heights of the games it apes. As the saying goes, eventually the horse needs to be made into glue. Hired Gun is very sticky.
Traversal is snappy and you can grapple or wall-run to most surfaces, with later levels growing in grandeur. Yet if you’ve survived Ghostrunner’s anxious platforming, you will shrug at this and move on.
The flaws really show when the action heats up. While
Doom tempers the flow of its action with clear enemy attack patterns and recognisable silhouettes, Hired Gun throws everything at the screen, all at once, giving you little time to think about what and how you’re shooting. Shielded enemies, mechs, aliens, teleporters, and snipers all bombard the screen with little signposting. It’s a potpourri of mayhem that stinks, and not in a good way.
You can muddle through by holding the trigger in and letting rip, which is fun but hardly the thoughtful combat management of Doom Eternal. The spread of cyber-mods on offer (including firing energy blasts from your fists, hacking and exploding enemies, and disabling shields to enable close kills) help inject some extra fun, but they all do much the same thing and rarely affect the fight in meaningful ways. The same can be said of your companion cyber-mastiff,
Hired Gun throws everything at the screen, all at once, giving you little time to think.
which can be sent into battle to chew on enemies. Its real use, however, is to highlight targets in the dimly lit levels. You’ll instinctively ignore most of the games’s upgrades and killer pup in favour of relying on the guns.
BULLET HELL
In this respect, Hired Gun is enjoyable. The bulky Warhammer 40K guns feel meaty and chug in your on-screen hands. Upgrades and parts bought with bounty hunting rewards can turn even the lowliest pistol into a thunderous hand cannon. New weapons can be found in the levels too; hidden chests reward explorers. Yet again, the game stumbles, as there are too few guns or variants of them to experiment with. Midway through the campaign you’ll have seen the entire arsenal.
Keeping you engaged becomes Hired Gun’s biggest task. The story does a decent job but it’s dense with tabletop lore and gives you little time to get emotionally connected to its cast of misfits. Better is the world itself. You may not care why you’re making progress, but the art direction and evocative environments on offer continue to surprise. It’s why the side-quest and endgame bounty missions deliver, because you’ll take any excuse to rerun through a smoky Gothic smelting plant or warzone with five-storey trenches. What you’re doing in these worlds is generic and messy, but just taking in and wall-running these vast expanses proves fun.