Reviews
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Review
Necromunda: Hired Gun is a first person shooter in the Warhammer 40k universe. It plays like you’d expect a modern shooter to play. It’s got some nice mobility with a double jump, air dash, combat slide, and wall-running. All this mobility feels real good in battle. I feel like they were going for kind of a Doom 2016/Eternal vibe (fast paced combat, metal soundtrack, broken future world).
It’s got a strange loot system that I wasn’t super keen on. You find a few chests in each of the 13 levels and guns of 3 different rarities pop out of them, along with items and armor. At the end of a level you can choose which new guns to keep and which to scrap for money. There’s a safe area you hang out in between levels with shops where you can buy new guns and augments. Before you start a level you can equip guns in your inventory to your loadout, but it’s limited in a weird way that I never quite understood. You have to take your starter pistol which I found kind of annoying, since I found other pistols I would have much rather had instead.
I also didn’t understand that you had to equip weapons in your inventory for the first couple levels of the game and so I had only stock weapons and found the bosses to be extremely damage spongy. Once I figured out how to upgrade the guns and equip the good ones I was finding in the levels the game was much easier.
You can also spend money on Deus Ex style augments, some passive some active. My favorite was the auto-aim power that acts like Soldier 76’s ultimate ability in Overwatch. I also feel dumb here because for the first 3 or 4 levels I didn’t notice the mod UI had tabs that you could switch through so I thought the first screen that came up was the entirety of the upgrades and ended up investing a lot of money in some dumb stuff. :-/
The story didn’t capture me at all. I kinda resented having to run around the the shop level talking to people before the next campaign level opened up. I don’t have any familiarity with the Warhammer universe so it was all kind of just nonsense about rival factions I’d never heard of. I did appreciate that it wasn’t trying to tell a “universe apocalypse” style story—it was a very much contained local story.
The gameplay itself was good. The shooting felt nice, the guns felt varied enough, and the mobility was great. I enjoyed searching around for chests, which were sometimes hidden away in hard to find places. The level design was also good—I think the best one was the train level, which I noticed was front-loaded. The settings were pretty much the same otherwise, but that probably has more to do with the little part of the Warhammer universe this takes place in. The “set design” was nice—it conveyed a giant decaying world nicely. Everything felt appropriately big and old, with hints of some great world that used to be there.
Overall I think the game is ok, especially if you just want to mindlessly shoot some guys while listening to podcasts. I don’t think the story was very engaging and the loot system is kind of annoying, especially because you need to engage with it or you will have a real tough time in later levels. It’s flawed, but it has a some good core shooting gameplay in there.