You Will Never Find a More Wretched Hive of Scum and Villainy

There are currently over 32,380 Hive Worlds catalogued by the Administratum of the Imperium of Man, and out of all of them, Necromunda is the most famous... or infamous, depending on how you look at it. This jewel of the Segmentum Solar and its great forges supply the Imperium with much-needed weapons and neophytes, but at what cost? Teeming with billions and allowed to grow unchecked for millenia, Necromunda has a seedy underbelly that operates just below the surface. Ruled by ruthless gangs and corrupt merchants, the Hive World maintains a delicate balance in which everyone from a petty thief to a crime lord knows their place. If there's one profession that's perfect in a world where everything has a price and discretion can be monetized, it has to be a mercenary - you're one of them. Other people's dirty dealings are your line of work, no hard feelings - it's only business... until you step on too many toes, at least. Until you miscalculate and pick the wrong side. When a heist goes wrong and you find yourself at death's door, you get to reflect on certain things in your final moments, even if there's precious little you can do in your predicament. You think about who wronged you, or what started the deadly chain of events that led you here - to your demise. Usually you don't get to act on those thoughts, but sometimes... sometimes you get a second chance. Rust-damn, there are times when death is preferable.

We Must Be Cautious

Just to get an important fact out of the way, the game being tested here is the PlayStation 5 port of Necromunda: Hired Gun. It's entirely possible that the comments I post here will not be applicable to the PC release of the game, but it is my job to score the release I've played. Your experience may (or rather, it will vary, for the reasons I will explain below).

Necromunda: Hired Gun puts you in the shoes of the titular "hired gun", a mercenary operating on the Hive World of Necromunda. Your first contract... doesn't go as planned. Your companions (which you're presumably supposed to care about, but you don't, since you've only just met them) die during the mission, and you're pretty much left for dead. You wake up in Martyr's End, sitting in a surgical chair, and standing right in front of you is none other than Kal Jerico himself - the famous bounty hunter. It appears that he invested quite heavily in your recovery, spending pretty penny on upgrading your gear with the latest the black markets of Necromunda can offer. It's immediately apparent that this wasn't a form of charity - the man has certain expectations, and although you're not interested in his offer, you're already unwittingly involved in an intrigue. Like it or not, you'll have to resolve it throughout the course of the game. Not a bad premise, if a bit generic, but the story isn't exactly the focal point of Hired Gun. The game loop going forward is fairly simple - Martyr's End functions as your base of operations from which you can select contracts, purchase bionic implants, upgrade your gear, listen to local rumours or test your skills at the shooting range. Once you feel prepared, you select a contract, complete it and return with your earnings to go on another shopping spree, rinse and repeat, until the campaign is complete. Simple, but it underlines the idea that you're a merc.

Let's start with all the good stuff. In terms of Warhammer 40K lore, the game certainly looks the part and is a joy to look at. You have access to an excellent arsenal, ranging from your basic, weak stub gun all the way to heavy bolters - it's clear that the developers were faithful to the source material. You even have your very own cyber-mastiff, a faithful cybernetic companion that allows you to detect enemies and can be sent off on its merry way to tear out their throats. Dog in a game? Instant positive. Your character's abilities are also pretty neat - double-jumping and wall running really give you great mobility, enhancing the frantic combat of the game, and that's just the basics. You get more, including the ability to shoot explosive projectiles, haywire nearby circuits with electricity and even telefrag enemies, crushing them into a pulp in the process. On paper, this should be a hit... right?

Let’s Keep a Little Optimism Here

The game starts in medias rea, so at this point I already knew I was in trouble. I will be perfectly blunt - two weeks ago I was ready to slam the game - 3/10, at most, and I felt I was being fairly generous. I had it all jotted down, I even made a hilarious compilation of game footage that, in my mind, was far more "representative" than any of the trailers. The product I received to review was effectively unplayable, and not for the lack of trying on my part. There were good things about it, to be sure - the environments in particular were very accurate to what you'd expect from a game in the WH40K universe, or more specifically on a Hive World like Necromunda. The beautiful gothic architecture could be seen here and there, but it was fairly obvious that "the good stuff" was reserved for the ones living at the literal "top crust" of society. The bottom layers of the Hive World, hidden in the shadows of the cities in the skies, were effectively covered in junk, and the people inhabiting them subsisted on whatever waste has fallen from above. It was dark, grungy and unwelcoming - great stuff. The deeper you went into the various locales the more ancient the architecture got, consistent with the lore surrounding Necromunda. Signs of ancient technology were hidden under a thick layer of rubble, just waiting to be discovered and... repurposed. The levels were lit by fountains of sparks and great, atmospheric lighting, showing off what current gen consoles can do in terms of graphics, even in a "budget" title. If you squinted, you could even say that it almost had the look of a triple-A title, without the triple-A price tag... until you tried to actually play it.

There were several things off about it, some were immediately apparent, others cropped up in the process of reviewing the game. The first thing I noticed was that aiming was nigh on impossible. The sensitivity and the deadzones of the sticks were set in such a way that your crosshair would either not move at all *or* fly across the screen, prohibiting fine control. Try as I may, I haven't been able to adjust them appropriately no matter what settings I used. No bother, I thought to myself - the game features aim assist, right? Well, it does, on paper - that feature was disabled in the initial release, and a known bug the developer was still working on. To top it off, the game featured the weirdest trigger behaviour I've ever seen in a video game. Imagine you're the one holding the controller - you pull the trigger, you unload your magazine into an enemy, your character starts reloading and... and nothing happens. You're in the middle of a firefight, still holding the trigger, and your character is just standing there, idling. It isn't until you release the trigger and pull it once more that you can continue shooting... but wait, there's more! There was a perceptible delay between the end of the reloading animation and the game actually registering your trigger pull, and as a result, the only course of action was to furiously pull the trigger as soon as the reloading animation starts to, at some point, continue the fight as you normally would. Infuriating doesn't begin to describe it, and to say that controller support as a whole was "broken" would be charitable.

Okay... deep breath... I kept on playing and I noticed that the audio mixing was incredibly inconsistent - at times everything sounded "correct" and consistent with what was happening on the screen, then other times you couldn't hear what the NPC's were saying to you at all, they were drowned out by the background sounds or the soundtrack. The weapon sounds, particularly the shotguns, sounded muffled, as if they were toy guns. Switching from an appropriately-behaving pistol to a shotgun with the impact of a marshmallow was... jarring, and it felt wrong.

The graphics, while beautiful at first glance, showed some blemishes upon further inspection. Certain things would pop in and out of existence every now and then, and not in a nice, faded or otherwise concealed fashion you've come to expect from modern games. Things were either there, or they were not - the Level-of-Detail of in-game models would change in plain view of the player, affecting immersion. The game also committed the cardinal sin of allowing the player to enter what's called "murder closets", specific areas of the map that spawn enemies for you to fight. When I first found one, I was standing in a corridor in the middle of a boss fight when I suddenly started being harassed by enemies literally spawning right in front of me, in plain sight, making it apparent that I probably wasn't supposed to be there. In this case, the wave of enemies was also infinite, so I had two choices - either change locations immediately or... Press square to win. What I mean by that is that Necromunda: Hired Gun features an ability similar to the glory kills of DOOM - if an enemy's shields are down, you can simply approach them and hit them with a powerful, scripted melee attack. On weaker enemies this feature is instantly available and executes them outright, so that's what I did - I kept shooting at the boss and when my health was getting a little low, I just executed a couple of enemies to recharge, then continued on while the Goliath was patiently waiting for me at the door. Oh, did I mention that enemies have trouble with doors? They have trouble with a lot of things.

The enemy AI is extremely primitive, there's no other way to describe it. From the moment an AI sees you, it will attack you instantly and attempt to maintain line of sight, paying no regard to its own health and without any discernable strategy. Melee enemies will simply bum rush you, even if they can't physically fit their chosen path. The smartest enemy type I've seen throughout my entire playthrough were the psychics which would always attempt to teleport behind me, or to a safer location, and attack me from a more advantageous angle - unfortunately, they were also vulnerable to the melee attack, so they rarely got the chance to do so. Many hours into the game I saw an enemy cower and retreat... once. That's it.

I gave up. I stopped playing then and there, about 1/3rd of the way through, and started writing... I even began reading reviews from other outlets, since at this point I wasted a lot of time playing the game instead of just hitting a wall with my face and enjoying a nosebleed. It would've been preferable. I noticed that the game was getting... good scores, 6/10 being the consensus. I wanted to play whatever game those other guys were playing, because it sure wasn't this one. I even remarked on it in my notes. Then, I stopped. A patch notification. Let's give it a chance. This happened multiple times throughout the course of the last two weeks, and finally... on the day of the third patch... I had to scrap my text. Start over.

They... actually fixed it. I felt it from the moment I picked up the controller. The aiming was fine-tuned, the weird delay in the trigger action was gone, the game seemed smoother... and... I began to enjoy it. It felt good. I mean... it felt really good. Not good as in triple-A good, but for that price? Bargain. I was okay with the occasional glitch, I was okay with hordes of enemies as stupid as a pile of rocks, I was okay with all of that because the guns handled well, and they finally had oomph. I didn't have the time to think about all the small nitpicky issues, I was popping heads as if they were pumpkins. Gore covered my screen, accentuating the surrounding architecture and concealing much of the imperfections. I... I kinda liked it. This brings me to my broader point.

Do. Or Do Not. There Is No Try.

Why'd you do it? Why'd you do it, Streumon Studio? Or was it Focus Interactive? Was it the pressure from Games Workshop to release the game on schedule? Was it financial difficulty? Either way, there's a problem in one of those companies, if not all of them. This isn't the first time you've done it either - your previous title, Space Hulk: Deathwing, had the same issue. I'll call it "BOA", Broken on Arrival. It's a shame, it truly is, because after playing the game with the three patches installed, you really have something here. It's not the best, it's not up there with the big names in the genre, but dang it, I'd be lying if I said I didn't have fun when I picked it up again. With the major gripes fixed and the product polished, I finished the game, maxed out my character in side missions and left with a smile. You should be proud of your work, but many of your potential customers won't even try it out - the reviews are already published and the scores won't change. Few reviewers will be willing to wait until you get all of your ducks in a row, that's not how the algorithm game works on the Internet. We have deadlines too, we're not your play testers. I chose to wait, possibly to my own detriment - less eyes will look on this text, there are more reviews out there now and people have already made up their minds. I can tell just by looking at the game that you've poured a lot of love and attention into it, but... gameplay is still king. If your game doesn't work on Day One, not in the sense of crashes or glitches, but in the sense of being painful and frustrating to play, you're dooming it to failure and mediocrity. I hope that people will continue to read reviews until the disc release hits store shelves on the 30th, but is it really wise to hold on to hope instead of appealing to customers with a game that's fun from start to finish? I wonder. Regardless, the digital release should've been marked as Early Access, because that's what it was. Apparently PC players didn't have to deal with nearly as many issues, which explains the score disparity between different platforms. I sincerely hope that in the future this won't happen again. I hope that at least one employee will read what I had to say and draw some conclusions from it. In the immortal words of Shigeru Miyamoto, "A delayed game is eventually good. A bad game is bad forever". You only ever get one first impression, for god's sake, make it a good one.

So... with the open letter complete, should you, the reader, buy Necromunda: Hired Gun? Well, put yourself in my shoes for a second. Two weeks ago I would've said that you're better off just burning your money, it'd be infinitely less frustrating. Now? Now it's mostly fixed. The product that I intially played is *not* the product that you're going to buy, so how can that have any bearing on the score? As of right now, it's a "maybe". If you're a big fan of Warhammer 40K, I'm pleased to announce that the growing pains are, for the most part, over. There's stuff here for fans to enjoy, that much is certain. Yes, the game is still glitchy, it still deals with pop-in issues and no amount of patching can fix a pretty baseline narrative with few twists and turns, but... you don't get the chance to focus on any of that as you play. With the gunplay fixed, the game becomes what it was always meant to be - a frantic shooter with fun mechanics and hordes of enemies just waiting to be butchered. The expansive levels are fun to explore, the atmosphere is good and although the play time is fairly short, you can't complain about that at this price point. If you find it cheap, give it a shot... just... be sure to update it all the way - you were warned.