Thanks to a renewed interest in the hobby and a slew of talented devs, we’re rapidly shooting past the era when just discovering a Warhammer video game that didn’t make you want to pour Nuln Oil in your eyes was exciting enough for a recommendation. Strangely though, there’s still shockingly few FPS’s for a setting that’s had more ink spilled about its firearms than many others have their entire mythoses. 

2021’s Necromunda: Hired Gun was an enjoyable, if messy nu-Doom style romp, and the more recent Darktide finds its otherwise atmospheric rendition of chaos-swarmed hive cities held back by live service shenanigans. Boltgun rejects such gaudy complications on principle. Here’s the pitch: You are a very large, very fast man with a very large, very loud gun, and there’s nothing anyone else can do about it. It is pure chaotic catharsis in the way that all the best retro shooters are. Oh, and it’s excellent.

Storytelling is deliberately light, with comms from your Servo-skull and the odd cutscene to bookend chapters. But Boltgun’s environments convey all they need to, maintaining the maximalist techno-gothic grandeur that’s so key to the setting, while still delivering the occasional labyrinthine warpscape to get lost in, in a worthy tribute to both Tzeentchian madness and classic FPS level design. Progressing through these spaces is familiar territory, usually involving grabbing coloured keys. Boltgun spices things up with ‘Purges’, though: Huge arena fights that you can’t leave until you’ve killed a requisite number of heretics.

More key than Boltgun’s storytelling, though, is its tone. Usually, you have to look at games entirely about Orks to find decent examples of writers not taking 40K’s universe completely seriously. But Boltgun seems to know how ridiculous Space Marines are on principle, and by framing its un-killable, blueberry-armoured protaganist through the superhuman lens of the Doom Slayer, it absolutely wallows in excess at every opportunity. A dedicated taunt key is permanently available, just in case any of these heretics forget in whose name you’re purging them, and the sheer size and heft of your three-fridges-sellotaped-together power armour is constantly reinforced by the excellent sound design. 

Boltgun doesn’t just rest on the traditional Boomer Shooter laurels of having one speed (extremely fast) and calling it a day. You’ve got access to jumps, sprints, and boosts, with the option to combine for some seriously satisfying mobility. Movement is exceptionally tight and fluid, and ends up as the best defensive tool available to you, should your arsenal of ridiculous weaponry fall short. Chances are it won’t, though. The titular boltgun is a chunky, accurate mid-to-long range powerhouse, and you’ll soon find an absolute beast of a shotgun to cover those tight corridors. A searing plasma gun can make short work of elites, and the heavy bolter is a deeply satisfying room-sweeper. There’s a few others I won’t spoil, but the real star of the show here is your chainsword. It’s a sword with chainsaw teeth you can rev mid-carve, and it’s every bit as fun to use as that sounds.

Boltgun’s choice to focus on chaos cultists, chaos space marines, and two out of the four flavours of chaos daemon (Tzeentch and Nurgle), does mean that enemy variety can feel a bit lacking by the time you hit the middle of its 9 hour campaign. 

There’s a handful of different cultists, but they tend to blend into each other in mobs. There’s only so many ways Boltgun can remix and revitalise its relatively limited roster throughout, and while pacing remains satisfying, this limited roster does become noticeable a bit sooner than I would have liked. That said, the daemons especially have a great deal of love poured into their designs. Plague toads hop and jiggle, Screamers stalk the skies, and each Pink Horror you dispatch sees two Blue Horrors taking their place. The greater daemons, when they do show up, are a bit more bullet spongey than exciting though.

Overall, this is the finest 40k FPS on the market. Again, there’s only been a handful of them, but while the fan in me hopes Boltgun doesn’t take up the top spot for too long, it’s certainly going to take something special to knock it off.

Developer: Auroch Digital
Publisher by Focus Entertainment

This feature originally appeared in Wyrd Science Vol.1, Issue 5 (Dec '23)

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