Where to start with this game? I guess my history with Warhammer? Warhammer is fun, I think. I have kind of a grim sense of humor, and I think Warhammer kind of tickles me a little bit. It's so dark that it's impossible not to see the the humor in it. Everything is so extra. Skulls are on everything.

I'm not much for real time strategy, so I haven't participated much in the actual game space of 40K, but making a 40K shooter in the same vein as Doom just seems so obvious, it's weird that it never happened until this game came out.

On the surface, Boltgun is great. The art design of the weapons and enemies is great. It's surprisingly colorful, and enemies explode into pixelated blood when they die. You move super fast and chainsaw through all the little weak guys, and shoot the big guys from a distance, and chainsaw 'em when they're low on health. It seems inspired by the newer Doom games, which is ironic, because the game is one of those "boomer shooters" which hearkens back to the shooters of the 90s.

I gotta say though, I know Doom and Duke Nukem 3D had maps. As unhelpful as they generally were, they were better than the nothing this game offers. Most of the other reviews for this game I've seen definitely mention how difficult navigation is. I have to agree.

There are definitely some tough enemy encounters in this game, but the absolute toughest enemy, is finding your way around. I would kill 90 percent of the enemies in a level, and spend half of my time trying to figure out where to go. I think it would've significantly improved my enjoyment if I could quickly go from combat to combat.

Even by the end, the combat started to wear on my nerves, too. The amount of enemies that you battle at the same time, with the insane variety, it just kind of became noise at some point. Especially during the final encounter in the game where I had to kill the same super strong boss three times. I thought I was going to cry after he came back the second time. But I powered through. This is one of those games that I've beaten more to get it out of my mind. I beat Boltgun, so I don't need to think of it anymore. I'd be interested in a sequel to this maybe imitating the N64 or PS1 style of graphics? I dunno.

What this game nails is the guns, gunplay and aesthetics. What this game fails at is level design and some annoying spongy enemies. The end result is a game that struggles with pacing and guiding the player through the monotonous labyrinthine levels. I feel I would have liked this game less if it wasn't for an update that included a designated button to activate a bread crumb trail. I kept getting lost and having absolutely no idea where I needed to go. Hallways bled together. Mud and gibblets smeared on my face. Blinded and disoriented yet fueled with a desire to purge the heresy. So I kept smashing that 'N' key to guide me to heresy.

It certainly wears it's Doom heritage on it's sleeves featuring 3 color keys required to navigate and beat each level. Usually with a big arena set piece to cap off each level. In principle this isn't a bad thing. In practice, the level design and gameplay mechanics hold this back substantially. The main issue I have with the focus on arena combat is how you don't really have the tools to support that gameplay like you have in Doom 2016 and Eternal. In those games you get double jumps, dashes, air dashes and various objects you can interact with in the environment to give you the advantage. You move fast and fluid. Able to weave through the bullet fire. You have mobility in Boltgun, but the most obnoxious thing about it is how it's tied to you holding down the shift key... you do move noticeably faster with the shift key, but it's kind of annoying that it isn't a toggle function. My pinky finger was so strained by the end of playing... Why wouldn't you want to move at maximum speed as the primary setting? You do get a dash, but it feels a bit janky and has a long cooldown. And you can't use it while midair... not having a double jump or air dash significantly holds back the gunplay. Not to mention not having an effective gap closer like Doom Eternal chain on the super shotgun. It just doesn't feel quite right... which makes the emphasis on arenas a big downside.

The gunplay is still overall satisfying and fun. The guns are all punchy and enjoyable to use. It certainly fulfills the power fantasy you would want from a game about an Ultra Marine. I did find the plasma gun and the Vengeance launcher to be the least satisfying to use. They aren't bad by any means, but both are noticeably weaker compared to almost every other gun. This is due to their damage to rate of fire and splash damage that can hurt and kill even you. Both feel like weird middle grounds caught between grenade and rocket launchers. Certainly my least favorite and used weapons. The rest of the roster is great though. There are some redundancies, including the plasma and vengeance, such as the Volkite Caliver and Gravity gun. Both are effectively the same weapon, just the gravity gun is much stronger and does splash damage too. Then the bolter and heavy bolter, but I like how both of these are balanced. The heavy bolter slows your movement speed down, by about half, but has an insane rate of fire to make up for it. Then the melta gun is just an amazing shotgun with unfortunately low ammo.

While I felt the level design was pretty terrible, even if I liked the art direction, the enemy variety is actually quite good. Lots of variety in the fodder and stronger enemies across the board. The game does a good job of introducing and switching up the enemies to keep encounters feeling fresh. The only exception is with the Boss enemies. I never really enjoyed any of these fights because they were effectively very spongy and would typically endlessly spawn in enemies until they die. So you basically just want to focus them. I think this is fine, but you just fight them over and over again. With the final boss requiring you to kill the Sorcerer like 3 times, but also kill multiple other boss enemies. Making the final fight more of a grind and kind of annoying and stressful rather than a satisfying test of your skill.

The DLC though fixes almost every issue I mentioned above, and for only 6 bucks and an additional 3 hours of gameplay it's an easy recommend. I never got lost. Never needed to push the bread crumb button. There was a far greater emphasis on exploration creating a better sense of pacing and there were far less arena encounters. That said, the arena fights are definitely the densest and most challenging, with the exception of the final boss from the base game. These levels also just have better variety compared to the base game. So overall I think the DLC is vastly better than the base game. It also introduces a few new weapons. A rocket launcher and a double barreled melta gun which is fucking awesome. The rocket launcher is decent but still a little lackluster in terms of damage.

Overall this was a fun shooter but suffered from pacing issues which caused me to take a decent amount of breaks before beating the game. The DLC in contrast engaged me without leading to exhaustion. It's an objective improvement over the base game and for 6 bucks is an easy recommend, even if you felt lukewarm about the base game like I did.

I’m surprised about how much I disliked it.

It starts with an excessively convoluted map design, way too big and confusing, and the game doesn’t have a map, so it's easy to get lost.

Adding to this, killing enemies is also surprisingly repetitive. Most enemies use “armor” as a mechanic, and your weapons have “penetration”, so you need to use the correct weapon for the correct enemy. The problem is that the highest level of armor is 2 or so levels above the highest penetration level, so most enemies become bullet sponges. There are some very interesting weapons, but they feel weak because of this, and it’s even worse on higher difficulties. If the game didn’t have an easy mode, I wouldn’t have finished it.

Because of this, the game massively overstays it’s welcome.

Aesthetically, there are some very ugly/plain looking levels, especially in the canyon level. Even the ones that look good/great are hurt by the weird “retro” filter the game plasters all over everything. Yes, you can easily tune it down in the settings, but it does feel a bit cheap to depend on a filter for that retro look you so intensely put on the marketing.

I’ve seen a lot of people waving away criticism with a “this is how the original Doom is” which makes me think they didn’t play the original doom.

EDIT:Some things I forgot to mention: While the canyon level (a third of the game!) is dreadful aesthetically, the rest looks better, specially the first third. The soundtrack is okay, but only the main theme really stands out.

I really wanted to like this one. The theme is close enough to Doom, a favorite of mine, and it is also based on one of the most lore-heavy fandoms that exists. This should have created a winning combo. Great theme, great lore, and a great game! But that's just it. This game tries to skate by on its theming and the nostalgic feel of its combat, while skipping the parts that really make projects like this viable.

We want to feel like we are playing an old-school game without actually playing an old-school game. Old games have an adversarial relationship to their players. Partly that was just the culture back then, where games were expected to kick the player's ass and the point was for the player to "git gud" and rise to the bar the game set. It was also partly due to games being a new medium back then, without a fully defined design language. Level design, UI design, control schemes, even methods for saving and loading progress could be wildly different from title to title. Games back then often did not have a guiding philosophy. They were just people throwing ideas around until something "cool" came together.

Boltgun is doing what many games are now doing. It is trying to bring you back to the experience of an old game without being an old game. But the charm (and perhaps the value) of projects like this is giving you some nostalgic experiences while also applying modern game language and philosophy to the project. The best of these kinds of games pull off a magic trick, tickling that old part of your brain while also removing all the old-school obstacles to fun. Boltgun forgets that second part. This game does not apply hardly any modern game philosophy. It does not care about obstacles to fun. It doesn't seem overly concerned with fun much at all.

The lack of a map is probably the biggest example of this. This game does not include a map of any kind, not on the pause menu or as an overlay or even a minimap. There's not even a compass. That is likely a design choice based on the idea that, in the old days when games were in black-and-white and computers were powered by steam engines, you had to poke around and memorize the level layouts yourself through methodical exploration, trial-and-error, and maybe even hand drawing some maps yourself. Etrian Odyssey shows that at least some people may still enjoy this, but I'm not sure those people are playing Doom-like FPS games based on Warhammer 40K. I do not have the time or the inclination to spend that much time in your game level, learning each contour, diving into every crevice, and scribbling what I find on the back of a napkin so I don't forget. This design choice, in modern times, is simply an obstacle to fun for the majority of people. My game backlog is way (WAY) too big for this kind of boredom.

Level design is another issue with this game along those lines. As has been said by many who have played this game, it is incredibly easy to get lost in this game because everything looks the same. The textures look the same. The lighting looks the same. The colors are similar. Blink your eyes and you could easily be turned completely around without even knowing it, with no compass or map to tell you otherwise. Besides the unvaried textures and colors the bigger issue here is probably that these levels do not use modern level design language to guide players at all. The contours of the level do not guide the eye. The spaces do not channel the action. The player will jump behind something expecting a secret, because it seems like there should be one, but there just isn't. I (and other players) just jumped off ledges more than once because it felt like there should be something to jump down to and there just wasn't. Sorry buddy, you missed the tiny opening in the rocks half-a-klick back that was not signposted at all, but is the only way to progress. As I said, it is just tubes and boxes slapped together and the player is just expected to make sense of it all themselves.

It is a big knock against a game like this when the obligatory teleporter maze puzzle has better signposting than literally the rest of the game.

A million videos and essays have been written about Doom 2016 and the philosophy that guided that game. I will not rehash all of that, but just simply point out that Doom works compared to Boltgun because Doom actually has a game philosophy. Always be pulling the player forward, into the action. Everything is designed around that idea. That central philosophy then allows old school ideas and modern design sensibilities to be wedded into an excellent (maybe timeless?) FPS experience.

Boltgun frustrates me because it just feels lazy. I know Doom 2016 was a bigger project with a much bigger team. I'm not saying Boltgun has to be as good as Doom 2016. But Doom 2016 does exist. That means Doom 2016 can be copied in some ways because those devs already did some of this work, just like how platform game developers study Mario 1-1.

I just wanted this to be more, and in the end it just felt like a cash grab, a blip, like a CD-ROM game I would find in a cereal box. Hell, Chex Quest was a better game than this one. At least it had a map.