Never before have I played a game that is such an embodiment of the time when it was made. The screams screams early 2010’s shooter, with a macho generic action plot, grey and yellow color palettes, gear of war inspired shooting, and just about everything you’d picture when you imagine a video game that you’d see in the background of a TV show or a new channel complaining about video games being violent and ruining the youth. It’s your stock standard 3rd person shooter and there ain’t nothing wrong with that.
I have no knowledge of WarHammer but I can tell you this game made it seem super bland and uninspired. It’s just seems like a lot fantasy tropes shoved into a gritty sci-fi setting with no real depth, I could be wrong but that’s what I got from it. The story follows a team of Space Marines trying to stop an orc invasion, then its revealed a Scientist accidentally made a gateway to hell or a chaos or whatever when trying to make a weapon to stop the orcs and ultimately you end up fighting demons and orcs. Thats about it, its very much just a action movie plot that’s getting you from one explosion to the next, I will say they tried with a plot twist to make it interesting but to say it’s anything more than generic would be a lie. It works but you definitely aren’t playing for the story.
This game has one experience and that’s running through levels and killing things, there’s nothing more to it. It’s simple, focused, and fun enough. There’s some really good rag-doll physics, gore, and animations for weapons, killing things always feels good. The encounter generally focus on quantity of enemies so you can just mow them down and feel unstoppable, not quite a horde shooter but somewhere in between that and a Gears of War. The game keeps things interesting by drip feeding new weapons and upgrades for your health and special ability (which is just a rage sort of mode) so as soon as killing things gets stale you get a new toy. It’s only a 5ish hour game so they can get away with pretty minimal variety and just having you shoot things for the entire runtime. In the latter half of the game a new enemy faction gets introduced so break up killing the orcs. I don’t think they are as fun to kill but there’s a cool interaction between them and orcs because they start fighting each other so the combat arenas become more chaotic and fun. There’s levels them selves are pretty boring, just corridors and rooms with different aesthetics and hues of grey and yellow. Maybe this is just the Warhammer environments but all I know is that I was incredibly bored by the actual levels themselves both in design and art, all very forgettable stock standard slop. The only time there’s any shake up in the levels is these boost pack sections that are good and do change up the gameplay and levels but they are few and far between while honestly not doing that much different.
There’s really not much else I can say about this game, it’s a mid 2000s shooter. Nothing wrong with it but nothing really good about it either, it’s a video game I suppose.
