"Necromunda: Hired Gun" Review - Jank for the Jank God

Available for: Playstation 4, Playstation 5, Xbox One, Xbox Series X/S, Microsoft Windows

Reviewed for: Microsoft Windows

Over the past year or so I've been more and more inclined to try new things. The upside of this is that I've been able to have all kinds of new experiences that I otherwise wouldn't have had. The downside is that it means I've tended to start off a lot of my reviews in the same way. This review is no exception. I've never even once dipped my toes into the world of Warhammer 40k, whether in videogame form or its original tabletop form. From what I understand, the lore is supposed to be insanely deep and fascinating, but as someone who never really does any kind of tabletop gaming, it just hasn't been for me. Beyond that, I also understand that when it comes to video game adaptations of the Warhammer universe, they tend to fall short of expectations for both fans and non-fans alike. Beyond even that, today's review topic, Necromunda: Hired Gun, which takes place in the Warhammer universe, is published by Focus Home Interactive. There are times when FHI publishes quality stuff (such as 2019's A Plague Tale: Innocence), but more often than not the games that come from this infamous middle-shelf publisher are janky H.P. Lovecraft adaptations. So there's no less than 3 reasons that I normally wouldn't give a game like Necromunda a second glance. But when SkillUp published a video that made some promising comparisons between it and Right Trigger 2020 GOTY Doom Eternal, I figured it might be worth a shot!

So, was it worth my time and money?

Let me give you an eyebrow-raising answer: Necromunda: Hired Gun is the single greatest game that I will never in a million years recommend. The reason for this lies in some of that classic Focus Home Interactive jank, but we'll get to that. For now, let's just start from the top. 

Necromunda: Hired Gun takes place on the titular hive world of Necromunda, and you play as the titular hired gun: the least likable, crankiest British man you'll ever meet. At the start, you've taken on a contract to..........do something.........and it all goes sideways somehow. Then you're rescued by someone you evidently already know named Kal Jerico and you have to find "The Shadow" by fighting the Eschers and helping the Orlocks and then fighting the Orlocks and then helping house blabbityblah and if you can't already tell, I paid exactly zero attention to the story. It was a bunch of gobbledygook nonsense that I'm sure would make sense and maybe be exciting to someone who knows the Warhammer lore, but for me, I just skipped through every bit of dialogue because I would find myself incredibly bored and ready to get back into gameplay. So don't go into Necromunda hoping for a good story if you're like me and have no investment in the universe, it's not really newcomer-friendly, which is fine, I won't be taking any points off for that. So let's get right into what matters, the gameplay.

I'm going to kick off the gameplay discussion with a statement that I was running with up until a certain point in my time with this game, a statement that will need to be asterisked eventually. Focus Home Interactive allows its development partners only a small budget with which to make their games, and developer Streum On Studio is one of the few to spend that money the right way. At the cost of things like graphical quality, the developers wisely spent their limited budget on making the gameplay in Necromunda as excellent as possible. Good God, the gameplay feels amazing against all odds! Necromunda is a first-person shooter that, like the modern Doom titles, has a heavy emphasis on freedom of mobility. If you just stand there and shoot, you aren't going to last long even on the easiest difficulty. But Necromunda takes it a bit further by having your "grade" at the end of a level (and presumably a portion of your reward money) somewhat tied to how stylishly you fought. You can double jump, slide, run on walls, and use THE most accurate grappling hook I've ever seen in a game in combination to pull off some exciting stunts, and I felt that the game was at its most fun when I was rapidly switching between these movement styles on a whim. This is what I mean when I say the developers spent their money right. The grappling hook knows what you meant to do 100% of the time, so you're incentivized to use it whether you're locking on to enemies or getting to a different part of the arena, because no matter what, you're going to succeed. Running on the walls makes you harder to hit and activates an auto-aim "cone," so in the heat of battle, you're incentivized to wall run for the sake of avoiding damage and increasing accuracy. The sliding doesn't really add that much in the way of incentive, but it's still fun to slide towards an enemy as you fill them full of lead! Just about every aspect of the game's mobility systems is specifically engineered to be easily usable and to make the game more fun. But it doesn't stop there. See, the game also has a Bloodborne-esque "auto-sanguine" system. When you take damage, for a brief time you can earn back that health and even make yourself healthier than before by dealing damage back. So with that in mind, let's say you're on low health, get shot, and have auto-sanguine activate while you're standing next to a stretch of wall. Sounds like that would be an excellent opportunity to deal lots of damage while avoiding as much damage as possible, so running on that wall would be an easy recipe for getting back perhaps your full health bar! Or let's say you're in a similar situation but you aren't by a wall. No problem! You can just grapple over to an enemy and gain back plenty of health by doing the one-hit kill quicktime event. The fact that almost every enemy in the game can eventually be one-hit-killed by getting close might seem cheap or like a bad decision, but it's hard to get hung up on that when it gets so well incorporated into the dance. So hopefully you're starting to see how all the moving pieces come together to make an entertaining gameplay loop. Believe it or not, there's even more to talk about than what I've already covered: your cyber-Mastiff, specific upgrades, special abilities (such as my favorite, the auto-aim, which lets you get even wilder with your movement since you don't have to worry about accuracy), etc, but I'd prefer to spell out the big picture stuff as a bit of an appetite-whetter. See, the professional thing to do would be to take that last sentence out, but I think it's worth keeping in to emphasize that the game is SO fun to play that in my excitement about talking about how fun it is, I briefly forgot that I don't recommend it. And that's really the big message I want to get across: Necromunda is SO fun to play, that "X." It's SO fun to play that I forgot I'm not recommending it. It's SO fun to play that when the credits rolled, my first thought was "I want to play some of those randomly-generated side quests!" And perhaps above all else, it's SO fun to play that I gave it a second chance when I was about to write an incredibly short review where I gave it my first-ever 0/10. 

So that brings us to where the game unfortunately suffers a lot: the technical side of things. I'll be talking about what has lead me to not recommend it at the end of this section, but there's plenty to talk about besides that. The first thing to touch on is something I can't really take points off for because my favorite game is Dragon Age: Origins, and this problem is a result of money spent on making the gameplay good: Necromunda is one ugly game. It might just be the Warhammer aesthetic, but very little in this game is pleasant to look at. Making this worse is the horrible framerate dips and spikes. I'm not sure what the technical specs on my PC are, but I know that it runs much better-looking games smoothly (such as Resident Evil: Village). I played Necromunda on a variety of different graphical settings throughout my time with it, and I kept the in-game framerate counter on out of curiosity. No matter what settings I chose, the framerate at any given moment would be anywhere between 20 and 140 frames per second, and most of the time the framerate was like one of those arcade "light stopping" games where the lightbulbs flicker around in a circle and the goal is to hit the stop button when the lightbulb above the jackpot lights up. It would go up and down, back and forth between those two extremes, and as a result, on any graphical setting, the framerate felt choppy. This was especially bad in the final level, and not just when there were many enemies on screen. But the problems don't stop there, folks. The sound design in this game is awful. Easily one of the worst examples of sound design in any game in recent memory. The guns all sound flimsy, enemy footsteps are inconsistent at best (which can be a problem when you're fighting teleporting enemies), even at max volume the music is too low during battle segments, etc. All of that sound stuff combined with dialogue lines that repeat over each other multiple times every couple seconds ("don't make me waste 'em!", "You throne-damned skinny!", etc) make the auditory experience in Necromunda less than ideal. There's also plenty of animation glitches, and most of the animations are pretty bad to begin with. Like the insta-kill melee attacks, for instance. There's no smooth transition between gameplay to melee attack animation back to gameplay. When you launch the melee attack the camera abruptly cuts to the animation before abruptly dropping you right back where you were facing beforehand, and it's jarring every single time. And we're still not done talking about this game's technical problems! There are also times when levels will simply bug out and you won't be able to progress. For me it only happened once, but your mileage may vary. 

Beyond the technical problems, there are also some truly odd design decisions. For instance, there are levels where you need to re-power generators by collecting batteries in order to proceed. These generators will typically need around 4-7ish batteries in order to be reactivated. Would you like to guess how many you can carry? Three. You can carry a maximum of three batteries, and because of this arbitrary design decision, you'll have to make multiple trips to and from the generators. It feels like this whole system was made to pad out the runtime. And to make matters worse, this system is most prominent in a level that was already the worst one in the game! At around the midpoint, you're tasked with going into this super secret vault deep underground that evidently holds a dark secret. Even for a game with as little an emphasis on story as this one, this level is incredibly weak from a story perspective. You go down there basically "just cuz" and leave having not accomplished anything or learned anything of consequence to your mission. But I digress, story doesn't matter in this game. But while you're down there you have to fight a new kind of enemy: the xenomorphs from the Alien films. I daresay whoever designed the xenomorphs back in the 80's or whenever it was has a solid argument for copyright infringement. These "gene stealers" (as the randomly generated side missions and not the main plot seem to imply they're called) are like something you'd find in a Unity asset flip. They don't run in a T-pose, but they run in a pose pretty similar to that. Their footsteps have no sound so it's as if they just glide across the terrain. And all the awesome stuff about the gameplay gets thrown out the window for the one level they're present because there's no room to wall run or verticality to take advantage of, and even if that weren't the case, they're literally too fast for you to be able to do anything. I had to play this level on easy mode because it literally seems impossible to be able to survive their onslaught on any other difficulty. Even on easy mode I came close to dying far too frequently because, again, they're too fast, so they dish out more damage than you can possibly heal with the auto-sanguine mode. Boy is this a stark contrast to the gameplay paragraph. Whereas in that paragraph I got so excited talking about how fun the gameplay is that I forgot that I'm not recommending this game, as I wrote this paragraph my mood got progressively worse. And we haven't even gotten to the big thing yet.

There's a specific reason I don't recommend Necromunda: Hired Gun in spite of what it does well. See, I played 90% of the game twice...and it wasn't my choice to do so. It was while either the 10th or 11th story mission was loading when it happened. I was waiting for the typical loading screen tips to come up, but the screen was just black. Then I realized my PC wasn't making any noise. Then I noticed the start-up sequence had begun. There hadn't been any updates pending, I wasn't scheduled to have the PC restart at any time. Necromunda: Hired Gun literally crashed my PC. I didn't know something like that was possible, but I guess I was wrong. But that's not all. When I booted the game back up, all my settings were intact, but all record of my progress was gone. I did some research and went into my files to try and locate the saved data, but all the relevant folders were empty. My settings, again, were seemingly present in a file, but Necromunda had crashed my PC and wiped my progress off the face of the earth. No autosaves, no previous levels, just a pristine three empty save slots. When I looked it up, I couldn't find anyone else who had had this happen, so it's possibly an extremely rare problem, but I can't recommend you spend your money on a game that might just up and decide to delete everything you've done. That night, I considered writing a two line review that contained only that information and giving the game my first ever 0/10, but you know what I did instead? I booted it up again and started from the beginning because I had been having so much fun and I didn't want to give it up. So that ought to speak volumes about how fun this game is to play. As I went through my second time, I would find myself once again getting caught up in the gun customization before remembering that it could all go *poof* next time I went to the mission board. So that's the reason why, despite my love of the gameplay, I do not recommend you spend your money on Necromunda: Hired Gun. If it can do what it did to a pretty good PC, imagine what it might be able to do to a lesser PC or a console. 

Folks, this game is as mixed a mixed bag as it gets. On one hand, you have a gameplay loop that is incredibly satisfying in spite of all the technical oddities that take away some of the potential weight. On the other hand...that's the only thing holding this game together. Everything that a game can get wrong on the technical front, Necromunda gets wrong. It's nowhere near as bad on any level as, say, Cyberpunk 2077, since it's at least a lot of fun, but in spite of the little descriptor that's going to go next to the score I give it (remember that my scale only lets me take off 1 full point for any given negative), it's about as worth your money as Cyberpunk in its current state. 

Let us review:

Pre-big thing technical issues - 1.0

Poor design decisions and alien level - 1.0

Crashed my PC and deleted its save data - 1.0

The final score for Necromunda: Hired Gun is...

7.0/10 - Good

Please just do better next time, Streum on Studio, please just do better next time.