Warhammer 40k: Boltgun Is Ridiculously Good

foreign [Applause] it was perfect perfect everything down to the last minute details a 40K fans have had it kinda rough lately with the ups and downs of recent release dark tide and even before that necrom underhire gun and space Hulk Deathwing both had polarizing responses from Gamers and it's actually kind of surprising to think that we've never had a really solid Run and Gun first person shooter set in the 40K Universe letting you run around and stomp in the skulls of Heretics as an ultramarine arm with a Bolter and Chainsaw to change with the release of Warhammer 40K bolt gun a throwback shooter or a boomer shooter as they're more commonly called being developed by allrock digital and published by Focus entertainment and all I can say is that Boomer Shooters are about to get yet another boost in popularity because bolt gun is just ridiculously awesome and some of the most fun I've had gaming yet in 2023 [Music] ball gun's just not a great game for 40K fans it's a great game for fans of Shooters in general it perfectly encapsulates everything about what makes this subdrunner of FPS games so much fun and is probably the easiest recommendation I can make all Year everyone should play this the best way to sum the whole thing up is that it's like a first person version of Space Marine from back in 2011 it's like someone took the raw power and Carnage you had in that game and turned it into an entire FPS Campaign which probably ain't the worst comparison to make either because this thing is apparently some kind of a sequel or at the very least set around the same time period you're playing as an ultramarine sent to the planet of greya to investigate possible chaos activity only for the drop ship to crash and the rest of your squad getting killed all right turns out the whole planet is a hotbed of hostile forces and in true obstacle FPS fashion you're taken on the role of the one-man Army and have to get the job done all by your lonesome with a Servo skull as your only companion it might annoy certain 40K fans that they can't swap out and play as any other Marine chapters or customize your weapons or any of that kind of stuff bolt gun however isn't really trying to be that kind of game feels like it's doing its best to appeal to both casual and hardcore fans of the series but if you're after a super lore heavy experience though well you're not gonna find it here and about all the story you get comes from these very 1990s in spite into Mission screens in between each of those three chapters visually I'm reminded of similar Indie Shooters like Proteus and cultic with the graphics having that chunky pixelated aesthetic offset with this really appealing and unique art style even that intro and those intermission cinematics have a whole Star Wars dark Forces thing going on featuring hand-drawn and highly detailed Sprites combined with minimal animation and full voice acting that certain levels you'll see the manifestation of the taint left behind by the forces of chaos as you navigate through these Titanic expansive industrial backdrops long since put out a commission and now completely dilapidated and I've just lost count the amount of times I've stopped dead in my tracks and spent 30 seconds or so just admiring how gorgeous the whole thing looks not to mention the scale of some of these environments is just really vast there's just so many cool looking locations to explore here it really never does get old and oh look they even added your mum into the game as well wait a minute plus the music is just amazing [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Applause] that was beautiful enemies include various breeds of cultists you've got the chaos Space Marines Terminators plague toads and nurglings along with blue and pink Horrors and you're not the kind between your mum's legs sadly though there's no Gene Steelers or Orcs I don't know maybe that's in bolt gun too I love that little guy despite wearing heavy power armor I often forget how Nimble these Space Marines really are and in true old school shooter fashion you can zip around the place pretty quickly which is kinda handy because there's always going to be a couple of dozen enemies to deal with at any one time land on the ground from like a high enough vantage point and you'll even do Shockwave damage pulverizing whatever's beneath you you can charge into enemies to knock them back or just outright kill them which is always fun and then power-ups like the aura of Doom and the assault Doctrine are more or less just like berserk packs so they've really nailed that feeling of playing as a fully kitted out Space Marine [Applause] there is like a definite lack of damage feedback though and by that I mean it's just not very well communicated to the player when you're taking loads of damage like this bit here for instance I take a hit from this enemy and lose 130 Health points in a single hit but if you weren't looking at the hard well you'd hardly know it and now compare this to Doom for instance taking a load of Buckshot from like a shotgun Sergeant the entire screen goes red you get knocked back and without even having looked at the status bar you know that your character definitely took a big hit I guess it's a bit of a minor complaint but it's something that becomes more noticeable when you're up against a bunch of enemies because you don't really notice how much damage you're actually taking thankfully though you've got an absolutely devastating Arsenal here to send all these Heretics back to Hell along with your most important weapon you're sharp wit I mean yes son press that taunt button at any time to let out like a scathing barrage of Words which are more damaging than catching bolts around to the face well not quite but hey they are pretty cool there's just so many of these as well then some of them are pretty damn rad one of them even makes a reference to Captain Titus another one seems like a reference to the opening of blood [Applause] I live again as for the weapons well you start off with the chain sword but even this thing can still be pretty useful able to dish out a lock on melee attack that finishes the weaker enemies off in a single hit but can also do some nice damage to bigger units if you match that attack button over and over [Music] it's a bit of a shame though that you don't get any other melee weapon like the Thunder hammer or the Power sword but it's not really as much about melee here as it is shooting yeah speaking of which before too long you come across The Balter which any self-respecting Space Marine should have in his Arsenal and it really is one of the most iconic weapons in their entire roster even though that bolt is really one of the most basic weapons in the grand scheme of things it's still effective throughout almost the entire campaign and to keep it interesting you'll find magazine upgrades hidden throughout the levels like dragon fire bolts Vengeance rounds in those armor-piercing cracking rounds all ammunition types from the tabletop stuff which have been effortlessly carried across into the game and integrated into the shooting and they're just really fun to use you're actually encouraging restraint and not just firing full auto and hoping for the best I don't know I just respect the fact that the bolt is a weapon that's more or less able to completely turn a basic human into mist after a couple of hits and it just makes you appreciate that raw Firepower you get from Explosive Rounds connecting with soft tissue that glorious side of the weaker enemies getting jibbed after just a couple of hits it really never does get old anyway after that you'll find the shotgun and really what kind of FPS would it be without one though it is kind of thumb me off a little bit how this thing is bound to number two on the keyboard instead of three real ones well no one I'm talking about this by the way though this thing slaps pretty damn hard and it has the kind of sound effect you'd really want and expect to hear fans of Shooters will also be happy to know that you can swap out the shotgun right after firing it to skip over that reload animation and this becomes really useful early on as along with the bolt gun it's the only weapon you've got [Applause] later on it's sort of an upgrade to the shotgun you'll get the melter gun now look I know it's not technically a shotgun but it really does more or less function like one if you stop to think about it firing out this powerful short range blast in a white Arc only instead of it shooting at a bunch of pellets like a standard shotgun shell it's a heat blast somewhere in the tens of thousands of centigrade and it's like literally shooting someone with the force of a sun and I guess just for basic balancing and also to not completely unravel the space-time Continuum ammo for this thing is kinda limited because otherwise you'd single-handedly be able to wipe out the entire chaos thread in the third slide is the plasma gun and this is probably one of the weaker weapons not because it's not any good I mean that couldn't be further from the truth but because you can't swap out of this thing up the firing because for some reason after you've fired off a shot you're locked into the weapon until the recharging animation is complete and I don't know if this was like a deliberate design choice or just an oversight but either way it makes the weapon kinda limited because it means you can't swap to another weapon to maximize your damage output after that you've got the heavy Bolter which is like a heavier version of the Bolter yeah no [ __ ] and this thing is so massive that your character is basically lugging it around the entire time kind of makes me feel like I'm playing as Jesse Ventura in Predator carrying around all painless the heavy Bolter takes up like half the goddamn screen and the shell casings are about as big as beer cans and when you absolutely positively got to execute every [ __ ] in the room except no substitute the sound this thing makes is so loud and awesome that if you hooked up a subwoofer to the bottom of your chair firing this thing would actually massage your prostate yeah it's that good okay [Music] I like that now the fifth slide is the Vengeance launcher a weapon which is being carried across from Space Marine [Applause] [Music] and this is a grenade launcher that fires sticky grenades which attach to enemies and then explode a couple of seconds later for massive damage you've also got more basic throwable grenades which do a lot of damage but the cap for these is really low for some reason only I would hold like one or two at a time in the case of those world breaking Vortex grenades you'll only find them in secret areas that one does kind of make sense though because throw out one of these things and you'll even notice how it easily kills some of the mini bosses then finally you've got the vulcite caliber did I say that right in the grab gun both of which are more or less the same firing out like a constant stream of energy like a laser that does sustain damage you don't get the grab gun until I think it's like the third chapter and then even then ammo for this thing is pretty rare so you want to save this thing for the tougher enemies but the caliber is a really handy and useful weapon all round which visually kind of reminds me a lot of the plasma gun from Doom now each weapon and enemy type has a strength level and although it's not fully explained in the game I think the way it works is that if you match the strength level of a weapon to an enemy it means you'll be doing a lot more damage so if an enemy is level five you want to use weapons with a rating of 5 or higher because those weapons are going to do more damage and then you can find machine spirits on each level which are going to boost your weapon's power even more power off which does sound like it makes sense but it seems like a needlessly confusing way to just explain how the basic combat works so yeah obviously the heavy bolt is going to do more damage than the normal Bolter in the same way the chain gun in Doom does more damage than the pistol it's like no [ __ ] better weapons do more damage than weaker ones just kind of like it's putting a number on what should just be common sense and you'll just shoot enemies with whatever weapon you've currently got most of the time this thing plays as a run and gun shooter that being that you navigate the environment you find keys to get through locked doors and then kill Whatever Gets In Your Way there's even often a fair bit of verticality to these levels with jump hacks appearing in certain areas but only is more or less just preset jump pads but then in other times you're more or less just locked into the one area where you've then got to purge all the enemies before moving on more or less turning it into an arena shooter yeah I said it and honestly I found that these areas often weren't as good only because the game kind of lacks a lot of those features that makes Arena Shooters work so well mostly being things like a dash move or just the ability to really move across the space quickly so how fun these sequences are is absolutely dependent on how well that Arena has been designed and some of them are definitely lacking and just feel less enjoyable to play through than the others plus it also just depends on the kind of enemies that you're having to deal with and by far the most annoying enemies are these so-called Champions now these are chaos marines that run right up too for some really damaging melee attacks and there's a chance that after they're killed they'll get back up again and go into some sort of Rage mode making them even more dangerous in a game where you've really got no fast way to get the [ __ ] away from something these guys are the cream of the crop when it comes to being a pain in your armored ass they also find those play toads to just be really [ __ ] irritating and the toughest variants really just to take like an entire stockpile of ammunition to put down plus there's just something kind of annoying about fighting toads in video games I always get PTSD thinking about that opening level in taikatana and when you're locked into a small Arena and have like a dozen of these things to wipe out it just kind of feels like Intergalactic Pest Control the other thing I had an issue with is the pacing of the campaign especially for those earlier chapters you get the first four weapons the bolt gun shotgun plasma gun and the heavy Bolter within maybe like the first 45 minutes but then it's not like another two or so hours after that when you finally get the Vengeance launcher and that two hour long interval is very tedious with lots of spongy enemies like the plague toads to contend with then only that limited Arsenal to help you out then once things really start to ramp up the first chapter comes to an end and they take all your weapons away and then the same thing happens again in the second chapter like right when things are starting to kick off and you've got an entire Armory in your back pocket all of your weapons are again taken away and look I understand why they've done this believe me no one gets what they're going for here more than I do they're most likely trying to replicate those old FPS games back in the 90s where your weapons would get reset in the end of each chapter I mean games like Doom quaking Doom Nukem all did this but that was because in those games with the end of each chapter you are often sent to an entirely different area not to mention that it's fitting with the whole episodic business model that a lot of those older games used to have here though it kind of seems like a needlessly archaic feature man all it really does is kill the pacing of the campaign because chances are most people playing this are gonna get through it in a couple of sittings you know if not one sitting and to have that deliberate kick in the balls it just kind of removes how fun the whole experience really could have been from start to finish there is also a definite sense of repetition in the combat not in the way that you'll see the same few enemy types over and over I mean there's nothing wrong with that but more in the way that the game reuses some of these tougher mini boss encounters which really starts to get a bit tiring so for instance early on you'll fight a lot of change now these are giant chaos demons that teleport all over the place and have a line of sight attack that does massive damage and the first encount against one of these guys could have served as the end chapter boss and you're not only having to deal with this guy but also a constant influx of other enemies that keep spawning in now ignoring just how [ __ ] annoying it is when boss fights rely on spawning in other enemies consider just how insanely spongy the Lord of change is to begin with so having to essentially replay this fight you know the three or four times you have to do it for the rest of the campaign it doesn't make it any less tiresome the n-shap the boss is always a chaos Sorcerer And it is always the same cycle of just trying to stay away from the guy whilst avoiding all the other inconsequential enemies that the game is constantly spawning in whilst you're trying to whittle away the massive health bar of the boss itself Vortex grenades can offer up a quick and easy solution to dealing with these kinds of enemies you know assuming you've got one but there's never really anything that evolves about any of these fights the only change is that each time you're back in that same spot you've got better weapons the strategy is just like taking on the Cyber demon in Doom you know what I mean shoot at it until it dies I think the only other criticism I'd make for bolt gun is the difficulty or they often lack thereof yeah man bolt gun is a pretty damn easy game at least early on to the point that it's just often laughable the so-called secret areas are really just out in the open and enemies are always really easy to deal with often just standing in one place and shooting at you later levels definitely dial things up especially in the last chapter by throwing dozens of enemies at you at once but it's still quite an easy game especially by Boomer shooter standards there is some definite [ __ ] with the way that certain enemy attacks work and they often have this weird tendency to almost attack you preemptively and seem like they're tracking your movements when you're not even in their line of sight which does feel kind of cheap what the hell is even that but I think people who are familiar with this genre and more than capable that games like Ultra kill or Turbo Overkill so again I absolutely obliterate everything that this game throws at them for the most part anyway then again I don't know maybe that's like the whole point and when you're hopping into that iconic blue Power Armor would you really want to have it any other way foreign ing about a power fantasy FPS making you feel like a force of nature might sound completely asinine but I guess my point is if you're after lack a truly hardcore crushing experience and have a working set of opposable thumbs well you might not find it here truly have to emphasize though that that doesn't make it a bad game quite the opposite all up the entire campaign took me like eight hours to beat and there is definitely replayability here in going back in to get 100 kills and to find all those secrets in every level I will say that for a game that's main longevity is based around finding all the secrets and getting all the kills it is kind of baffling that they didn't include an auto map but then more than that the fact you can't even check your level stats until you finish the level itself sure there can't be too hard to just incorporate some kind of basic stat screen I also think some kind of codex menu would have really been handy too like just a few pages of info for each enemy type or faction seeing as not everyone's gonna be as balls deep into 40K more look I don't want to spend hours trawling to a Wikipedia page learning about the history behind the melter gun but I'd gladly sit there for two or three minutes reading through an in-game menu over the basic mechanics behind the weapon is what it is [Music] and yeah I know these are really just nitpicks but I guess at the end of the day nitpicking is probably a good theme considering overall there's just really not that many genuine things to complain about when I wasn't playing bolt gun all I wanted to do was go back and play bolt gun hey pal did you get a load of the nerd and it comes back to what I said at the start of the video and that's how this is really one of the easiest recommendations I can make all year I just can't think of any reason to not suggest people go out and buy it right now in fact sitting here watching my video is time wasted which could be better spent buying downloading and playing it the whole thing is brimming with soul charm and character it looks and sounds great it's fun to play it's violent gory and exciting in it got a decent length of it in the age of the so-called Boomer Shooters with other titles like Proteus cultic nightmare Reaper turbo Overkill project Warlock and Beyond Sunset we've got yet another great game to add to the ranks here with Warhammer 40K bolt gun so yeah overall damn good stuff sir [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] foreign [Music]

Channel: GmanLives

Views: 866,410

Keywords: warhammer 40k boltgun review, warhammer 40000 boltgun, duke nukem, video game trailers, new games 2023, space marine, warhammer 40k boltgun, video games, warhammer boltgun, warhammer 40k, warhammer 40k darktide, warhammer 40k boltgun gameplay, warhammer 40k lore, warhammer 40k 10th edition, space marine lore, duke nukem 3d, warhammer 40k reaction, game trailer, game trailers, boltgun trailer, warhammer boltgun gameplay, warhammer 40000, gmanlives, gggmanlives

Id: XRiphY5IwTU

Length: 22min 22sec (1342 seconds)

Published: Tue May 23 2023