Warhammer Necromunda: Hired Gun from Streum On Studio

[Siel]

 

[Tyranicon]

So the problem with a cooldown for the melee takedowns is that you need a pretty visible indicator somewhere on the screen, and even with that, some people are inevitably going to be pissed off when they move for a takedown and nothing happens. The gameplay is just so fast.

I don't know. I think takedowns are already balanced by how ugly they are.

 

[The Vanished One]

I thought there was some sort of cooldown already? Sometimes I move in and can perform it, sometimes the prompt does not appear. Either way, I wish the game could do without them entirely, but they're convenient to get rid of annoying enemies, especially because how finicky special ability targeting is, and because there is no slowdown/pause when opening the radial menu.

Other than that, I'd rather the game had Stalker or Metro-like gameplay and more of a horror atmosphere. As it is, the shooting is some of the worst I've ever played and the cybernetic powers are mostly underwhelming. Health and shield seem meaningless when they decrease so quickly, but then linger on when you're low on health and you have generous revive options. Atmosphere is ruined by twitch combat and poor encounter design. Movement is great, but I'd gladly give it up for a better overall experience.

Tip: in the current, broken state of the game, Ambot hunts with upgraded voice module and abusing takedowns is a fast way to make money.

 

[Jenkem]

https://store.steampowered.com/news/app/1222370/view/3040472934150989420

Patch content

You will find below the main fixes that this patch is bringing:

Audio

• Dialogue sound mixing improvements (global VO volume increased)
  
• Added missing sound FXs in levels

Bug fixes

• Fix a possible blocker during the Takedown tutorial
  
• Fix of a random bug causing an incorrect offset in aiming alignment
  
• Fix of Numpad keys triggering unexpected behaviours ingame
  
• Invert camera setting doesn't apply on the wheel selection anymore
  
• Fix of a bug when opening a menu while Strengh Booster is still active
  
• Various fixes

Gamepad

• Rework of the Aim Assist when the player switch to iron sight

 

[Infinitron]

https://www.pcgamer.com/uk/necromunda-hired-gun-review/

NECROMUNDA: HIRED GUN REVIEW
A potentially great FPS killed by a thousand cuts.

Necromunda: Hired Gun is a shooter suffering from a mid-life crisis. A linear, singleplayer FPS releasing in 2021, it has looked in the mirror, seen its greying temples and crow's feet, then panicked before rushing out to buy a bunch of hip new mechanics guaranteed to appeal to those cool Zoomer streamers: bolted-on side-quests, a trendy new loot system, a range of gory melee kills it doesn't know how to pull off. It's an FPS desperately afraid of its distinctly late '90s identity.

Which is a shame because Hired Gun would make for a pretty badass grandad if only it could stop embarrassing itself at the skate park.

You play a nameless bounty hunter who prowls the underhive of Necromunda, the largest Hive City of Warhammer 40k’s Imperium and one of its chief manufacturers of arms. Paid to avenge the murder of one of Necromunda's most notable Guilders, you become embroiled in a gang war to control the Hive City's murky underbelly.

Hired Gun's plot is disjointed and barebones, mainly serving as an excuse to thread together 13 loosely connected missions that take you on a tour of Necromunda. These missions (and the places they explore) are by far the best part of Hired Gun. Necromunda is like a million Mos Eisleys crammed together and left under a lamp, a noisy, filthy, and impossibly vast industrial hellscape. It's simultaneously a factory, a landfill, a scrapyard, and a battlefield. It makes Cyberpunk 2077's dystopia look like a nice wee holiday.

Hired Gun captures the foetid essence of Necromunda perfectly. It opens with you and two other bounty hunters on an elevator, travelling down through the Hive City's anthropogenic strata. You see its matted layers of crumbling concrete, flaking iron and spidering pipework. Each mission centres on a specific location within the Hive. The second mission, for example, sees you leap aboard the Koloss-44, a city-sized freight-train furnished with metal skulls and a cow-catcher that's more of a kaiju-catcher.

Elsewhere, you'll hop between cyberpunk skyscrapers and battle through a junkyard to penetrate the vast steel walls of an Imperial Generatorum. My favourite mission, simply titled the "Cold Black", involves descending into one of the most ancient parts of the Hive City for an encounter with one of 40k's most notorious foes.

It's a virtual space truly worth seeing, which is just as well, as everything else about Necromunda is either problematic or downright unfinished. The central issue is that the core combat isn't very good, but there are a bunch of reasons why.

Let's start with the weapons. In and of themselves, they're fine. Classic 40K bolters and heavy bolters sit alongside more familiar-looking assault rifles and shotguns, plus a couple of more eclectic weapons including a plasma rifle and a gun that shoots an exploding gravity vortex. It would be a respectable arsenal to amass over the course of the game, especially if they had distinctive effects and were useful in different situations.

Instead, Hired Gun employs a Destiny-style loot system, meaning you'll pick up dozens of these guns with slightly improved stats. But there's nowhere near enough variety in the weapon roster to make a loot system work. It only serves to dilute the sense of occasion of picking up a new gun, as well as the functional differences between the weapons themselves. There's no point in having three types of chaingun if they effectively do the same thing.

The weapons at least feel good to shoot, but you barely need to for the most part. A combination of floaty physics and an overenthusiastic gib system means that most enemies will fall apart if you so much as sneeze near them, leaving trails of intestines hanging in the air like wedding streamers. And that's if you bother to shoot them at all. Any standard enemy can be instantly killed by walking up to them and pressing E, triggering an elaborate but also extremely awkward-looking kill animation.

Since you also heal when killing an enemy by default, you can virtually clear entire battlefields with melee kills. You will have to pull out your gun for larger enemies, which include Shrek-like ogryns and robots that resemble BioShock's Big Daddies. But these lean too far in the other direction, absorbing bullets like a Kevlar sponge.

If Streum On simply fixed all this wonk and did absolutely nothing else, it would be a perfectly decent shooter. Instead, Hired Gun throws in a rubbish-truck's worth of subsidiary mechanics that add little or nothing to the experience. The worst of these is the mastiff, your canine companion that you amusingly summon with a squeaky toy. The mastiff highlights nearby enemies and can eliminate them with a "quick attack". It's even quicker to shoot them, which means I used my mastiff perhaps five times in the entire game.

Other features I hardly ever used include wall-running, which sounds cool but is basically useless, an entire sub-menu of special powers that include bullet-time and perfect aim, weapon-crafting and modding, which I don’t think I touched once, and side-missions, which are basically walled-off chunks of campaign levels that mostly exist so you can earn extra credits to buy new weapons and abilities. The one gadget I did use a lot was the grappling hook. It adds fantastic manoeuvrability to Hired Gun, and would work great if your enemies were in any way interesting or challenging to fight. But they aren't, so it doesn't.

It's fairly obvious that Hired Gun has been released too soon, not least because the version number on the menu screen currently reads "Ver 0.58333". It's riddled with bugs, from annoying glitches like texture flickering to hard screen locks and ctds, while the general balancing of the game simply feels off. It's a real shame. Despite everything wrong with it, I find the core premise appealing. The art and level design are fantastic, the weapons have promise if paired with interesting enemies, and the grappling-hook movement could be incredible with more time dedicated to it.

I hope Streum On Studio now gets that time to polish and refine and maybe strip out some of the more egregious concessions to modernity (loot systems in FPSes can get in the bin). Sort all that out and Hired Gun could be one of those games the industry looks back in five years and calls "underrated." Right now though, it isn't underrated. It's just a bit shit.

THE VERDICT
48

NECROMUNDA: HIRED GUN
Necromunda is a sight to behold, but it's undermined by wonky shooting, superfluous mechanics, and bugs.

 

[Tyranicon]

I don't know if my experience with the AI is worse than most, but the dog is absolutely useless for anything other than a radar.

I thought there was some sort of cooldown already? Sometimes I move in and can perform it, sometimes the prompt does not appear. Either way, I wish the game could do without them entirely, but they're convenient to get rid of annoying enemies, especially because how finicky special ability targeting is, and because there is no slowdown/pause when opening the radial menu.

Other than that, I'd rather the game had Stalker or Metro-like gameplay and more of a horror atmosphere. As it is, the shooting is some of the worst I've ever played and the cybernetic powers are mostly underwhelming. Health and shield seem meaningless when they decrease so quickly, but then linger on when you're low on health and you have generous revive options. Atmosphere is ruined by twitch combat and poor encounter design. Movement is great, but I'd gladly give it up for a better overall experience.

Tip: in the current, broken state of the game, Ambot hunts with upgraded voice module and abusing takedowns is a fast way to make money.

So there's a bar that pops up with the melee prompt, but I have no idea what it does because it lets me melee anyways. Whether it's a cooldown or melee "window" nobody knows because they didn't bother explaining it.

 

[Lyric Suite]

When i played Space Hulk i kept thinking about how cool a Quake-like game would have been with those enviorments. But in the age of decline we gotta get this ghetto nuDoom-Rage 2 knock off.

And like with Death Wing they fucked up this game by releasing it before it was ready.

Also, aside for the art in the enviorments which is indeed great (don't know what the shill man is smocking when he says the graphics in this game are bad) how "Warhammer" is this game really? Seems to me aside for the coat of paint this is yet another modern shooter. You could repaint it to fit any setting and nothing much would change.

 

[what am i doing]

When i played Space Hulk i kept thinking about how cool a Quake-like game would have been with those enviorments. But in the age of decline we gotta get this ghetto nuDoom-Rage 2 knock off.

The sad part is they could have just copied EYE's gameplay (including character progression and weapon system, not just gameplay) verbatim and they'd have something perfect. Instead it seems like they've tried to copy other games that really were never anywhere near as fun as EYE. It's an improvement over SHDW, and I think it shows that Struem On understands SHDW wasn't the gameplay their fans wanted, but I don't think they've quite realized that EYE's gameplay is exactly what we want again.

So there's a bar that pops up with the melee prompt, but I have no idea what it does because it lets me melee anyways. Whether it's a cooldown or melee "window" nobody knows because they didn't bother explaining it.

I suspect (but haven't tested to confirm) that the bar is your time limit to perform the takedown and if you let it run out you won't be able to do the takedown. Which is dumb as a balancing mechanic for takedowns because it takes an eternity compared to the pace of combat and if you actually let the bar run out that's probably enough time for you to just die.

 

[The Vanished One]

One more thing: why on Terra would they limit you to two guns and three pistols at mission start? It's a twitch shooter FFS, just let me have a whole arsenal. Nothing is gained by having you think about what you want to keep and carry with you, when there is no functional tactical component to the gameplay.

 

[Tyranicon]

When i played Space Hulk i kept thinking about how cool a Quake-like game would have been with those enviorments. But in the age of decline we gotta get this ghetto nuDoom-Rage 2 knock off.

And like with Death Wing they fucked up this game by releasing it before it was ready.

Also, aside for the art in the enviorments which is indeed great (don't know what the shill man is smocking when he says the graphics in this game are bad) how "Warhammer" is this game really? Seems to me aside for the coat of paint this is yet another modern shooter. You could repaint it to fit any setting and nothing much would change.

The game is pretty faithful to 40k lore, bar a few things.

1. The writing is horrendous. Seriously, I'm glad I can't hear any of the story dialogue.

2. You can buy a "real" bolter for dirt cheap.

3. Plasma guns malfunctions haven't killed me so far.

4. Ogryns toss fireballs that are apparently flaming rats. Can someone explain this?

I suspect (but haven't tested to confirm) that the bar is your time limit to perform the takedown and if you let it run out you won't be able to do the takedown. Which is dumb as a balancing mechanic for takedowns because it takes an eternity compared to the pace of combat and if you actually let the bar run out that's probably enough time for you to just die.

Yeah I think it is too. It's also really janky getting the melee finishers off, especially if you come in at odd angles.

 

[Tyranicon]

One more thing: why on Terra would they limit you to two guns and three pistols at mission start? It's a twitch shooter FFS, just let me have a whole arsenal. Nothing is gained by having you think about what you want to keep and carry with you, when there is no functional tactical component to the gameplay.

This should've been a Far Cry clone, not a Doom 2016 clone.

What we could've got:

• Sneaky sneak some underhive outposts
• Actual good-looking melee finishers
• Semi-realistic gameplay
• Good dog AI
• Career as a merc building our guns and doggo

What we got instead:

• Pew Pew, haha lasguns shoot harder than bolters
• Ogyrns toss fireballs

 

[orcinator]

don't know what the shill man is smocking when he says the graphics in this game are bad

Look at those fucking ogryns.

 

[baud]

1. The writing is horrendous. Seriously, I'm glad I can't hear any of the story dialogue.

that's par for the course for most GW products, sadly

 

[Clockwork Knight]

4. Ogryns toss fireballs that are apparently flaming rats. Can someone explain this?

ghetto molotov?

 

[Alienman]

Fried apocalypse chicken.

 

[Wirdschowerdn]

I played this all the way to Mission 8 in one sitting, but at this point I'm really struggling to go on because the repetitiveness and lack of surprises is overwhelming me with exhaustion.

This is one of those games that does everything quite solid from a reductionist point of view, but fails to take on a Gestalt.

Still better than Dumb Eternal though.

 

[Lyric Suite]

Lmao how is this game better than Eternal.

 

[orcinator]

Lmao how is this game better than Eternal.

Maybe if you have a broken C button.

 

[Mefi]

4. Ogryns toss fireballs that are apparently flaming rats. Can someone explain this?

I think it's a nod to Cawdor's bomb rats. One of the best things about the Necromunda TTB failure Focus published was the loading screen art showing various animals being used by the different gangs. I wanted to play that game, not the one just using as loading screen art. This flaming rat thing is dumb as fuck but GW will have nodded it through too so expect it to pop up in some hack writer's next novel for the Black Library.

 

[Hobo Elf]

Game got an update today. Fixed the hitching and made the framerate consistent / smooth. Wish I knew what else the patch did since there are no notes, but at least it's a lot more enjoyable to play now.

 

[Siel]

Game got an update today. Fixed the hitching and made the framerate consistent / smooth. Wish I knew what else the patch did since there are no notes, but at least it's a lot more enjoyable to play now.

On Steam? Because nothing on the depots:
https://steamdb.info/app/1222370/history/

Maybe you're talking about GOG if that's the case it's the patch from friday that arrived just today on the platform.

 

[Hobo Elf]

Game got an update today. Fixed the hitching and made the framerate consistent / smooth. Wish I knew what else the patch did since there are no notes, but at least it's a lot more enjoyable to play now.

On Steam? Because nothing on the depots:
https://steamdb.info/app/1222370/history/

Maybe you're talking about GOG if that's the case it's the patch from friday that arrived just today on the platform.

I'm on GOG so probably it's that.

 

[Echo Mirage]

The hired gun aspect of the story feels like a lack of vision. The more I play the more it think it would have made much more sense for the player character to have been a rogue tech-priest in search of archotech. The upgrades system would have made more sense and the capacity to carry all these weapons could be linked to the tentacle arms offering passive fire support.

 

[Israfael]

A epitomy of jankware, very disappointed

- Weird shooting, it feels very random and there's no consistency with guns. Moreover, there's no logic in guns choice (4 main mission quests and a dozen B and A contracts) - most are useless, and some heavy weapons (like plasma gun) are only good to kill yourself. Negative mouse acceleration if you use iron sights which basically makes them useless.

- Small locations, enemy spawning literally behind and in front of me, very repetitive, enemy waves, basically non-existant AI (the merc dog should just be put down or deleted, it does nothing and can't even just follow you around)

- Compared to nu-Dooms, it runs like shit and constantly crashes for no apparent reason (if it does not for ya, then you are in Warp with Tzeentch making you play this game), alt tab almost guarantees a crash (and it does not alt tab anyway, true 2004 experience)

- Very inconsistent difficulty, some contracts are very easy while others are a wipefest especially if you don't have that ability that breaks the voids and stuns robots/orgyns

 

[ADL]

Very strange they got shooting so wrong after doing it right in EYE and Space Hulk, especially in the latter.