I recommend_ Necromunda Hired Gun (Review)

 this video is brought to you by squarespace stick around to the end of the video for a special offer they're making available through my channel generally speaking i am very cautious about upcoming games that don't doany hands-on previews prior to launch i mean if you're an indie title that's one thing because doing a playable build is a thing that costs resources but if you've got a proper publisher like focus home interactive then hands-on previews aren't a big reach necromunda didn't have any hands-on previews and its review embargo is one day before the game's release and it's a warhammer game and let's be real the warhammer franchise is kind of famous for being a lot more missed than hit so a lot of red flags were flying when i got my pc review code for necromunda hired gun i finished it and i'm here to tell you that i had a good time with it and i do recommend it to you but before you click the like button and close the video thank you for clicking like by the way you should know that there are quite a few problems with this game some of which are pretty meaty and any one of those could be the tripwire for you and your enjoyment nuking your appreciation of it in a way that just didn't happen for me necromunda feels like a trip back in time and not always in a good way its visuals look decidedly last gen its gameplay flow feels like an early pre-alpha build for doom eternal and its enemy design feels really outdated at this point i want to be clear from the outset that there are dozens and dozens and dozens of shooters that you could be playing right now that are better than necromunda having said that i found its old-school charm to be quite novel it felt like playing a more dressed up version of those retro shooters that have seen a resurgence in the last few years games that are confident in the knowledge that shooting is fun and if you can just deliver a good shooting experience in some well-designed arenas then you're pretty far towards making a game worth playing at the core of nick ramundo is a combat loop that you enjoy returning to it borrows the verticality and the swift repositioning of dishonored the war running shenanigans of titanfall and the grapple-hooked fueled mayhem of doom eternal to arrive at something a lot less polished than its inspirations but also something unique especially when you take the inventive level design into consideration while the sound mix the story and the upgrade system all leave a lot to be desired none of these things are likely to be deal breakers since they're all kind of brief distractions that can be waved away in seconds should you choose you're going to want to get back into the action asap because the action is good and with a game like necromunda that's really all that matters

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necromunda hired gun is a first-person shootie game set in a subset of the warhammer 40k universe so let's be clear about this at the start i'm not a warhammer dude i've never played the tabletop i've never read any books and i've only played a handful of games most recently i played warhammer 40k inquisitor mata which had its fair share of problems but overall i enjoyed that one of the things i loved most about that was how much it immersed me in the 40k world it was so committed to the source material and so dripping with law at every moment that i walked out of it thinking yeah that was cool i want more of that even i someone totally disconnected from the 40k world could appreciate inquisitor to mata as a warhammer game because the game worked so hard to make me love that universe sadly necromunda doesn't achieve anything close to that you play as a bounty hunter who suddenly finds themselves in the middle of a gangland squabble where like eight or something gangs are fighting over different stretches of territory and you essentially get led by the nose from squabble to squabble as you try to find a way out of this mess now from what i understand this setup is an authentic necromund experience since the necromander tabletop was an offshoot of warhammer 40k and it focused on small-scale skirmish-style gangland warfare on this hellish industrial planet called necromunda but even though the story is authentic it's not good every new mission introduces the name of some new gang or gang member that's pissed off at you about something or other and the pace at which all these names are thrown around and introduced and discarded becomes a little dizzying i tried to keep up with the story as i was going through it i really did but eventually it all kind of just blurred into this haze as more and more stuff just keeps getting thrown at you without it ever actually meaning anything the factions you fight all look and feel pretty much the same the characters you meet all suffer from a distinct lack of personality and the conclusion to the story was very anticlimactic despite trying to offer up a sort of twist at the end as i am not a warhammer or necromundo fan it's possible that all of this is just going over my head and this is actually fantastic fan service full of cool characters brought to life and the missions i'm engaged with are pulled straight from the law or something i don't know i hope that's the case i hope necromunda fans love this i will say though that i think good storytelling is pretty universal and necromunda definitely didn't deliver in this regard storytelling is a little hamstrung from the outset owing to some really bad voice acting and some terrible sound mixing during cutscenes necromunda is a world of mechanical monstrosities and ruthless gangs who are led by legendary figures who dare to stand against the might of the great houses and the imperium it kind of sucks then that most of the characters sound like they were voiced by old codgers pulled straight from the pews of british pubs during the lunch hours mind you not the roaring evening trade the performances just don't have any presence or bite to them it's jarring to hear characters who are so milk toast when their character designs are so elaborate and the world they're standing in is so imposing what happened there's time for all that later you're gonna hurt yourself straining like that remember you only just made it this far the sound mix makes this even worse overall game sound is pretty good but for whatever reason the cutscene dialogue is just not properly balanced i mean here's an example so you found me you can be satisfied with that at least before i kill you no don't try where would the satisfaction be in that for either of us me shooting dead like that right where you are yeah really weird as i said the rest of the game sounds are fine cut scene dialogue pretty booked at least this is easily patched so hopefully they can just adjust this stuff post launch while we're on the topic of technical stuff let's talk performance the pc options menu was pretty okay you could customize almost every aspect of your hud which is helpful because there's a lot of hardened ui in this game within video settings you could toggle nvidia dls to a range of options including an auto detect which kicks in as a sort of dynamic scaling field of view unfortunately maxes out at 90 which i didn't love i play all my games at 105 and i did feel a little constrained by this you could toggle motion blur off so of course i did the advanced setting options are pretty weak and that they don't give you much to customize audio options are basically non-existent and on the control side you can remap any keybind and there's also full controller button remapping as well i reviewed this on two pcs one with a 2080 ti at 4k resolution and the other with a 3080 at 1440p resolution on the 3080 i was pretty happy with performance both with and without dlss enabled with dlss set to auto i was averaging around 150 frames a second and that would be pretty consistent except there were a few big sudden frame spikes that would drop down to like 70 frames for like a split second it wasn't sustained periods of slowdown it was very quick but it was disruptive because the game moves really fast and those sudden changes in speed are like your car suddenly dropping down two gears when you're already going 100 miles an hour on the 2080 ti running at 4k i got a lot more of those spikes to the point where it was quite a problem and i need to look at either adjusting settings down or lowering the resolution to get it stable at 4k nvidia dlss is doing a huge amount of heavy lifting i can actually turn dlss off on my 3080 and i wouldn't really lose anything at 1440p but on the 2080 ti at 4k i was averaging around 75 frames with dlss set to auto when i turned dlss off i was averaging 35 frames making it essentially unplayable as a side note my brother was playing this on a gtx 1080 at 1080p and he says he was getting terrible fps spikes and stutters and that dlss helped smooth those out a little but it didn't resolve the problem bottom line for performance i wouldn't say this is a well optimized game and there are some issues here depending on how beefy your gpu is if you are buying on pc i strongly recommend making use of steam's two hour refund policy to test it for yourself and see what you get if it looks shaky get a refund and come back to it after a few patch cycles have smoothed things out it's possible that you might have expected some better performance from the game given that it's not exactly a next-gen visual showcase necromund's visuals are by no means bad but they are old looking the biggest defenders are the textures which are really muddy and low res it's a good thing this game moves so fast because if you ever stop to take a look at it you'll see there's a lot of pig in that iron human character models look equally not great with waxy skin and almost no facial animations it's not all bad though the lighting engine at work here is actually pretty good and i did stop to remark on numerous occasions how well-lit spaces were with a mix of fill lights creating strong contrast ambient light like neon signs providing color and muzzle flash providing strong illumination in tight settings still necromundus certainly isn't going to be winning any awards for graphical prowess it gets the job done but just barely in terms of bugs and stability i had no crashes and only a few minor bugs one time an item i was interacting with just didn't work and i had to restart the mission another time i just couldn't fire my weapon because i was caught in a glitched animation so i died mostly though the buggiest stuff i observed was really dumb and sometimes broken enemy ai which we'll talk about more in the combat block overall i'd say that nick remunder is a finished product from a bugs and stability perspective it's not polished to a fine sparkle but nor is it a fallout 76 level bug salad it's fine at least it was for me your mileage may vary so that's the technical stuff the sound in cutscenes sucks performance is shaky graphics are pretty average and it's largely bug free and stable the game works generally but is it fun yes yes i think it is

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in addition to having no previews necromoda's developer and publisher also very tight-lipped about what the game actually was like we saw the gameplay trailers and we kind of guessed it was do maternal but in the warhammer universe and that was really it we had no idea beyond that so let me explain what necromunda actually is mechamundo is a mission based first person shooter with light rpg elements you'll begin the game by selecting your character's appearance from a number of preset options and after a brief tutorial section you'll arrive at the mission hub a hollowed-out server called martyr's end there you'll find a rogue dock to upgrade your bionics a weapons dealer to sell you upgrades an artificer to mod your gear and the number of characters who you'll chat with at various times to progress the story outside of missions the general flow of the game is that you'll talk to some people there they'll tell you that that mission you just went on really stirred up the hornet's nest and that things are really bad out there and that'll unlock a mission and you'll go over to the mission board you'll select it uh there's a brief loading screen and then you're in there are 13 campaign missions to complete which should take you around about 10 hours or so but in addition to that there are also bounty board missions which are a good way to earn extra credit so you can boost your character's stats these missions are just small slices of the campaign levels with specific objectives like kill x number of enemies or loot x number of chests etc i've done a few of them i didn't enjoy them they felt far too brief since they were typically over in five minutes or sometimes less if i was to continue playing this game it would be at higher difficulties in the campaign i would not be grinding these end game side missions the trailers give you the impression that necromunda is essentially warhammer doom eternal and while that's true for the gameplay structurally this game is much closer to the new wolfenstein games where your base of operations is the place where the story progresses through cut scenes and dialogue and where you can outfit yourself in preparation for the next mission i know do maternal had the fortress of doom but that was more of a gameplay space than anything else necromundo's murders and is the place where a lot of world building happens and it's also the place where you can give your good boy the pats he deserves so earlier i spoke about how necromunda is not a particularly pretty game and that's true but i really loved the world design on display here and it was easily one of my favorite parts of the whole experience when i first arrived at marta's end i spent a long time just looking at it soaking up its incredible density and detail the team that made this game are apparently just really big warhammer nerds and you can tell because they poured a lot of love into the design of each of these spaces necromunda is a planet entirely covered in industry where the very mountains have been turned to rubble to extract the resources within them across the planet megacities known as hives reach higher than those mountains ever did and the squalid underhive in which the game is set collects all the runoff and refuse from above this is the world you traipse through underground quarries roaring foundries acid lakes shipyards and the train network that connects it all while nekromunda's storytelling is weak each of its 13 levels communicates so much about the world you're exploring i didn't feel immersed in necromund's law but i absolutely felt immersed in its world as the ambitious level design continued to tell stories that the narrative never could the real draw card though is the combat which is as messy and janky as it is fun and satisfying it's got some obvious flair that's gonna make it fun right out of the gate like the ability to slide and immediately dodge left and right to avoid incoming fire more meaningful is the ability to wall run on most surfaces i say most because sometimes you try and execute a wall run and it just won't work that wall for some reason is not runnable and that can be frustrating when it does work though it feels awesome as its generous magnetism allows you to cross huge spans with ease interestingly they've added an auto aim feature that kicks in when you're wall running it's sort of like a cone that means so long as you're pointing in the general direction of your target your gun will lock on and you can actually upgrade this ability so the cone becomes wider and more forgiving it really incentivizes you to wall run as a combat maneuver for increased efficiency rather than just as a tool of repositioning because it's 20 21 we've got to have a grapple hook and sure enough there is we got one it holds two charges and has a really short cooldown which essentially means that it's always available to use whenever you want to use it you can throw it ahead of you to speed up forward movement throw it above you to immediately zip to high ledges remove enemy shields with it and use it to pull yourself towards enemies for easy glory kills it's the absolute bread and butter of necromund's combat as more than 50 of combat here is about finding the right position for an engagement rather than just blindly pulling the trigger and this was really fascinating for me because as i was playing this game i wrote in my notes that the verticality and repositioning going on here hadn't really experienced it in a game like this before it felt like ubisoft's hype escape where you're just constantly shifting up and down levels it felt like dishonored where so much of both combat and stealth was about thinking in three dimensions obviously do maternal and titanfall do this stuff too but they do it on a much flatter axis than necromunda does as i was researching necromunda i came across this entry on wikipedia quote necromund also stands out from most other games by games workshop by having a more three-dimensional table layout with buildings generally having multiple floors interconnecting walkways and bridges end quote i'm guessing that these developers knew exactly what they were aiming for when they built these levels this way they were trying to recreate in first person the most defining aspects of the tabletop experience and they did it the multi-tiered level design coupled with these powerful instant use mobility tools creates a combat flow that's so much about using verticality to your advantage either to set up an engagement on your own terms or to quickly get out of trouble what's even more interesting about these arenas is that they allow you to choose how you want to play most spaces you'll enter have both wide open areas which facilitate wall running and quick changes in elevation as well as sections of tight corridors which would facilitate close 1v1s your enemies will follow you wherever you choose to go so you get to decide how combat plays out through the simple choice of being either in or outside and i found this on the fly decision making kept combat feeling fresh when there were a lot of reasons that it shouldn't what are those reasons well where to begin uh the biggest issue is enemy design which ranges from pretty average to really bad you know how doom had this combat chest framework where every enemy represented a piece on the board and it was about combining them in different ways to produce unique engagements uh necromoto's chess pieces are more like checkers they all look and feel the same even when they aren't there's your standard infantry who may or may not have a shield or a force field around them then there's your big boys who just kind of run up to you and smash you in the face uh there's some aliens briefly who move way too fast like to the point where it's almost comical and then there are some dogs none of these enemies are well designed in their attacks their telegraphs their movements recall doom you need to fight differently based on what you're engaging in that moment here in necromunda enemies don't ask you to do that they all kind of feel the same and the variance in combat comes from where you choose to engage them in addition to the basic combat model of shooting guns there are plenty of upgrades available but a lot of this just doesn't work weapon mods and gear are a good example you can mod your weapons to substantially change their rates of fire range magazine etc but there's a whole bunch of other stuff in there that just doesn't make sense like laser pointers that don't seem to do anything or status damage that's never really fully explained the delta between a crappy white weapon you pick up from the ground versus a fully modded rare drop purple weapon it just feels really insignificant it's a nice little ritual to modify your weapons but if you deleted this entire modding

system from the game i don't think much would have been lost the same goes for the various bionic upgrades you can unlock during your playthrough there's basic stuff like your health and shields and wall running magnetism etc on top of that though there are a lot of different abilities like a thermal view and a berserk mode where you run around meleeing everything and a fireball you can shoot and a teleport dash and an aim assist mode and heaps of other stuff the problem is that to use this stuff you either have to bring it up on the d-pad or you need to bind a specific key for it i think someone who really wants to spend a lot of time with this game will go through the process of understanding each of these abilities binding the keys remembering to use them in the right circumstances etc i think the average player like myself is just going to look at this stuff pick one or two abilities to bind and pretty much ignore everything else if the developers had stripped some of this back and built it into the gameplay flow better these abilities would feel more meaningful rather than just tacked on options for the sake of variety but that's the thing right i think there will be some people that do go the extra mile with all of this stuff because the game is fun enough to warrant it i played it on normal mode but there are two more difficulties on top of that and if you said to me you need to play this game again on high difficulty i'd be like okay sure that sounds fun necromundo reminds me a lot of the metro franchise which i really loved that was a franchise that started out really janky but it knew what it wanted to accomplish and even though there were plenty of problems with it the developers absolutely nailed the tension and immersion they were going for even if the sound effects sounded like they were downloaded from a youtube video necromund has the same thing going for it the developers wanted to recreate the verticality of the tabletop experienceand they did that they wanted to recreate the defining spaces of planet necromunda and immerse the player in that world they did that they wanted to create fast-paced nuts to butts combat that gave the player freedom to choose where and how they engaged their enemies and they did that there are plenty of missteps along the way technically narratively and the upgrades economy but like i said none of those things were deal breakers for me i enjoyed necromunda despite its many shortcomings and i recommend it to you and i really hope it gets a sequel because i would definitely be down to play more of this

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