Necromunda: Hired Gun

Necromunda is one of the spinoff games from Games Workshop's Warhammer 40,000 miniature wargame. Likewise played with miniatures, Necromunda is about small scale skirmishes between the gangs of the titular hive city/world that produces weapons and such for the Imperium's vast military forces. As a first person shooter, Necromunda: Hired Gun is a video game adaptation more of the Necromunda (sub-)setting than the actual tabletop game.

Gun for hire where the sun doesn't shine

You play as an unnamed hired gun whose little troupe's attempt to claim the bounty on someone called the Silver Talon goes pear-shaped. You alone survive but at the cost of becoming indebted to your savior, bounty hunter Kal Jerico. Jerico correctly guesses that mere gratitude wouldn't motivate your character to do as he wants so he had the doc saving you also install an implant in head that belongs to the very same Silver Talon. And so you continue hunting the Silver Talon because she's hunting you. Or something along those lines -- the game's dialogue was so muffled that I often lost track what the characters were mumbling about.

Hired Gun's hub is a place called Martyr's End, its mission board being where you start story missions. You can also take on endlessly generated side missions for various different factions for quick credits. Credits are then used for upgrading your -- and your mastiff's -- many implants and customizing weapons. You can also buy weapons and other things but the vendor has stuff only up to the second, blue rarity -- missions is where you'll find the good stuff.

The game is technically a looter shooter due to the random aspect but as far as I know, the only variable changing on items themselves is the rarity that goes up to +3: white, blue, purple, and gold. I assume the quality affects the base stats: I never did a proper comparison because that would've required first changing all the parts to be the same on both items.

I found it annoying that you can access your loadout only at the mission start screen and to a lesser degree at the store. Would it have been too much to ask to have a button to open your inventory?

Smoothness meets jaggedness

Hired Gun is a great lesson on how important level design is for first person shooters. Unfortunately it teaches this lesson by having bad level design. Gameplay is very fast and smooth -- you have a bunch of active abilities and there's wallrunning, grappling, sliding, double-jumping -- but the corner-heavy maps, messy visuals, and enemy spawn system truly bring the experience down.

Me playing the game on Medium graphics probably didn't help with the messiness, though I have doubts max setting would've made a difference with the visual busyness and dim lighting. Initially Hired Gun even set everything to Low while still running poorly. But it seems there's an issue with windowed fullscreen -- in exclusive fullscreen the game struggled far less and I could up the settings.

It would be really difficult to distinguish most enemies from the environments without the white outline option. Your mastiff summon highlighting enemies in red through walls is a godsent ability as well.

Enemy reinforcements spawn whatever direction you're not looking at with little regards to the distance: they can appear right behind you. I did one side mission in which you need to defend points on the map. It felt like soloing one of the objective waves in Mass Effect 3's multiplayer with how new enemies were always coming from the directions I hadn't been looking at.

It would help if Hired Gun's levels had good routes for running around like Doom Eternal or Ghostrunner, for instance. It says a lot that the game's rarest achievement on Steam is 'Death comes from above' (1.1%) that requires killing measly 100 enemies while wallrunning. You even get autoaim while doing so. But there's simply so few places to do so effectively; you have to go your way out to find a runnable wall with enemies in its vicinity.

A-grade killing, D-grade immersion

Upon learning that Hired Gun has achievements tied to its performance scoring system -- a non-immersive feature I've never liked -- I thought a 100% completion would be troublesome. Fortunately game difficulty turned out to not have an effect on your grade so I could play on casual Medium. One of the three grades is determined by your resurrection stim usage: playing aggressively and proactively keeps your health and shields up and avoid the need for stims.

Style is another grade and I'm not entirely sure how that works. One person said to vary the methods of killing, another to do headshots, and third to use combat takedowns as much as possible.

The final grade is from opening treasure chests. Sometimes it's a damn mystery how to get to a chest or if it's even a chest in the first place. You have an activated ability that makes the visuals unreadable noise but highlights interactable objects through walls. The problem with it is that it shows the same icon for door buttons and chests (unless the chest is trapped). And sometimes the way to the chest is very well hidden. I did not enjoy the treasure hunts very much.

For achievements, you need an overall S rank from one mission -- which can be a short side mission. Main missions all need to be completed at A rank, which on Medium is not too bad of a challenge. You can replay main missions from Martyr's End even after you have finished the campaign, as well as keep doing side missions to max out reputations and gun skins. But I don't think I will do that.