Warhammer 40,000: Inquisitor - Martyr

I try my best to avoid isometric/top-down action roleplaying games these days despite how cool they may look. They ultimately offer a very similar experience to each other; I might as well return to Diablo III if I ever feel like playing the genre. However, I had to add Warhammer 40,000: Inquisitor - Martyr onto my wishlist when I saw NeocoreGames releasing Sororitas Class DLC for the game. I thought that was a rather unique proposal; how many games allow you play as a sister of battle? I would say, though, that even this game does not allow you to truly play as one because the classes -- while determining your abilities and all -- are merely your character's background: you're an inquisitor in the game. There's a bit too much of pondering in the role, not enough religious fervor of the Adepta Sororitas.

Top-down ARPG with Warhammer 40k flavor

I bought the game when its definitive edition bundle was massively discounted on Steam in late 2023. A rumor started circulating that the sale was because Neocore was about to shut down the game's servers and the always-online game couldn't be played anymore. That didn't happen and I suppose to calm things down, Neocore added an offline mode to the game to futureproof it. I wish they had also added a LAN option so that I could've unlocked the game's 2 multiplayer achievements like in Neocore's earlier game, The Incredible Adventures of Van Helsing: Final Cut.

I didn't get to play the game as soon as its turn was up on my backlog because Neocore decided to release yet another player class DLC, the Hierophant, separately from the complete bundle: priced at 15€ and with exclusive achievements. After a year, that DLC, too, got a big discount and I could finally start my journey with an actually complete edition.

The title of the game feels unnecessarily lengthy. The franchise's name is already long and then for some reason there needed to be a subtitle. 'Inquisitor' alone wasn't enough and so they added 'Martyr' which is a long-lost voidship in the game, now having reappeared after thousands of years. You as an inquisitor lead an investigation on the Martyr and its long-dead commander, Lord Inquisitor Uther Tiberius.

There's a standalone expansion titled Prophecy that continues the base game's campaign. The expansion has been integrated into the base game as well; you don't need to install it separately. Except for the Tech-Adept class, the expansion begins after the base campaign has finished. But if you play as the Tech-Adept added by the expansion, the base campaign is skipped entirely. Instead of teleporting away from the Martyr at the end of the campaign, the original inquisitor goes into the Warp with the ship and the Tech-Adept inquisitor replaces them ad hoc. That was an amusing way to do it.

To get around the Caligari Sector they're at, your inquisitor commandeers a rogue trader's ship whose name didn't ever seem to get mentioned which was kind of odd. The rogue trader herself is Ragna van Wynter. She isn't someone to simply push around by the inquisitor which makes sense as rogue traders wield the same level of political influence as say Inquisitors and Space Marine Chapter Masters. Van Wynter provides occasionally-prickly commentary about the inquisitor throughout the story but she can't deny them from using the ship.

I'm not sure if this genre in particular is the best for inquisitorial investigations. Not that the game does anything complex with it: merely fills guided quest steps like any other action RPG. Because you return to the star map/your ship after every mission, the campaign feels the same as playing random maps. Ultimately the genre comes down to slaying hordes and hordes of enemies. Neocore is quite good at the horde part: like in Van Helsing, there are foes that come in huge swarms. Corpses also stay on the ground for you to admire afterwards. It would be even cooler if the slain enemies ragdolled around a bit but I suppose that would have an effect on performance.

Over an extensively long play session, Inquisitor did sometimes start running poorly enough to warrant a restart and there were rare laggy moments. But most of the time performance was fine. Turning the camera never felt good, though: maybe it's due to mouse acceleration and/or running the game in windoweds fullscreen with more than one monitor, the cursor easily going offscreen when trying to rotate the view.

The majority of enemies are from the setting as is to be expected but the mech ones seem suspicious. I've never seen their kind in any Warhammer 40k context before. I don't quite recall how the mech enemies in Van Helsing looked (even though I replayed the game rather extensively not too long ago) but the ones in this game sure have the same vibe to them. Other enemy factions include rebellious citizen of the Imperium, Nurgle and Khorne Chaos forces, Eldar and their Dark kin, as well as Tyranids.

Clearly as some sort of fan service, in a couple of missions you commandeer a tank and in twice as many an Imperial Knight walker. They're mind-numbingly slow missions and you should not make the mistake of playing them on any other difficult than the lowest Normal to avoid dying and needing to restart. (Playing campaign mission on higher difficulties is probably not worth it in general.)

Please, come again

Starting Inquisitor today sure feels like you've stepped into a years-old live service title with a ton of stuff piled atop each other -- which the game admittedly is. Active development has ceased but everything added is still there and can be a tad intimidating. Neocore sure tried all manner of stuff with small pieces of DLC and game modes. Some features are time-gated so that you'll have to keep returning back later. I stuck to stuff that had achievements tied to it; Void Crusades seem to be the one really worthwhile endgame. There is a tarot card system to increase challenge and rewards, quite like in Victor Vran.

When creating a new character, you can pick any of the past seasons to play in. The seasons no longer end (as far as I know) and the character cannot share loot with characters of other seasons. I believe you can mail items to a non-seasonal character, though. After finishing the campaign once, you can choose to skip it on new characters to have all the NPCs aboard right away.

I don't know which season is truly the best but after some research I picked the Season of Judgment because belt slot items can drop as 'Harbinger of Judgment' which has one of the better special item effects. Also, I don't know what the developers were thinking using the rarity colors of World of Warcraft but switching green and blue around. If they had used yellow instead of green, it would have been like in Diablo III.

I think the classes added by DLCs -- Tech-Adept, Battle Sister, and Hierophant -- are more interesting than the base game ones: Crusader, Assassin, and Psyker. They have additional mechanics the older ones don't have, although the Crusader and Assassin are able to manually execute enemies given a chance roll makes them susceptible. With bigger elites, there's even a whole slowdown cinematic scene (if you have the option enabled). It's an odd feature for the genre whose games tend to end in as fast as possible map clearing. Manually executing singular enemies does not rhyme with that. With the later classes, Neocore definitely smoothened the experience and it became quite like the already twice-mentioned Diablo III.

I was initially perplexed why the cosmetic pets didn't collect currency -- surely they could've copied that feature. But I then learned you can enable auto-pickup for all loot for yourself, which is even better. And because your inventory has so much space, you can easily collect everything in a mission without filtering out anything. Selling and scrapping all items by rarity is very smooth, too. I also liked how you can reroll an item's stats indefinitely without the cost ever increasing.

I picked the sister of battle as my main, so to speak, as the class was the purpose for playing the game in the first place. I was disappointed at how your character's appearance is determined entirely by worn armor and none seemed to have the iconic white hair look for the Sororitas. One of the late game morality-locked armors did eventually have it, though. Unfortunately it was not one I ended up using.

The morality system is a fairly shallow mechanic. I think only the Psyker with his Warp Anomaly spawning truly benefits from going Radical. With other classes you might as well always go Puritan -- the exclusive perks hardly matter either way. The subject for the morality choice is always found guilty and the puritan choice is the one that kills them with the exception of two times (I think) when the only consequence is which end of the morality bar you move toward.

Not a complex title

The battle sister has the most time-consuming exclusive achievement, Journey of Faith: reach the maximum level of 100. Leveling is simple enough on Normal when using a melee weapon with shield/life drain. You don't have to worry about a build all that much. However, to be the most effective you can and make Inquisitor kind of a breeze, having some synergic setup is recommended.

Admittedly it does take a bit to get there on your first character because you have to accrue a collection of socketables and go through the long process of upgrading your tech priest ally on the ship to get access to item modifications. I looked up a build finally a little bit after I had completed the Prophecy campaign for my gameplay experience to change drastically. I was suddenly zooming through missions at maximum movement speed with everything not super resilient dying in the blink of an eye. The heat aura psalm doctrine that ticks like 4 times a second seems extremely powerful and adding things to support it appears to make the game easy mode. Even at +10 difficulty levels from tarot cards, I wasn't yet being truly challenged anymore, even if an occasional Chaos Space Marine of some sort managed to knock me on my ass and almost entirely empty my suppression gauge somehow.

The Hierophant is probably the most inquisitor of the classes because he gets a retinue. I'm not an expert on inquisitor lore but I feel they always have one. In fact, all the classes in this game (excluding the Tech-Adept and his mech summons) do start with an offscreen retinue but they perish when the inquisitor's transport crashes on the Martyr. That is true for the Hierophant as well but he starts building up a new retinue with levels, eventually having a crusader, assassin, psyker, and a sister of battle alongside him -- a multiplayer experience just by yourself.

The class also has the rarest achievement: Demonstration of Faith. I think the main reason for its lowly 0.2% unlock rate on Steam is simply the DLC's late release in the game's lifespan: the vast majority of players had already moved on. There's also how the DLC is not included in the definitive edition bundle. Killing 10 Chaos Engine elites with hierophant spells is straightforward enough of a task, the only problem being your retinue often stealing the kill. You'd probably unlock it by just playing long enough but the way I did it was leaving the retinue back on the ship (which you can do) and completing low level Hunt missions with Nurgle demons as the enemy faction. You can find at least up to 3 Chaos Engine elites in one.