Every time it stretches beyond what it can reasonably do, it’s in service of presenting a compelling idea. The game’s ambition can be seen at its margins. Combat never changes unless you force it to change by trying new weapons, using your trusty cyber-dog more often (yes, you have a dog sidekick, and yes, you can pet and feed it), or cranking the difficulty up. The sound design is delightfully punchy, and player movement does feel pretty great, even though everything else surrounding it is kind of bad. When the heat of battle is on, Necromunda: Hired Gun becomes a genuinely enjoyable cacophony of mayhem and cartoonish gore. Maps can be explored and secrets can be found, but it is all so samey and never really amounts to much. Once a mission is accepted, players drop into a vast area where they must explore and engage in firefights and slight puzzles as they traverse point A to B and C. Image: Streum On Studio/Focus Home Interactive It’s definitely fast and brutal, but it never becomes dynamic.
The player’s range of movement suggests the combat will be fast, brutal, and dynamic. (You face other enemies eventually, but I don’t want to spoil them.) While all three gangs are very different in what they’re good at and how they look, they all do the same three things: stand in place and wait to die teleport and wait to die or unload ammo in your direction, and wait to die. The setting of Necromunda is chock-full of interesting foes to face, but most of the time, the player is only pitted against Goliath, Escher, and Orlock gangers. That said, the enemy AI never got any better, and the lack of enemy variety is a bummer. Once I paired that with the grappling hook that Necromunda: Hired Gun waited a little too long to provide, the game finally started to get fun. Then I got my hands on a Bolter, a fully automatic weapon that fires rocket-propelled rounds. While the player can be swift, smart, and agile, the enemy AI is anything but. The guns my bounty hunter started with felt awful to use, and the hyper-fast, Doom-like gameplay just didn’t feel right.
Hired Gun’s opening two missions left a bad taste in my mouth. Image: Streum On Studio/Focus Home Interactive via Polygon
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