Games Workshop has licensed its IP to a wide variety of video games over the past few years, which have served to expand its universe and interpretations of its characters far beyond the tabletop game. It kicked off a little earlier, with Space Marine, a pretty standard third-person action affair akin to a movie tie-in, but soon expanded its horizons with three Total War: Warhammer entries.

More recently, things have been shaken up even more. A host of mobile titles have entered the fray, and Chaos Gate – Daemonhunters was a surprisingly good turn-based tactics offering last year. I still believe that Fatshark was close to greatness with Darktide, but development updates are slow and unimpactful. Warhammer has slowly crept into new genres, with RTS games and roguelikes, hack ‘n slashes and CRPGs, all of which serve to expand the universe in new and interesting ways.

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Warhammer 40,000: Boltgun is a retro first-person shooter designed to mimic Doom. It’s an idea so brilliant that you wonder why it’s taken so long to happen. The two were practically made for each other. One is a grimdark world filled with blood and viscera where violence the only answer to your problems, and the other is – they’re the same thing, okay. You’re even killing demons in both of them!

warhammer 40000 boltgun great unclean one

The first thing you notice in Boltgun is the cool pixel art sprites of your favourite cultists, Chaos Space Marines, and, of course, daemons. The next thing you notice is the pool of gore they explode into when you shatter their skull with an explosive round from your eponymous weapon. The retro art style doesn’t make the violence any less brutal, and might have the opposite effect. While the blood splatters are a cartoonish red and the sounds of the dying are more Saturday morning cartoon than Saving Private Ryan, but when the entrails of several ‘sploded Space Marines are clinging to your boots and dripping down the walls, it feels suitably gruesome.

Levels consist of light platforming and shooting everything in your path, neither of which are ever challenging. You have a variety of weapons available, from chainswords to grenades, plasma guns to shotguns, but your boltgun will solve most problems. Sometimes the level layout gets a little confusing and you have to backtrack from a dead end to find the required route, but generally following the daemonic hordes will keep you on mission.

warhammer 40000 boltgun tzeentch

There’s not a lot else to it, really. There are bosses who might kill you once or twice, but they feel like bullet sponges rather than tests of skill. Levels take you from one location to another, and while there’s always a cool set piece or new enemy to surprise you, nothing else evolves past ‘shoot shoot slice boom’. I guess that’s why they’re called boomer shooters.

There are ways to elevate the genre, though, which games like Prodeus achieve with aplomb. Boltgun is content to mimic those decades-old iterations, safe in the knowledge that its IP will pull it through. That’s ultimately what it boils down to: if you like Warhammer, you’ll probably enjoy spending a few hours with this. In many ways, Warhammer 40,000: Boltgun is a bit like the Detective Pikachu movie. It’s cool seeing all your favourite characters realised in either hyperrealism or funky pixel art sprites, but there’s not a lot of substance beneath that cool veneer.

Fans of the IP will have some fun here, but you likely already know whether you’ll like this game or not. Boltgun competently blends the Warhammer universe with a genre that felt made for it, but offers no surprises. It set out to be a Doom clone, and it succeeded. That’s fine in some ways, but a shame in others because this could have been special with the application of a few original ideas.

Warhammer 40k Boltgun review card

A copy of Warhammer 40,000: Boltgun was provided by the publisher.

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