In the far-flung future there is only war, making it a pretty sucky place to live. There’s plenty of bad guys, no good guys to speak of, and the best you can hope for is a faction that’s marginally less crazy than the others. It’s an absolute nightmare scenario but also badass beyond all belief, like a universe made only of pure concentrated heavy metal album covers. It’s also a scenario you can sink hundreds of dollars into for tabletop gaming, while for videogaming it’s been used for everything from turn-based strategy to action hack & slash. Oddly enough, what it hadn’t been used for is to create a Doom-style shooter that’s more action than brain, but that’s about to be corrected with the pending release of Warhammer 40,000: Boltgun.
Boltgun is pretty much exactly what you’d expect from its description- a big, loud, violent FPS featuring a heavily-armed warrior going up against impossible odds through a series of semi-intricate levels, gaining new and every-gorier ways to take down everything and everyone in his path. In the case of Boltgun you’re in the giant metal boots of a space marine, initially armed only with a chainsaw-sword but very quickly picking up the first of several different types of boltgun. The boltgun is the favored weapon of the troops of the Imperium of Man, which the Space Marines are in service to, and they come in a variety of types for every situation. It’s a brutal weapon that shoots explosive bolts, and what it can’t take out in a few shots can be dispatched with a follow-up attack from the chainsword. The old-school FPS combat is bloody and brutal, and highly satisfying when you get right up in its face.
Warhammer 40,000 is just about as perfect a setting as could be imagined for this type of shooter, and Boltgun is looking to deliver on the promise of its expectations. The retro engine is plenty detailed enough to render the dark, gothic Warhammer universe, and the level design is a tour of the hostile architecture of the series, complete with secrets for the curious Space Marine to chase after. Fusing Doom and Warhammer seems like a no-brainer and in retrospect it’s surprising this hasn’t happened before, but that’s all about to change with the pending May 23 release. The new trailer shows off all the relevant details, which to summarize are- fast action, heavy weaponry, gothic design, and lots of twisted enemies to turn into bloody splats of goo. Basically, just about everything an FPS could ever hope for.
