 We're finally through the dog days of winter and spring where game releases are few and far between. So what do we have going on? Well, we've got 70 bucks for the excellent ratchet and client game and DLC for the Final Fantasy 7 remake and of course, there's Ghosts and goblins remake What about? No, that was delayed Yeah, there's there's nothing really at this rate. I'll have to talk to my family A year ago. We all thought 2021 was going to be insane instead now the Knicks are out of the playoffs I've got nothing going on at all There's one game though that I had my eye on all year and after playing in Necromunda hired gun I figured I make a video about it because let's be honest. We have nothing else going on When a game is great the video is really long and when game pisses me off because it's bad The video is also really long, but when a game is somewhere in between Well, then you get like 10 or 15 minutes. So let's hop to it Store Brands do maternal The last generation of games saw a steep decline in the number of mid-budget titles that got released games like I know Shadow Warrior 2 or Metro Last Light they just weren't getting made anymore Instead we moved into a period where all we get are massive safe triple-a games and Small cheap little indie games and that's a real shame because the double-a space still has a lot to offer games like Darksiders 3 Remnant from the ashes the surge to or hell blaze show that there's still a place for mid-budget titles From the moment I saw Necromunda, I figured it would be right up my alley because I like double-a games I like how they're often a tiny bit flawed I like how the lower budget makes them have to compromise because sometimes having restrictions leads to more focus in a design Necromunda is a worthy entrance into the double-a space It does a bunch of things really well and gets the big stuff right while still being janky enough to constantly remind you You're playing a game made for like 6% of what it's gonna cost to make Far Cry 6 Plus it's a pretty damn good shooter last month My son walked into living room and saw me editing video and said oh, there's the obligatory doom eternal reference And I made me realize that yeah, I do end up talking about doom eternal almost in every video It's replaced Dark Souls as the game I reference for quality doom eternal is one of the best games ever because it literally has no flaws And there are very few games we can say that about Necromunda is like a really cheap knockoff of doom eternal It's like eternal in quite a few ways aside from a fact that has many large glaring flaws But even with those flaws hired gun is a great shooter not because it does anything new But because it knows what to steal Necromunda plays like eternal and Titanfall 2 mixed with a tiny dash of destiny and a code of 40k paint sloshed over it Now Understand it is not nearly as good as any of those games because its production values are very low But if you're not going to be original at least rip off the good stuff The best way to describe it is Imagine this a team of developers in 2020 spend a week playing doom eternal Titanfall 2 and destiny 2 before using a time machine to go back to 2011 to develop a shooter for the Xbox 360 May have dated mission design and a bare bones story But it gets its gameplay right and it's surprisingly clever with its mechanics when I play games I find myself trying to work through what the thought process behind certain design decisions are for instance Despite sounding in my review like a hated Returnal I actually liked it quite a lot. In fact, I ended up getting the platinum trophy for it Which is very rare for me But so many design choices annoyed me in that game that I spent a good chunk of my time thinking about why they were even there And when you approach games like this sometimes things that aren't obvious start to make sense For instance, I'm pretty convinced that Returnal's glacial progression is less about making the game as good as possible And more about making the game last 30 hours because Sony decided they wanted to charge 70 bucks for it The beauty of Necromunda is that its design choices are all well considered It's clear the devs carefully thought through almost everything in the combat system and made choices that make sense for the problems They were trying to address It's got a bunch of very rough edges But when it comes to the actual minutes and minute combat, it's easy to see what they were going for There was a very deliberate effort to figure out exactly how to make a super high mobility FPS game work. Very few shooters really do high mobility combat There are several shooters that have wall running and long slides and Necromunda has those things Plus the Doom Eternal Dash Dodge But Necromunda pushes this forward because the developers made a conscious effort to work that high mobility Into every aspect of the combat. So that dash and wall run and double jump It's not just a means of traversal. They're actual combat mechanics The game has a few little tricks up its sleeve that makes it play fast even when you're shooting and Hired gun when you wall run or slide the game subtly throws aim assist on As you progress through the game you can level the character up to increase that aim assist even more Now aggressive aim assist normally feels shitty with a mouse But the devs here really deserve a ton of credit for hitting a perfect balance in the way it uses bullet magnetism To allow shooting while running to feel snappy and accurate The single best thing about the game is that the mobility isn't just for show The game makes enemies less accurate when you're sliding wall running jumping or dashing So using the mobility tools as often as possible is the most efficient way to avoid damage And that subtle aim assist makes it easy to shoot enemies Even when you're running on a wall or sliding across a room Those two things combine to push the player into speed and aggressiveness that are only matched by Eternal or ultra kill beyond that the game revolves around magic type abilities and managing cooldowns Tougher enemies have shields that can be broken with an electric blast groups of small enemies can be exploded with fireballs You can dash across the map and explode people and then of course there's a bullet time ability a soldier 76 auto-aim skill and a few others Each of these abilities feels like a solution to combat problems Now it's not nearly as rock-paper-scissors as something like doing maternal But it still uses the abilities in a way that requires more from the player than your average FPS game Finally necromunda takes a risk by not having regenerating health Since Halo 2 almost every shooter has moved to regenerating health with only a few exceptions Like the Wolfenstein reboot while this works in some games and others it ends up slowing the combat to a crawl and the slower Pace that comes from needing to get in cover and do nothing while you wait for your health to recharge has another side effect It makes defense and healing a passive waiting game rather than an active decision a player has to make then doom 2016 came along and completely upended shooter design by making healing Require the player to kill enemies rather than hide behind a rock or scour arenas for health packs Probably the most important decision necromunda makes is making the player actively heal at the beginning of each level You can buy a few health packs that you can use in a pinch, but the majority of healing is done by shooting things After taking damage your wrist will glow red, which means you can heal for percentage of the damage you do to enemies for a few seconds This is a pretty smart decision rather than relying on an active heal button or making the player kill enemies This system makes the game a constant back and forth You'll always be very low on health and then be forced to hunt an enemy to heal off of it It gives the combat a pretty unique sense of rhythm enemies in the game Almost all fire hitscan weapons and arrive in huge groups surrounding you from all sides This just would not work without the healing and mobility tools and the mobility tools Wouldn't work without the progression that allows you to snap your reticle on an enemy even when running on a wall It's one of the better shooters of the last few years and easily the best shooter made by a double-a developer since Bulletstorm the combat alone makes the game worth its asking price the flaws Okay, but now it's time to remember that as good as necromunda is it is not a triple-a game So I want to briefly explain the flaws so you know what you're getting into here while the game's influences are clear This is not doom eternal The game's levels are pretty great looking and they're surprisingly huge and interesting to explore But the mission design is extremely basic despite a fantastic setting You're given very little actual context for what you're doing each mission basically drops you in an awesome map And then has you shoot things on your way to the other end a bigger problem is that enemy variety is very limited While there are a bunch of different factions to fight They're all basically the same faceless dudes with guns and almost every encounter plays out about the same Because every enemy is basically the same aside from a few different heavies that you'll come across and the very rare Sniper the story is like lies very double a It's bare bones and it fails to really use the setting to tell the story of the 40k universe if you're a super fan of 40k I'm sure you'll get something out of this But with a simple manhunt plot and no text or audio logs What you have is a cool setting but very little to carry you through aside from the great combat I will say though that the story is at least carried along by good voice acting including your player character Who is pretty well done? I love this guy's voice check it out You've heard people talking about the silver talent First smartly designed as the movement and combat are and they are really smartly designed The game totally fails at some other things For instance the inventory and loot system are extremely difficult to deal with and the game does a piss-poor job Explaining it all to you like I literally did not know you can modify the guns until the third to the last mission And these mods are like super important the game could have told me that I could triple a guns magazine or Change scopes or make guns do elemental damage, but it does not do that It does not tell you all that stuff is not explains at all and is instead very deep in these confusing menus And those confusing menus are only available in one screen before you load into a mission That is the only time you can look at your inventory. I don't even understand why it's like that I had no idea how the charms and Archeo tech worked for the first ten missions I thought the loot selling screen was actually a loadout screen I thought I had a bunch of charms equipped But it turns out they actually attached to your guns and this screen here is just what you have in your inventory While this screen here is how you equip things the thing about necromunda is that everything needed for a badass Triple a FPS game is here, but it's all just like a little bit off and janky Progression is pretty well designed from a gameplay perspective But it's just clunky when it comes to actually using some of the skills and items the weapon mods system is surprisingly great But the game doesn't explain it and you have to do all of this stuff in one screen before missions It's the only time you can access your inventory Levels are huge and beautiful, but the missions you do in them are very average including the encounter design itself It's just like enemies thrown in at you The game has a bunch of replayable procedural side missions that are fun But they didn't better off working those into the campaign so they didn't feel so ancillary to the experience This game feels like at one time it was an attempt to make a dollar general brand Warhammer 40k version of destiny 2 like I'm not even sure why there is loot and stuff Combat is amazing, but the story aside from that good voice acting just isn't really very good Still necromunda is a really good little game It's so good I hope it gets THQ to take a chance of making a sequel and upping its budget Getting a top quality writing team on board and making a higher quality version of this game So here's a TLDR necromunda hired gun has a ton of flaws both big and small and The game has some weird choices, and it can be a bit confusing at times, but any game that lets me do this Well, that's a game. I'm happy I bought I'll even give you a grade for this one necromunda is a solid 75 It's well above average and its gameplay is great But it never lets you forget that you're playing a janky double-a game, and that's fine, man The world needs way more good double-a games All right I think I'm gonna do a video on the ratchet and clank game and why it proves that insomniac is now officially one of if not The best action game developer in the world, and I think I'm gonna do a video on Dungeons and Dragons dark alliance that I've been playing co-op with my son I got I got a good amount to say about that game And I'm definitely gonna do a video about why the idea of splitting America up into smaller conservative and liberal mini states is a terrible idea You don't dissolve the most powerful empire in world history because you disagree about the minimum wage or Waiting periods to buy a gun or 6% differences in the top marginal tax rate All right, that's it. Thanks for coming. I'll see you next time. Bye