Necromunda: Hired Gun is no home run for the Warhammer universe, but it is another interesting FPS from Streum On Studio, the creators of one previous Warhammer shooter and the delightfully esoteric E.Y.E: Divine Cybermancy. This DOOM-esque high-speed shooter gets a lot right, but an overload of mechanics and a plethora of technical issues cement it as a chaotic mess that requires patience to truly appreciate.

The narrative in Hired Gun's twelve-mission campaign is a difficult one to understand for anyone without deep familiarity with Warhammer. Players leap into the world as a mercenary with some sort of vendetta against rival gangs. The hows and whys of this tale are ill-explained, with character dialogue awash in a sea of jargon that might as well be another language. Overall, the campaign does a great job of conveying a world forty thousand years into a grim future with its eye-grabbing environments, but fails to impart any particular meaning to the struggles in its mercenary conflicts.

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Hired Gun makes up for its mystifying story with a core of FPS gameplay that's reminiscent of AAA greats without quite reaching those heights. At its best, the shooting is fast and exciting, incorporating ridiculous weaponry and a variety of player abilities into combat thrills more often than not. The titular hired gun can also use a grappling hook to get around an arena, a level of mobility that leads to both amazing feats of precision and agonizing pratfalls into bottomless pits. It's not uncommon for the grappling hook to send players through walls or into objects, however, which is an early glimpse into Hired Gun's near-constant glitches.

 

Necromunda: Hired Gun is features crashes, freezing, and other gameplay issues that plague each playthrough. The version currently running on Xbox Series X has the stability of an Early Access game at times, and several in-game mechanics are simply broken. As noted by the developer themselves, using a sniper rifle or any kind of scoped gun is impossible at time of writing because of sensitivity issues. Menus stutter and break, enemies stand still instead of attacking, and some in-game prompts require a few tries before they trigger. All that and at least ten trips back to the dashboard in the middle of levels prove that Hired Gun just isn't ready for a full launch.

Even if the developer irons out the technical issues, Hired Gun also has a problem of trying to implement far too many mechanics into what should be a straightforward shoot 'em up. There's a loot system to get new guns, armor, and perk items, but there's no inventory menu, making item management a headache that's almost not worth bothering with. There's also an implementation of DOOM's Glory Kills, only without the vital requirement to damage enemies before grabbing them. This means that it's easy to stab one enemy, go through an invincible killing animation while another enemy approaches, and then pounce onto them and repeat the process throughout an entire room.

Necromunda gameplay boss fight

In fact, not only is it possible to go through entire levels without firing a gun in Hired Gun, it's sometimes the best strategy when the AI actually smartens up. In these situations, the still-thrilling combat ends up as a hilariously busted mess that renders optional upgrades like entering into a melee-only Berserker mode superfluous. This also goes for the barely-there wall-running and several other optional abilities. It's so easy to get overpowered early in Hired Gun that later upgrades and weapons (including a wild rapid-fire grenade launcher) feel unnecessary and less special as a result.

In spite of these flaws, the chaotic level of excess is also why it's still worth giving Necromunda: Hired Gun a chance at some point if the bugs and crashing end up fixed. Firing off giant green energy spheres and grenades before teleporting into a huge enemy and making them explode is fun even if it's not challenging. This is the type of design that's overflowing with ideas, mixing and matching concepts from other titles just to see what sticks. Even if the game doesn't come together as a cohesive whole, there's enough fun here to keep fans of FPS and 40K happy. Combine all that with the beautifully realized environments of Warhammer's darkest underground city and Necromunda: Hired Gun gives off a great vibe and ends up enjoyable despite itself.

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Necromunda: Hired Gun is available now on PC, Xbox Series X|S, Xbox One, PlayStation 5, and PlayStation 4. Screen Rant was provided a digital copy of the Xbox Series X version for the purposes of this review.