Necromunda: Hired Gun Reviews
Necromunda is a sight to behold, but it's undermined by wonky shooting, superfluous mechanics, and bugs.
Necromunda: Hired Gun shoots itself in the foot with bugs galore, brain-dead AI, and a dull, nonsensical story.
The game's story never captures an ever-shifting gang war landscape of assassinations, ambushes, and back-stabbings. Instead, it leans into the worst aspects of Warhammer storytelling, throwing too many proper nouns at the player while also being too grim-dark for a setting that pretty much coined that term. You could skip most of the dialogue sections and the story could still be told with its visuals; in fact, that might even be more effective. Even though a lot of the levels look similar, there is still a history and sense of massive scale and character in each area you jump, shoot, and sprint through.
And so, Necromunda often oscillates between a brilliant indie gem and a frustrating mid-tier game.
Fast-paced, loud, and unashamedly grim, Necromunda: Hired Gun is a competent, fun shooter when it all works.
Necromunda: Hired Gun tries, but stays there. If you are a lover of the genre, its gunplay and mobility will be interesting for you to enjoy its combats, when the game is left.
Review in Spanish | Read full review
Necromunda: Hired Gun drives us into the criminal underworld of the Warhammer 40,000 universe with a brutal and frenetic classic-style FPS that will improve as soon as some technical problems are fixed. Said that, it is missing a multiplayer mode that gives more hours of life on our console or PC.
Review in Spanish | Read full review
Necromunda: Hired Gun unfortunately suffers from several bugs that make it a too immature game to be enjoyed properly. Underneath these issues, however, there is a far from trivial FPS.
Review in Italian | Read full review
An undeniable passion project with incredible world design, addictive gunplay, and a great soundtrack, let down by jank, weak storytelling, and half-baked systems. I could see this getting rave reviews if it had been released in Early Access, though. Give it six months. It's got the makings of a corpse-grinder cult classic.
Necromunda: Hired Gun does have redeeming qualities. The movement is great, the gunplay feels good, and the environmental design is stellar. There's simply a legion of issues on both the design and technical fronts working overtime to hold it back. If you are willing to overlook Hired Gun's many problems and massive amounts of jank you'll likely have a great time blasting gangers to bloody bits. But, I won't fault you for waiting on a sale or sequel instead.
Necromunda: Hired Gun is a perfect example of a game that does the Warhammer 40k license justice. If it had the time to hammer out the bugs and issues it could have easily been a sleeper hit of 2021. As it stands it remains a forgettable release that launched with too many issues to keep players’ attention. Even well after launch the game remains in a bad state that makes it hard for me to recommend checking it out. I hope the game gets ironed out at some point, but by then it may be far too late to return to.
Instead of focusing on key design aspects, the dev team created a whole mess of conflicted ideas and decisions. And the quality of console port is just unacceptable.
Review in Russian | Read full review
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.
Fast-paced action and combat is the heart of Necromunda: Hired Gun. A great variety of skills allow you to string moves together while taken on dozens of foes at once. The world of Necromunda is a horrible dystopian underbelly of the 40K universe and it shows in Hired Gun. It's just a shame that the story, and characters are so barebones that the 40K license almost feels wasted.
Necromunda: Hired Gun has a certain grungy charm and offers up some clever ideas, but unrefined core mechanics, messy level design, and a shameful lack of polish ultimately add up to Necro-no-fun-da. Hardcore Games Workshop fanatics might still find something to enjoy here, but I recommend you don't hire this gun at anything but a steep discount.
Necromunda: Hired Gun will need a lot of work to get it into a state anywhere close to one we could recommend playing. Actually activating aim assist shouldn't be a tall order, but the same cannot be said of the abysmal frame rate and long list of glitches and issues. Without them, the game could be considered somewhat average. With them, we question how Necromunda: Hired Gun was allowed to ship on PS5 in the first place.
Like so much of the Warhammer 40K universe, Necromunda is a richly imagined world filled with the potential for conflict and storytelling. Using it as the setting for an action-filled shooter makes total sense. Although its mechanics are essentially a greatest-hits collection of ideas from other shooters, Necromunda: Hired Gun is a competent introduction to this particular slice of the Warhammer 40K-verse.
Necromunda: Hired Gun is a fast paced FPS that makes the most of the Warhammer 40K license. The attention to even the smallest detail by the developers and the excellent level design are the setting for a dynamic and frenetic shooter. Unfortunately, just like Streum On Studio's previous titles, this latest video game by the French team is plagued by a number of technical problems and issues in the AI department.
Review in Italian | Read full review
The most obvious conclusion of Necromunda Hired Gun is that it's a shame. The technical difficulties are easily solvable, but they discourage any player from starting a game, being the most advisable to wait for a first patch that fixes the aiming and the strange ghosting. Since the gameplay is directly affected and the title bases its fun on it, the reasons for recommending it decrease to insalvables levels.
Review in Spanish | Read full review