Last year the sequel to the praised Warhammer game Space Marine was at long last released, sadly I couldn’t get it to work on my current hardware. BUT there was another game starring a space marine released not that long ago, and this one definitely worked.

Boltgun is a retro style shooter in the homage of the original Doom, sometimes referred to as a boomer shooter. It fits given the Doom universe and the Warhammer universe mesh quite well, so the style of play with over the top action and violence all fits.

You play as the Ultramarine (because GW don’t remember the other Space Marine chapters exist anymore)  Malum Caedo who after the events of Space Marine has been dispatched under orders of the inquisition to Graia to destroy remnants of the Chaos forces who are after the artifact that was used in the Space Marine game.

You crash land with initially only your chainsword… but at the start that’s all you need, being able to charge in after revving that blade up and reduce Cultists to pixelated blood and guts. You get a larger array of weapons as you go forward in the game, your bolt pistol, the ever trusty Boltgun, and then some bigger weapons like the Vengeance Launcher. You will start to need these weapons as Cultists give way to Demons and Chaos Space Marines.

At first playing it I didn’t get the sense of the over the top Warhammer nature. Sure there was blood and guts but… and then I found the Taunt button. Oh how I loved the Taunt button. Press it for your Space Marine to insult the forces of Chaos with proclamations of their filth and the power of the Imperium.

The game is broken up into 3 acts each with several levels and ending with a fight against a Chaos Sorcerer Lord in Terminator armour… annoyingly yeah that’s the same with each act, no different separate boss for each act, just the same one in a different circumstance.. though the final one does throw quite a lot at you.

There is now a 4th chapter thanks to dlc which includes new enemies like Chaos Havoks and new boss level threats like the Hellbrute, plus you don’t fight the Chaos Sorcerer Lord this time as he was properly killed in act 3. You also get some new weapons like the Missile Launcher in the dlc chapter (yeah, I know, you don’t get a Missile Launcher till the dlc). So it’s a fair shake up from the main game.

Overall I found it a rather enjoyable experience. It holds its inspiration from the original Doom quite close, and thankfully its dlc chapter does not make the mistake Doom did of making optional tricks mandatory. You will be constantly running and shooting, leaping into melee to finish off weaker foes while using up a lot of your heavy weapons’ ammo fighting the big guys while having to learn the attack patterns of and behaviours of each different foe, learning to blow up certain units rather than just fill them with bullets.

One of the benefits to being a retro shooter is that the price isn’t too high and will be far more likely to work on whatever computer you’re running it on. So it’s an easy purchase to get you through a weekend or a week depending on how much time you put into a single sitting.

Rating: 🎮🎮🎮🎮