Rip and Tear for the Emperor!
Warhammer 40,000: Boltgun is a Retraux First-Person Shooter game set in the world of Warhammer 40,000. The game is developed by Auroch Digital and published by Focus Home Interactive.
The game takes place several years after the events of Warhammer 40,000: Space Marine. After fending off the invading Orks of WAAAGH! Grimskull and the Chaos forces of the Chosen of Nemeroth, the Forgeworld of Graia has been closely monitored by the Holy Inquisition for further threats. Inquisitor Seilbel of the Ordo Malleus has requested the aid of a squad of Space Marines from the Ultramarines Chapter for an important mission. The Inquisitor believes that the Adeptus Mechanicus of Graia has secretly been experimenting with the fragments of the late Inquisitor Drogan's power source, and demands that whatever heretical research data that remains, along with the power source fragments, be retrieved and given to her. She gives them a surviving servo-skull once belonging to Drogan - "Incommodus" - to aid them in their search. As the squad of Ultramarines make their descent, their drop pods suffer severe damage that causes a fatal crash landing, leaving only one survivor. The player takes up the Power Armor of Malum Caedo, a Veteran Ultramarine, as he blasts, shreds, and purges his way through the hordes of the Ruinous Powers.
The game was released on May 23, 2023 for PC, Playstation, Xbox and Nintendo Switch
Previews: Announcement Trailer
, IGN Gameplay Preview, Developer Let's Play, Release Date Trailer, Boomer Shooter Gameplay Trailer, Extended Gameplay Trailer.
This game provides examples of:
- Actionized Sequel: To Space Marine with extremely scant cutscenes and dialogue, and far more running and gunning at high speeds.
- All Your Base Are Belong to Us: The Sorcerer boards the Crown in the final chapter, intent on hijacking its warp drive for his own insidious ends.
- And the Adventure Continues: Malum manages to kill the Chaos sorcerer, retrieve the fragment of Drogan's power source, and close the Warp rift over Graia. However, Graia is still tainted by Chaos, and so the slaughter of heretics and daemons must continue.
- Anti-Frustration Features: Boltgun possesses a few contingencies to encourage aggressive play as well as exploration.
- While their special properties won't do so, extra Boltgun ammo provided by special magazines will carry over to the next level if they are unused.
- Any Vortex Grenade picked up will stay in Malum's inventory between missions until it is thrown.
- The player can save anywhere and at any time during a mission, but to prevent themselves from being stuck in a firefight they are unprepared for and cannot overcome, the game has an autosave feature that lets them load into the start of the last section it was used so they can try a different strategy with the resources they had at that moment.
- Munitions Boon surplus ammunition for a weapon carries over into the next level within a chapter.
- Malum only received mild health damage from falling off of edges into bottomless pits, a relatively minor inconvenience in lieu of a death penalty for the same.
- Armor Points: Contempt, a callback to the title of a Gaunt's Ghosts novel and a slogan of Inquisitor Ravenor's."My armor is contempt. My shield is disgust. My sword is hatred."
- Asteroids Monster: Pink Horrors, unless gibbed, will split into two Blue Horrors once their health is fully depleted.
- BFG:
- A Heavy Bolter is an available weapon, the heavy machinegun version of the standard boltgun.
- The biggest and baddest weapon in your arsenal is the mighty Grav-cannon, an extremely powerful beam weapon that utterly annihilates anything it is pointed at. Grav-cannons are usually vehicle mounted.
- Bag of Spilling: Like many games of its subgenre, Boltgun strips Malum of most of his weapons at the start of each major chapter save for the titular firearm. Also, at the start of each level you lose any weapon upgrades you collected and your health and armor is reset to 150 and 100. On the plus side, this avoids an Unstable Equilibrium situation in which players are excessively punished for not finding a lot of secrets.
- Big Bad: Tumulus Samael, the Chaos Sorcerer Lord of the Black Legion who leads the chaos forces on Graia.
- Blue Is Heroic: Of course, as a member of the esteemed Ultramarines, Malum Caedo is covered in the blue livery of his chapter (with some white and gold) and he is also our main protagonist.
- Chainsaw Good: As expected the chainsword is the primary melee weapon of Malum Caedo and it looks very similar to the one wielded by Captain Titus.
- Continuity Nod: The game's backstory has multiple callbacks to Warhammer 40,000: Space Marine, and it takes place on the same planet. Malum also mentions Titus and Sidonus by name in two of his taunts.
- The story's MacGuffin is a fragment of the warp device created by Inquisitor Drogan, and when recovered it's stored in a capsule identical to the one Captain Titus used to carry it around.
- The Meltagun functions identically to how it did in Space Marine, and the Graia-pattern "Vengeance" grenade launcher makes a return.
- The skyline of the second level features what appears to be the wreckage of the Titan Invictus.
- Cool Helmet: Malum wears a white Mark VI Corvus helmet with a golden laurel wreath; otherwise known by the fans as the "Beakie".
- Demon Lords and Archdevils: Great Unclean Ones (Greater Daemons of Nurgle) and Lords of Change (Greater Daemons of Tzeentch) are amongst the enemies that the player will battle.
- Drop Pod: The opening cut scene has Malum and his squad entering Graia through a drop pod, however it ends up in a fatal crash that kills the rest of his squad, leaving him as the Sole Survivor
- Elites Are More Glamorous: Not only is Malum Caedo an Astartes of the esteemed Ultramarines Chapter, but he's also a Sternguard Veteran at that. With properly blinged out Power Armor and proficiency with all sorts of Space Marine weaponry to boot.
- Enemy Civil War: The Forces of Chaos and the Ambulls indigenous to the tunnels of Graia fight each other as well as Malum during the "Tunnels Beneath" level of chapter 2.
- Expy
- The Plasma Gun serves as an analogue to Doom's automatic Rocket Launcher, but also has a brief interrupt animation when you let go of the trigger which is nearly identical to that of Doom's own Plasma Rifle.
- The Meltagun is used as an analogue to Doom's double-barreled Super Shotgun, complete with a clip of two shots before reloading.
- Excuse Plot: The plot is basically just a clean-up to the chaos taint that plagued Graia long after the events of Warhammer 40000: Space Marine concluded.
- Feathered Fiend: Many of the Tzeentchian daemons feature bird parts and features. The Lord of Change which Malum fights towards the end of Chapter 1 is a full-blown giant monstrous bird-humanoid like all other Lords of Change.
- Foe-Tossing Charge: The Charge move dashes Malum forward, pulping weaker enemies and knocking away larger foes.
- Gameplay and Story Integration: Like in the source material, while the chainsword will instantly kill most normal heretics, it does negligible damage against ceramite armor or demonic flesh.
- "Get Back Here!" Boss: The Lord of Change and Sorcerer teleport around the area at random, forcing the player to keep up with them while dodging fire from Mooks.
- Glass Cannon: Plasma Gun Renegades die in two shots, but their weapons will deal a massive amount of damage if they manage to hit you — on a high enough difficulty and after taking a bit of damage, they're an Instakill Mook.
- Goomba Stomp: Dropping on a normal enemy from a sufficient enough height will typically kill them, which makes sense considering the sheer size and weight of an Astartes in Power Armor.
- Grenade Launcher: The Vengeance Launcher (a remote-detonation grenade launcher from the first Space Marine game) makes a return as one of the usable player weapons.
- Guide Dang It!: Even a game as elegantly brutal and straightforward as Boltgun has a few idiosyncrasies that are easy to miss thanks to the scant tutorials.
- After a charged chainsword strike, the melee attack button can be pressed repeatedly for some extra damage beyond the initial collision.
- The potential resurrection of Aspiring Champions, and the splitting of Pink Horrors, can be prevented by continuing to shoot them during their death animation until they are Ludicrous Gibs. Some weapons such as the Volkite Caliver will automatically render them to paste after the killing shots with them are made.
- The Secret Munitions Boon power-up gives the weapon Malum is carrying double its maximum ammo, but this will be overwritten if he picks up a general munitions pick-up that refills all your weapons to their normal full capacity, it will roll back the excess of the Munitions Boon he picked up.
- Enemy deaths only count if they occur while Malum is in the level. This is especially important for completionists during missions where there is some kind of death trap like the Descending Ceiling of Heresy Lurks that will reset once Malum leaves that area, sparing any enemies that were low enough to escape getting crushed if he left too fast. The surefire way of getting rid of them all without risking getting swarmed and flattened himself is to make it to the end of the gauntlet and wait until the ceiling has fully come down and killed everything in the room behind him before exiting.
- There's no in-game indication of what any powerup does, requiring you to pay attention or make educated guesses. Machine Spirits suffer terribly from this, as there's zero immediate indication of what they do, requiring you to notice that your Boltgun now has a higher strength rating, your Shotgun has rebounding projectiles, or that you can move faster when firing the Heavy Bolter.
- In "Sanctum Magistratum", the last level of the first chapter, Malum has to make his way through a Tzeentchian door maze. It can take a while to work out that the correct door is marked with a large nine-pointed star of Chaos. It can take even longer to realise what to do after the fourth correct door, where you have to follow a trail of very small Chaos sigils daubed on the scenery to reach the exit.
- Have a Nice Death: Dying at any point will have the game present you with a menu to reload a save, restart the level, or return to the main menu, along with a short sentence describing what killed you.
- Heavily Armored Mook: Chaos Terminators are equipped with assault cannons and can withstand over twice the damage a Chaos Space Marine can, requiring a few dozen shots from even an upgraded Str 5 boltgun to put down.
- Idle Animation: If you stand idly for a while, Malum will produce and start reading the Codex Astartes.
- Kill Enemies to Open: During "purge" setpieces, the exits of the arena seal with daemonic barriers, and won't let you go until you've killed every major enemy that appears (excluding any respawning chaff like cultists or nurglings).
- Lightning Bruiser: The Ultramarine runs fast, charges strongly, and leaps far. And he can do all these things while firing his guns and chucking explosives.
- Ludicrous Gibs: Every single weapon in your arsenal is more than capable to turn enemies into very chunky salsa.
- Mook Maker: Great Unclean Ones have the ability to spawn hordes of Nurglings from their Belly Mouth. If left unattended, you're at risk of being overwhelmed.
- The Lord of Change also will continue summoning in lesser Daemons of Tzeench while it’s alive.
- More Dakka: The Heavy Bolter — usually a mounted weapon, with strong recoil even for an Astartes. It never needs reloading, allowing you to burn through your entire stock of ammo turning cultists and Daemons into pulp.
- Necessary Drawback: The Chainsword is very powerful, and with enough time and revving will cut through literally anything, even if it doesn't make sense (chainswords should struggle to kill a Chaos Marine due to their armor, but not here). However, the stronger an enemy is when you hit them with the Chainsword, the more likely it is that they will hit you and push you back, forcing you into melee recovery and allowing them to get another hit in before you can start cutting them again.
- One-Hit-Point Wonder: Downplayed. Autogun Cultists and Nurglings will die to one direct hit from any weapon or a single swing of the Chainsword, though they can survive a glancing Boltgun or Shotgun round.
- One-Man Army: And how! By the end of the game, Malum will have singlehandedly slaughtered hundreds, if not thousands of cultists, Chaos Astartes and daemons, including Greater Daemons!
- One-Winged Angel: Aspiring Champions, unless gibbed, will revive and become Chosen Champions on death, but only if they inflicted at least some damage to you. Otherwise, they are not worthy of being Chosen.
- Overly-Long Tongue: Weaponized by the Plague Toads of Nurgle, who make use of their long and diseased-ridden tongues as a form of attack if the player gets too close.
- Powerful, but Inaccurate: The Plasma Gun launches a ball of superheated plasma that explodes on impact, potentially damaging or killing multiple enemies at once. It can take out sizable chunks of health from greater demonic enemies as well as Chaos Space Marines, ammunition for it is rather plentiful, and it is also acquired relatively early before stronger firearms like the Heavy Bolter are. Its main drawback is that if it's fired too close to Malum, the explosion will severely hurt him, and if it's shot too far away, the projectile has a tendency to deviate the further it travels, potentially missing its target by a sizable margin. In summary, it's best used at mid-range.
- Power-Up:
- Machine Spirit items allow you to upgrade a weapon for the rest of the level, ether by increasing their strength, enabling rapid fire, or unlocking a new function such as the Shotgun gaining ricocheting rounds.
- There's also Emperor's Wrath and Assault powerups. The Emperor's Wrath vastly increases your attack power, allowing you to destroy even the incredibly tanky Lord of Change in three Meltagun hits (normally requiring a dozen hits). The Assault powerup makes your Chainsword melee attack much stronger and easier to rev, while also removing the usual pushback action from your target to allow you to Chainsword almost anything to death, including the Sorcerer.
- Recurring Boss: Tumulus Samael, the Sorcerer, is fought at the end of each chapter.
- Reviving Enemy: Aspiring Champions, if they land a hit on you in melee, will revive upon death as tougher Chosen Champions to continue the fight, unless their bodies are gibbed in time.
- Scratch Damage: If a weapon has a lower rating than the target, it will do less damage. The Shotgun, for example, has a strength rating of 3, and a Chaos Marine has an strength rating of 4, so the Shotgun will do significantly less damage per shot to the Chaos Marine, while absolutely wrecking Cultists (strength 3). However, the damage reduction is not absolute, and all enemies will always take damage from a weapon, which is an important consideration with higher powered weapons: the Heavy Bolter only has a strength of 5, but fires so rapidly that it will still inflict significant damage to strength 6 and above enemies. The strongest weapon in the game, the Gravcannon, only has a strength rating of 5, but inflicts so much damage so rapidly that it doesn't matter.
- Sequel Hook: As the Inquisitor declares that Graia is still threatened by the forces of Chaos despite the Sorcerer's defeat, a shot of massacred imperial guardsman under the shadow of a Bloodletter of Khorne appears on screen.
- Shotguns Are Just Better: Two flavors at that! From the Astartes Combat Shotgunnote and the Meltagunnote .
- Shout-Out:
- The game's cover is obviously based on Doom, likely to emphasize Boltgun as a tribute to the old 90's shooter games. The first level of the first Chapter, "Off Target", features recreations of the first room of Hangar as its final combat encounter, which is preceded by the first room of Entryway.
- One of Caedo’s taunts while battling enemies is “Hail to the Emperor, heretic!”.
- Smash Mook:
- Chaos Champions. The only thing they do is run towards Malum and try to smack him with twin chainaxes. Problem is, they're really good at it.
- Ambulls count as this as well — their only method of attack is to charge directly at the player. While the charge is lightning fast, they are slow and cumbersome to turn, and are briefly stunned when they hit a wall, making them usually less difficult to deal with. However, Malum will take massive damage if one manages to connect.
- Sole Survivor: Malum is the sole survivor of his Drop Pod's crash.
- Standard FPS Guns: Much of the player's arsenal takes cues from the run-and-gun shooter standbys established by Doom and Quake. The chainsword is your fallback melee weapon with a dedicated button, which does capable damage if you continue to rev it on one target, making it a hybrid of "knife" and "chainsaw". The boltgun is the standard "automatic weapon", with tons of ammo, while the heavy bolter serves as a "chaingun" for higher damage at the cost of slower movement. The bolt shotgun is of course the "shotgun", firing bolt rounds in an inaccurate spread, while the meltagun is a "super shotgun" that has low ammo, but does very high damage at point blank range. The plasma gun's high strength, automatic fire and splash damage is equivalent to a classic Doom-style "rocket launcher". The Vengeance is a sticky "grenade launcher". The volkite caliver is a "lightning gun" pinpoint beam weapon that rapidly shreds health, while the grav-cannon is the game's "BFG" that functions as a superior beam weapon with added splash damage.
- Super Spit: Plague Toads have a ranged attack where they can spit a cluster of acidic bile.
- Sword and Gun: The cover art depicts Malum armed with his chainsword and bolter. In game, you have your chainsword available at any time, regardless of what weapon you have equipped.Malum: Bolt and sword!
- Taunt Button: There's a dedicated taunt button that causes Malus to yell out battlecries or taunts at the enemies.
- Too Awesome to Use:
- Vortex Grenades are very rare and extremely powerful, capable of half-killing the Sorcerer at the end of each chapter. Using it on anything less can seem wasteful.
- The Meltagun is the most powerful weapon in the game, with a strength of 7 and extreme damage output. Literally nothing in the game will do much damage in a single shot (except the Vortex Grenade). However, you can only hold 30 units of ammo, each shot takes 5 units of ammo, and you have to reload after every two shots. You'll only be able to fire it 6 times before running out of ammo, delegating it to close-range boss killing.
- Too Dumb to Live: The Priesthood of Graia really should have known better than to dabble with a dangerous device powered by the energies of the warp. Such experiments were the cause of a previous Chaos invasion. Unsurprisingly, their experiments with the Power Source fragments has the Forces of Chaos once again invading Graia.
