ABSOLUTELY RIVETING

Retro FPS BOLTGUN is blessed by the Emperor of Man

- Noah Smith

Boltgun is the first truly exceptional Warhammer 40,000 game since Dawn of War 19 years ago. An intense, retro-themed FPS, Boltgun casts you as a nameless, faceless Ultramarine: a violently hateful gorilla with the brain of a 14 year old, let loose on the traitorous Black Legion and their daemons. For the uninitiated, what separates Space Marines from the average gym goer is the ten tons of nuclear-powered armor they're entombed within.

Walking is a bit sluggish, but turn on auto-run in the accessibility menu and your soldier, the Sternguard Veteran, becomes a bounding hulk of metal and flesh, a bunnyhopping tornado of pure carnage and zealotry. It's one of the few instances where a licensed Warhammer game appropriately conveys the overwhelming power of a single Space Marine. As both a 40K fan with a love of the older source material and boomer shooter veteran, I was thrilled to find that Boltgun excels as a tribute to the insanity of the 41st millennium and stands on equal footing with recent classics Dusk, Ultrakill and Amid Evil.

Boltgun's maps are typically linear corridors flooded with cultists and lesser daemons, funneling the Veteran into larger combat arenas where powerful champions and ascendant daemons lie in wait. Doomstyle keycard hunting is kept to a minimum, but there's some clever level design that'll see you looping back through the industrial zones you've already purged.