Given the glut of licensed Warhammer 40k games in the last decade, I’m happy to report Necromunda: Hired Gun falls into the “good” category. It has enough enjoyable elements that a lack of polish and bugs don’t completely derail it. That said, I like it more for what it’s trying to be than for what it delivers, making it tough to recommend without highlighting several caveats.

In the chaotic bowels of Hive Primus, on Imperial forge world of Necromunda, you take control of a lightly customisable bounty hunter (male or female with a few outfits) caught up in an unfolding conspiracy. What starts as an investigation into the murder of a merchant guild member and a recent spike in gang warfare, slowly evolves into a more sinister conspiracy over a dozen missions. Of course, this being Warhammer 40k, you’ll see where this is going if you have any familiarity with the IP.

For fans of the comics and, more recently, the Black Library novels, you might recognize the infamous bounty hunter Kal Jericho. He loosely guides you and makes a few dramatic saves. With a seemingly carefree attitude and reliance on luck as much as planning, his character is consistent with his comic persona. Beyond that, the ultimate villains are easy to guess, though the game enjoys sending you on a few dead-end missions that exist only to add some visual and combat variety. Despite the amount of dialogue you’ll hear, Necromunda: Hired Gun is a game with a plot that barely moves forward until the final few missions.

Martyr’s End serves as a hub area with quest givers, shopkeepers that provide upgrades, and an arena for testing your latest loadout.

Thankfully, the gameplay is more engaging, with moments of brilliance interspersed with janky, unpolished elements. The highlight is player movement. Although it feels floaty and at times barely controllable, your bounty hunter moves in a way that could put the Doom Slayer and Titanfall 2’s pilots to shame. A massive room can quickly be double-jumped, wall-run, air-dashed, grappled, and mantled across in seconds. It’s so much fun the simply move around, I find it’s a shame the developers focused on the arena combat. Several larger levels provide routes that encourage you to chain wall-runs and jumps, but the first half of the campaign is spent primarily in tight spaces. There is also only a handful of scripted chase and escape sequences designed to challenge your traversal abilities.

Although it feels floaty and at times barely controllable, your bounty hunter moves in a way that could put the Doom Slayer and Titanfall 2’s pilots to shame.

Combat - which accounts for >80% of the experience- follows the tried-and-tested formula of moving you between story and platforming focused areas (maybe with a few patrolling foes), and funnelling you into large combat arenas. The music kicks in, and hordes of enemies emerge from around corners or doorways. It feels a little dated - especially when enemies spawn directly behind you - but firefights are fun, and you’re encouraged to keep moving and incorporate those traversal skills. That said, has broken elements. The close-range melee finisher, with no cool-down, can be upgraded to allow you to spam it through clusters of basic enemies, abusing invincibility frames.


The loot system doesn’t always feel like a good fit for the game, but there’s no denying the thrill of watching high-tier items spew from a chest

When the movement skills, gunplay, and level design all come together, it feels great and can look amazing in motion. Guns have heavy recoil but feel appropriately powerful, shredding enemies in your sights. Everything looks and feels chunky, over-manufactured, and hard-hitting - perfect for the Warhammer 40k (the recoil from most weapons even pushes you backward).

Staying mobile to reduce incoming damage is essential, but there are tougher foes and bosses, with their personal refractor shields (or a physical shield that can be torn away with the grapple), that adds a tactical component. You could circle-strafe around tough enemies while emptying a dozen clips, but picking the right weapon with a high penetration stat can turn a battle of attrition into a quick and decisive victory. There’s also your heavily upgradeable mastiff companion you can summon, but they’re less about damage dealing and more about drawing aggro and highlighting targets amidst the chaos. Another design choice I appreciate is how increasing the difficulty doesn’t just turn enemies into bullet sponges, rather it ups their damage output and the loot quality.

When the movement skills, gunplay, and level design all come together, it feels great and can look amazing in motion.

What isn’t fun, at least on the higher difficulties, is the lack of player damage feedback. Sometimes, you’ll be ducking and dodging through a crowd, knocking down foes with short bursts and close-range melee finishers, only to turn a corner and have your refractor shield and health bar disappear in seconds. With no recharging shields – it works more like armour picks-ups - and health regen tied to dealing damage, playing aggressively is encouraged, making this lack of feedback all the more problematic. Sure, there are checkpoints and a purchasable item that can instantly revive you, but it still leaves many encounters feeling unbalanced.


Audibly and visually noisy is how I’d describe the combat. Hilariously, you can add silencers to several guns but aside from a few lucky headshots, the aiming is too loose and battles too chaotic to support stealthy gameplay.

To increase your survivability, you need to focus on gear, player, and mastiff upgrades. Granular bionic upgrades can add new active and passive skills, or marginally improve the old ones. There are a dozen weapon types - think autoguns, bolters, lasguns, and plasma guns - with rarity-tiers and modifications that tweak their stats (a sniper rifle shotgun hybrid was one of the weirdest). Equipable armour and charms also rarity-have levels, resistances, and perks to consider. There are even consumables that increase loot chest item rarity, which is well worth the upfront cost as they pay for themselves. It’s an engaging system but the looter-shooter design doesn’t entirely gel with the linear mission structure and skill-based shooting.

To get enough currency, you’ll need to do contract missions… The problem is they’re neither interesting nor enjoyable.

To get all the bionic upgrades and weapon modifications requires currency. To get enough currency, you’ll need to do contract missions in addition to the main quests. The problem is they’re neither interesting nor enjoyable. They simply add basic objectives to a small chunk of the existing single-player maps – think: destroy, sabotage, defend, escort, or kill objectives - and I quickly learned to ignore most of them. The most insufferable task you with running laps through a small area until you’ve killed high-level enemies (or enough of them to spawn a mini-boss), or those that task you with protecting NPCs.

Mercifully, there are a few that simply require you to zoom through an area destroying key targets. These are the best choice if you’re desperate for cash and you don’t even have to stop and kill anything (pro-tip: invest in bionic leg upgrades for speed and jumping height). These missions have been tacked on to service the looter-shooter elements - which itself could’ve been simplified - and I’d have preferred to see the emphasis placed on a tougher “new game+” mode instead.


The upgrade system is surprisingly extensive and granular. Every successive upgrade ramps up the cost, so in a single playthrough, you’ll want to pick skills that complement your preferred playstyle (unless you like grinding contracts for extra currency).

There’s something very old-school about the level design in Necromunda: Hired Gun, with massive, fully accessible spaces to explore, with the odd loot chest tucked away in the corners. There are also areas with multiple ways and out, and I couldn’t help but wonder if the game started life as a more stealth-oriented experience? The level design, coupled with your mobility, makes simply tearing around these huge spaces is a lot of fun when secret hunting.

There’s something very old-school about the level design in Necromunda: Hired Gun…

Of course, that sense of scale is an important part of capturing the absurdity and grim atmosphere of the Warhammer 40K universe, in which your average human is like an ant in a colony - their only worth is the labour they can provide to the Imperium. The writing, though often bland, is decently voice-acted, even if the protagonist falls into the “just pay me and tell me what needs to be done” cliché. The ambient audio is all thumping and screeching mechanical sounds. The music, which ranges from ominous exploration tracks to pumping combat loops, is a highpoint.

Unfortunately, while the visuals are solid (with a few dated-looking scenes here and there) and the framerate holds close to 60fps (on the next-gen consoles) Necromunda: Hired Gun has so many animation issues that constantly break immersion. Cutscenes start and end jarringly; the protagonist’s arms and gun sometimes do their own thing; laser sights should never be used; execution animations make connect with the target 50% of the time and play out fully at about the same frequency. Enemies can jerk about as they traverse the environment, and the alien species you encounter… it’s like being back in the early 2000s.


Several missions take you to unique and visually spectacular locations, but they often feel like padding while you wait for the true threat to emerge.

The last major issue to touch on is the ongoing bugs (and this Xbox review code arrives after two major patches). I got to experience: loot falling through surfaces and out of bounds; switches and other interactive objects not activating (reloading a checkpoint fixed this); doors/barriers permanently closing before I could pass through into the next part of the level (again, reloading a checkpoint worked); and crashes to the Xbox OS during contract missions.

And yet… despite those issues, I honestly enjoyed a dozen hours with Necromunda: Hired Gun. Maybe part of that is just the lack of competition when it comes to Warhammer 40k FPS - the appalling Fire Warrior, and the authentic but bland Space Hulk: Deathwing are all that come to mind? Necromunda: Hired Gun is better than both those games, with clear ambitions to be Doom in the Warhammer 40k universe, with hints of Titanfall 2 and Shadow Warrior 2. However, a serious lack of polish and some unnecessary padding keeps it from being great, and it’s still got nothing on the criminally underrated and oft-forgotten Warhammer 40k: Space Marine – the pinnacle of action games set in that universe.



*Xbox Series S review code provided by Focus Home Interactive