Necromunda: Hired Gun
Platforms: PC
Reviewed on: PC
Reviewer: Maiyannah Bishop
Review Play-Time: 15h
Developer: Streum On Studio
Publisher: Focus Home Interactive
Released: 2021-05-31
Review Published: 2025-11-25
+ Very faithful to the WH40K look
+ Energetic and solid gunfights
- Time-wasting, easy puzzles
- Contrived and formulaic plot
-Unfinished endgame content
Necromunda: Hired Gun is a first-person shooter developed by Streum On Studio and published by Focus Home Interactive. This is one I had my eye on for some years now, but when it came out I didn't have the money for it, so having extra money for once in my existence, and a desire to see what it was like, I picked it up on the recent Steam sale. Streum On Studio is a hell of a studio: the games I have played are always interesting, even the times they are not the greatest, so I have to confess, I was looking forward to this entry from them. And that informs me being … well, acutely disappointed if I'm honest. This isn't a terrible game, but neither is it a great one, and it kind of suffers the worst fate for a game: it's neither good enough to carry itself on its own merits, nor is it of such poor quality where the experience degrades into 'so bad its entertaining' territory either. The game we're left with, despite cleaving faithful to Warhammer 40,000s look and feel, is as safe, formulaic, and - ultimately - boring an affair as one could experience. Perhaps worth it for the handful of hours of play you'd receive out of it on a deep sale, but not at asking price. I cannot say that I regret my purchase, but neither will I be likely to play it again after penning this review.
I have said in conversation several times that the biggest sin a game can do to be boring. Now, I shall spare you the ego of flattering myself and pretending that I am origin of this deeply-philosophical bumf, but I raise the sentiment because it is a reoccurring thought which would not leave me as I played. A thought that hung heavy around my neck akin to a stone, gaining increasing weight, and with it, a larger share of my consideration, as I ventured further and further into the game. First-person shooters are without a doubt my favourite genre, so why was I … well, to be frank, bored out of my mind? This is a game that lovingly cleaves to the Warhammer 40,000 setting with obvious care, but unlike other outings, it lacks that heart.
Yet as a critic, it was never enough for me to just say it was shit and move on — I wanted to understand why, how it got that way. In that sense, Necromunda: Hired Gun became something of a white whale for me as I sat down to write this review, because all the pieces are here, this is all stuff I should find engaging and enjoyable, done in ways other games have approached these mechanics that I have enjoyed here, so the million dollar question becomes: well, why not this one Ultimately that comes down to the game comprising less than the sum of its parts, but examining that is a surprisingly complicated affair, because it involves examining not the pieces themselves, though we shall certainly look at those, but rather instead looking at how they come together, because it is in that, which Necromunda ultimately fails.
Easiest to begin this autopsy is how the game begins. After choosing from a decent selection of different player character appearances, you go through a simple mission in media res that essentially forms a tutorial. Dodging side to side, sliding on the ground as a sort of dash, and wall-running are introduced, as they form the core of the mobility mechanics — if not all of them. Then a handful of simple combat encounters, after which follows arriving at the hub of the game preceded by an introductory cutscene. So far so good, this gameplay is plain bread and butter and hardly blowing the world away, but it is perfectly serviceable, and we rarely see a tutorial level set the world on fire.
It was in reaching that cutscene we find the incipient among our major stumbling blocks: the plot. I say incipient as it is a growing thing in and of itself, and it also comes to encapsulate the growth of a list of complaints. Each and every such complaint seems to have its genesis in cleaving to this hackneyed plot as a hungry tick, bloating itself in satisfying its hunger to adhere to this grand design, at the cost of my enjoyment of the game. I would generally forego mention of it if I felt I would stand alone in that discontent, but I sincerely doubt that I am the only person with this assessment.
Now, I am self-aware enough to realize that I said that the individual parts were mostly alright above, and when it comes to the mobility mechanics, or the shooting, and such, I would stand by that opinion, but — without getting into the kind of spoilers that earn me lovely “fan mail” — the plot at hand is the exception to that rule. As I said, I do not really want to go there, even if I do not in any way, shape, or form, feel that the narrative presented here is some magnum opus that deserves being experienced. I will say this much though: this is among that particularly-annoying brand of story where at every turn there is a contrived twist to place you into a bind, and the story has the really strongly-negative habit of pumping the brakes on the action every time I started to find myself starting to enjoy things.
I find some joy as a writer in having an above-average vocabulary without resorting to a thesaurus, but even with one I could not find a better word for the chief thing the plot does which is to the games detriment. I resort to what I shall, with considerable hesitation, label “puzzles”. It is a very generous term for these, because they essentially come in two very simplistic varieties: elementary jumping puzzles where figuring out the path from point A to point B is the challenge, and “collect some batteries from the immediate surroundings to power some piece of machinery.” My partner has since informed me that the technical term for this matter of time-wasting tomfoolery is “buggering the player about.”
In theory, platforming puzzles should make sense in a game that places emphasis on its conveyance and movement mechanics, and I wouldn't quarrel much with that assertion, but here they are presented in situations where the objective is not, for instance, discovering optimal paths that allow you to efficiently engage in gunfights or close the distance for melee takedowns. .No, they rather are the connective tissue. They are simple, and even me with all my long history of having, shall we say, directional challenges in games, figured out the paths without much pause. What making them the interstitial content results in is the feeling that we are stopping the happy fun shooty-bang-bang times to jump on random outcroppings in the scenery to traverse to the next fight. The association becomes that these puzzles are the thing you stop the fun parts to do to progress to the next one, which does not cast them in particularly-good a shade.
Unfortunately, the parkouring around the grim darkness of the far future reveals our first smaller issue to contend with: the movement mechanics feel very slippery at times. Indeed, while the gunplay sections were decently-challenging and I had a few that went down the wire (especially the boss fights) it was not the combat encounters which claimed my doddering hired gun - it was gravity. Each and every instance of protagonist-death in my story was one where I missed a jump, or the grappling hook they later give you decided it didn't need to attach, or the wall-running didn't end at the instant I let go of the key and my grimdark avatar happily careened into the void that is Necromunda's depths, which I imagined happening with childish glee, since it at least conferred on me some enjoyment of the deaths rather than mere frustration.
Such fates are not inherently a mission failure state: you can buy up to three “stims” which revive you at the last point before said death. I never actually ran out of the three stims, but presumably you fail the mission at such a point. But, this softened consequence meant that it was never a desk-flipping situation when it happened, and what have in the end was that it mostly felt Necromunda was just burning my time so as to be able to say there are things other than shooting in it. Perhaps some particular programmer was filled with pride of the parkour system they put together, and wanted to make sure we had to do it — I can't pretend that I am immune to doing this in my hobby projects. However, if that was their intent in so doing, they only guaranteed that I possessed a worse opinion of it than I would have otherwise. Left confined to the combat I probably would have felt that it made a very kinetic engagement that I enjoyed a lot. Adding chasm-climbing nonsense to the equation had the same effect it did in Doom Eternal: breaking up the flow of the experience for no gain, except that of irritation. I'm willing to concede that there exist a plethora of gamers who are likely not as bothered by these sections as I was, I would rebuke that point in the simple fact that even if they do not present a detriment to your own gameplay, neither do they add anything of any redeeming value.
The second variety of puzzles we're dealing with are a non-entity: while one can certainly argue that the parkour sections have a component of problem solving to them, the “find the McGuffins and shove them in the machine” puzzles are basicaly testing that you have eyes in your face to see things. And well, despite needing four to see things and basically being legally blind, I did not need naught but a moment to ever complete these sections, and they had the overwhelming vibe of wanting to extend the runtime of the game or, perhaps, have something other than the combat. I can't divine the minds of the programmers so I don't really want to impose an assumption on the design, but in either case it fails so we don't have to. If the intention is to pad out the run time, the longest segment is maybe about 5 minutes if you miss one of the batteries for a machine thats in a corner behind something. If it's meant to be an interesting intermission, some calmer middle action, well I could understand that, but the problem then becomes that this is not stimulating at all, its babby's first puzzle level of hidden object game, and the it comes across patronizing of the player, honestly.
That brings us to the part I was annoyed that it would stop: the gunplay. This is the part that is most frustrating for me, in the sense that it's the good part and it kept getting interrupted. There's little I can say that isn't praise here at the first blush of it: it is a kinetic system with good feedback, feels enjoyable to engage with, and the takedowns do genuinely replicate the visceral enjoyment that made the new Doom installments as controversial as they were in certain sectors. You get to select up to six guns from a large assortment for any given mission, and each of the firearms does a good job of making it feel the differences came not from a lack of balance or one of them being better than the other, but rather in having different weapons for different playstyles. I am not going to say they're perfectly-balanced, because nothing is, but the differences between the guns felt as if those weapons were simply better suited to my own playstyle better.
Unfortunately, as the game went on I found myself just skipping the combat with increasing frequency, and that is a problem I ultimately lay at the feet of the story and its puzzles. As the story dragged on, and became predictable in its twists, and the puzzles became enough fuckabout, the end result was that I just wanted to complete the mission and have it over with. By then, the enjoyment diminished, and so too did my willingness to engage with the combat. The parkour might make the combat feel kinetic and energetic, but my desire to engage with that parkour after just having spent 10 minutes doing a jumping puzzle is at record lows, and so I found myself just pushing through by means of healing kits and cheesing the AI. I don't generally want to do the latter, but I got to the point where the greater concern for me was completion, rather than mild gaming principles.
Meta progression in the game is in essence upgrading bionics for yourself, and your hound, and then getting better weapons. The hound is functionally a dog-shaped missile, and it does become important in encounters to distract - and after it is upgraded enough, kill - enemies. It becomes an effective way to manage the number of enemies you deal with at any given time, since it will both draw aggro and tie up enemies. So, upgrading it is a good idea. Upgrading yourself, on the other hand, is necessary. Along with expected upgrades to health and shielding and such, you also have a double jump, which the game neglects tell you about, and is all but essential to complete the jumping puzzles once you progress far enough in. At the start, the game has multiple routes that allow you to use it, the grapple, or wall-running, but towards the end, the amount of effort is falling off hard, and you find yourself increasingly shepherded into narrower paths with less options. The last couple of missions are, regrettably, entirely linear.
That is worthy of note as well: I don't know if it was money, or time, or the publisher's cocaine pile was running low or something, but the game was definitely lacking and rushed towards the end. Along with the optional paths vanishing, the story leaves a fair few loose ends, and without spoiling that conclusion, ends in a sequel hook that gave the impression that the game developers were begging for resources to complete the game. Yet, alas, they would not receive this, and we ultimately end up with the game we have, not, I suspect, the game Steum On Studio intended for us. That having been written, while I can appreciate the feeling this was not the intended state of the game, it is what we end up stuck with.
Nowheres does this become more apparent that the game was rushed to release than in the endgame content: the shell of an endgame is here, but there is no meat on its bones. You have successive difficulty levels of missions, randomly generated, that have a contractor faction you're doing it for, and a target faction. Or factions, in some cases. This has a reputation you build with these factions. So ... what do you get as a reward for building reputation? Absolutely nothing, as far as I can tell. This appears to be a system they had much higher aspirations for that just, never got realized into its final form as designed.
I do feel I'd be doing this game a disservice if I ended the review without commenting on how the game nails the Warhammer 40,000 themeing. The soundtrack, while it isn't going to win any music awards, is energetic and leans heavily into the atmosphere and theme. The maps, meanwhile, skillfully evoke the gritty and grimy, visceral feeling of the underhives of a 40k Hive World. This is a world that feels inherently dirty - as it should, for Necromunda.
