Boltgun Initial Thoughts

Good Morning Friends! It was in June of 2022 that I first saw the teaser trailer for a new Warhammer game called Boltgun, and I could already tell that I was probably on board with its particular brand of nonsense. Very rarely is a video game so directly targeted at my soul. In the mid-90s when I was obsessing over making levels for Doom 2, I was also obsessed with assembling plastic “beakie” Space Marines with my friend Jason and waging epic battles on his ping pong table semi-permanently converted into a battleground full of scratch-built terrain. That Proto-Bel would have been all over this game… in fact I kept trying to pretend that the EA-released Space Hulk PC game was actually a Doom clone at the time.
About a week ago the Boltgun trailers started to make their way into my feed and I remembered how much I wanted to play this game. Yesterday it officially released and I picked it up over on Steam, but it appears to pretty much be available for all platforms. Having spent part of my evening playing through the first half dozen levels or so… it very much feels like more of an actual spiritual successor to Doom and Doom 2 than the extremely excellent 2016 Doom release. As someone who cut my teeth on Wolfenstein 3D, Doom, Blake Stone, Rise of the Triad, and of course Duke Nukem 3D… this FEELS like you remember those games feeling. Modern audiences probably won’t really appreciate this fact, but even the sprite work in this game FEELS like it is 2.5D in the way that the transition of the model animations is ever so slightly abrupt.
You start off with just your chain sword and a little way into the first level you pick up your holy Bolter seated on top of an altar… with the reverence one would expect a holy instrument of imperial might. The chain sword takes some getting used to because effectively it throws you into a sort of bullet time as you line up your attack. You charge your sword, which pauses the game and then your character leaps forward and attacks with the blade. Essentially low-level minions will be finished off in a single hit… for higher-level minions, you will need to wait until they only have a sliver of life before it becomes a really effective attack. Essentially it can also be used as a movement ability of a sort where you charge forward and can sort of do a mid-air charge if you time it just right.
While the game lovingly replicates the feel of “random doodads all over the place for you to pick up” that was common for this era of shooter, it also has a lot of modern messaging. For example, the Chaos Cultists have lovingly painted platforms with yellow paint so you can know where you should be leaping to in order to kill them more efficiently. The game also features a “ledge pull-up” parkour system so if you leap across a gap, you can catch on the lip and pull yourself over onto the next platform. This isn’t over the top but feels pretty natural even within the framework of a “retro-inspired” shooter. There will be no blinking arrow telling you where to go… but I feel like a game like this doesn’t really need it. In some of the larger maps, there will be a bit of fumbling around and looking for the exit, but that also comes with this era of the genre.
What is so pure about this game is the fact that you get an endgame summary screen just like you did in Doom. The only thing that I feel a little iffy about is what it seems to count as secrets are not what I would have called secrets back in the day. Generally speaking, so far it is finding your way to a hidden powerup or something that is just off the beaten path… and less opening up new chambers and finding new areas of the map. I guess gone are the days of “humping” the wall while spamming your open key looking for a hidden door… and instead, it is just efficiently clearing every corner of every level. I admittedly missed several secrets on each level so maybe there were hidden doors that I just didn’t find.
The story is a bit on the light side, but really… did we care about the story in Doom? The story was largely an excuse for us to kill more demons, and the story in Boltgun is the story of EVERY Space Marine game… PURGE! There is a lovingly crafted number of chaos mobs that you will end up fighting along the way from mere cultists to Chaos Marines… to Chaos Terminators… to even Chaos Daemons like the Great Unclean One. Basically don’t expect high art here… this is a game with just enough story to keep it from falling on its face… as it should be for any 90s-era shooter. If you are also of this era then you will probably love it. If you were NOT from this era… I have no clue what you will think about this game. It’s a relatively fast-paced retro shooter with weapons that feel powerful and combat that feels visceral. For me personally… it really hit the spot. The post Boltgun Initial Thoughts appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.

AggroChat #211 – Under the Sea Elves

Featuring: Ashgar, Belghast, Grace, Kodra, Tamrielo and Thalen

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Tonight we record a normal show… and by normal I mean one that starts off completely derailing Belghast. We have a new way of trying to make sure topics that don’t actually make it on a weeks show roll over to the next week… and as a result there are a bunch of topics that have been sitting in limbo for awhile that we dig into.

Topics Discussed

  • Evoland 2 Reprised
  • Warhammer Age of Sigmar
    • Idoneth Deepkin
    • Stormcast
    • Nighthaunt
    • Games Workshop New Management
  • Disappointing Sequels
    • New Gundam Breaker
    • Deus Ex Invisible War
    • Master of Orion 3
    • Mass Effect Andromeda
  • Gloomhaven
    • Premium Board Games
    • Kingdom Death
  • Elder Scrolls Online
    • Current State of Game

AggroChat #200 – The Meta vs The Game

Featuring:  Ashgar, Belghast, Grace, Kodra, Tam and Thalen

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Tonight we are recording our two hundredth episode of AggroChat and we still have no clue what we are doing.  There was a joke floating around this week that “lets make a podcast” is the new version of “let’s form a band” and honestly… it sorta is.  April 13th of 2014 I gathered up some of my friends and said, let’s do a thing where we mostly just have the conversations we normally have on voice chat…  while recording it. Four years and some change later we are sitting at our bicentennial episode.

Tonight we talk about the Kulve Taroth event happening in Monster Hunter World.  Kodra and Bel talk about Magic the Gathering Arena and how this might actually be the answer to Magic for the Hearthstone crowd.  Kodra talks about his experiences with the Dominaria pre-release draft event. Finally we settle into a lengthy discussion about games with defined metas and the battle between playing the way you want and playing in a way that supports the meta compositions.

Topics Discussed

  • Monster Hunter World
    • Kulve Taroth
  • Magic the Gathering Arena
    • Preconstructed
  • Dominaria Pre-release
    • Drafting the set
  • Playing the Meta vs Playing the Game
    • Warhammer 40k
    • Destiny
    • League of Legends
    • Heroes of the Storm
    • Monster Hunter World

AggroChat #186 – Games of the Year 2017

Featuring: Ashgar, Belghast, Grace, Kodra, Tamrielo and Thalen

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After our long holiday break we return to record the 2017 Games of the Year show.  This time around we have sixteen games to talk about.  When you get six hosts and ask them what their favorite games were for a calendar year… you are going to get a bunch of answers.  Traditionally in the past we have split this into two shows, but this year we recorded it in one go for a show that weighs in a little over 2 hours long.  It was a great year for gaming and as always we would love to hear what our listeners favorite picks were.

Games Discussed

  • Horizon: Zero Dawn
  • Persona 5
  • FFXIV: Stormblood
  • Super Mario Odyssey
  • Destiny 2
  • The Sexy Brutale
  • Hollow Knight
  • Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild
  • Mass Effect: Andromeda
  • Night in the Woods
  • Okami HD
  • Opus Magnum
  • Through the Ages
  • Warhammer 40,000 – 8th Edition
  • Wolfenstein II
  • Diablo 3 – Rise of the Necromancer
  • Mixed Bag of Honorable Mentions