Forget the promise of peace and understanding

Thanks to a coincidence of curiosity and a big nasty Steam sale, I seem to have accidentally “gotten into” Warhammer 40,000. (A logical step, I suppose, when I approach it from the unsettlingly plausible angle that, at least in terms of sensibility, I have spent the last several years belatedly self-actualizing as the best possible version of my fourteen-year-old self.) I’ve been pestering everyone I know about this, until I realized: hey, wait, literally tens of people have, for some reason, willingly subjected themselves to my pestering in the form of disappointingly intermittent newsletters! Why not pester them instead? So here we are.

I am calling this part one because there’s other WARHAMMER FORTY THOUSAND I might want to write about—for example, after not finishing a book for months, I somehow read six 40k novels in two weeks; there’s a lot of interesting stuff to be said about pulp literary production and intellectual property and genre, or something. Maybe I’m deluding myself. I don’t know. Maybe not. Whatever! See you!

Warhammer: Vermintide 2

The only Warhammer Fantasy entry on the list, I think, by which I mean the only entry that takes place in the original “what if Lord of the Rings was all fucked up” setting, not 40000’s “what if Star Wars was Elric of Melniboné” setting. I got this game for free on Steam somehow, many months ago, and then recently I was thinking about the idea of first-person melee combat, so I installed it, and now I live in a ditch. 

Vermintide 2 is, as the name suggests, is a game about bisecting approximately one trillion rat people in a row with swords. It is disgusting and hilarious. I am relatively new to thinking about games in terms of “feel” — most of the games I have thought about and written about are games whose “feel” consists largely of, like, using the d-pad to go up and down in a menu — but this game feels incredible to play. It is very fun to suss out how to and when to block, how to sort of nudge your character back and forth to avoid damage, what the different items do, etc., towards the end of going rhythmically precisely bonko on a horde of snarling demonic rodentia.

Not that my rhythms were ever terribly precise. The game has a surreally high skill ceiling, but it is definitely fun to play from the floor. It’s an online co-op game, but you can play it with bots; they are much worse at the game, I assume, but I don’t really like playing video games with strangers, because what if I suck and they don’t like me? (More on this to come!) I played through what amounts to the “first campaign” of Vermintide 2 with bots on one of the easier modes. It ruled. The only reason I haven’t finished at least one play-through of the rest of the missions is because I got more excited about the 40k setting.

Warhammer 40,000: Space Marine

I played Gears of War for the first time recently. It was pretty cool. It felt real good to play, which is the main thing I’d heard about it. You’re a comically beefy man with your comically beefy bros and you have to hide behind boxes to shoot aliens in the face—but you probably know this already, even better than me, because Gears of War was arguably the most famous and representative game of its era, an era that led me to believe that I didn’t really like video games at all. Well, joke’s on me: I literally had a (sugar-free, thank you very much) Monster energy drink this morning. It tasted, frankly, epic, which is also the name of the company that made Gears of War.

In any case, I’ve recently come around on shooters in general, and I have long heard that Gears of War is one of the best-feeling shooters ever made, so when I got a free XBOX LIVE GAME PASS PC ULTIMATE (?) trial recently, I played it. I’d never played any of the Gears games before, except one time I played Gears of War 2 multiplayer at a party—I was surprised by how good I was, because I always got crushed when I played shooters with my friends, but that was just because the guy I was playing with had mistaken another guy’s Coke-and-everclear for his regular Coke, and he hadn’t yet realized that he was unbelievably drunk.

Turns out Gears of War is very good! It is a very good video game. It still feels stellar to play. It’s tense and funny and weird. All the chunks and kathunks sit right in the pocket. It justifies the existence of controller vibration. I like how there’s a minigame that you play when you’re reloading. Is Undertale a Gears of War-like? I stopped playing a few hours in because I wanted to cancel my GAME PASS ULTIMATE subscription, and also I hit a really annoying bug that’s apparently been around since the original 360 version, where you have to push a car and hide behind it, but it gets stuck if you die and restart the mission, which feels especially rude.

Warhammer 40000: Space Marine is universally compared to Gears of War. This comparison is obvious and appropriate. They are both third-person shooters where you are a massive slab of a dude and you shoot a bunch of aliens with an exciting variety of stupid and bonkers guns. The difference—and I am again paraphrasing essentially every review, contemporary and recent, of Space Marine—is that it’s not a cover shooter like Gears of War, because you’re such a mondo beefman that you are, in fact, the cover. This is also correct.

Space Marine rules. It is dumber and funnier than Gears of War. For starters, space marines—the guys—are hilarious. They are 650 pound metal-suited Englishmen with posh accents whose sheer presence blows everyone’s mind. “Space marine!!!!” yell the orcs (“Orks,” I suppose for copyright reasons), before you shoot them in the face with your massive gun and they explode, or you melee them to death with a chainsaw and then stomp on their head, which explodes. At one point, you walk through a makeshift infirmary and a dying guy goes, “I can’t believe I got to see a space marine…” That’s you! You’re the space marine!

If you do your fattest melee move on a stunned enemy, you recover health, like in the recent Doom games. (Interestingly, these murder animations do not grant you invincibility, which makes the cost/benefit analysis of health regeneration genuinely tense.) You cannot jump, but you can roll around. You just go thunk thunk thunk and shoot a kazillion doofuses in the face and they die. Several times you get a totally batshit jet-pack and can just dive-bomb into packs of dudes and then they die.

The levels are straight lines. The entire game is just walking in a line and shooting some guys and then you enter an arena and shoot a bunch of guys. Occasionally audio logs are hidden off to the side, because of course they are. The environments look fantastic as you walk in a straight line through them. The whole thing feels excellent in—and here’s the Magic of Gaming—the same way it seems it must feel excellent to be a 650 pound lab-grown Englishman physiochemically engineered to smash everything accomplishing your purpose of smashing everything. 

The plot is as obvious as the level design, but it is equally chill as hell. It hits as many Serious Dramatic Notes as the setting and gameplay can afford—there are ongoing ideological clashes; major characters die; the human stakes of what you’re doing are feel quite high, etc.—but it’s all chill enough. It plays its obvious campiness perfectly straight, which is the best approach, I think. The sequel coming out in a couple months might be the greatest game of all time. The first one might be the greatest game of all time, too. It’s definitely not. But like…maybe it is? (It’s not.)

Dawn of War

This is the canonical “best Warhammer video game.” It is a cool RTS. I played it for maybe six hours. I don’t have too much to say about it because, while I have a pretty high tolerance for getting broken shit running, something about the way Dawn of War was broken for me drove me up the doggone wall. I had to make my computer UI really small to make the font readably large and install a bunch of mods to let me zoom out enough to see anything. I don’t know. The vibe was just DOA for me. But like, it’s obviously a really cool game; I’m just a baby. Sorry! I’ll try again before Part Two.

Mechanicus

A vibey, happily tabletoppish little tactics game that plays out kind of like if someone smushed the recent XCOM games into the overall framework of Darkest Dungeon. You move your little dudes from room to room of a glowy outlined map and occasionally encounter bad guys, at which point you transition to a more detailed glowy map and do a bunch of Tactical Turn-Based Shooting. Less rigorous than XCOM, to be sure, and there are a couple other 40k games that hew more closely to the XCOM formula, but it’s a well-wrought and hooky game. 

Speaking of XCOM: I admired XCOM a lot more than I enjoyed it, unfortunately, because I found the setting and character design off-puttingly dull. Mechanicus is a good example of the way that the massive, completely ridiculous 40k setting can compellingly fill in aesthetic and world-building blanks. The Adeptus Mechanicus are silly and chill dudes, insofar as anyone in The Grim Dark Future is “silly” or “chill,” and the Necron are a solid and interesting enemy; it’s clear from Mechanicus that they were designed for the primary purpose of facilitating interesting game mechanics. I would explain what I mean by this, but this letter, like dozens more, has been trapped in the drafts box of this stupid website for too long, so figure it out yourself; I’m not here to do your goddamn homework.

Necromunda: Hired Gun

This game got like, a 49 on Metacritic or something? This is a shame, because it’s hilarious, and owns. It’s an FPS with basically every movement option you can imagine an FPS having—slide! double-jump! dash! dash in mid-air?!—and they all go about 15% too fast. There’s an inordinate amount of loot and crafting cruft, and it is incredibly trashy and annoying, but I just sort of aim my eyes at the numbers until I get bored and then sell the rest. The side missions that are supposed to let you level up are weirdly hard—maybe because I’ve, uh, sold the gear that would help—but the gestalt of it so unabashedly chaotic that I barely even care. I turn the game on and proceed to just fly around the entire map like an idiot and then I die a bunch of times in a row and turn it off.

Like Space Marine, it does the new Doom thing where delivering a melee killing blow gives you more health, except in Necromunda: Hired Gun it is an exact ripoff, down to the lengthy fatality-style animations. Reviewers objected to how much more half-assed these animations are than Doom’s, but the level of gory detail in the recent Doom games made me feel like I was about to discover a new way of puking, so I don’t mind. It looks extremely ugly, but in a sort of cool way, and Necromunda is canonically ugly, anyway. In reading about it I learned the term “Eurojank,” which describes something almost comically appealing to me, especially if Necromunda: Hired Gun is anything to go off of. I got it for $7 on sale. Video games are dumb.

Warhammer 40,000: Darktide

Ahghhh!!!! This game is so good! However, it sucks.

Darktide is much, much better than Necromunda: Hired Gun; however, the way it sucks is much less fun. It’s by the same company that made Vermintide 2, and it is often and fairly called a “spiritual sequel.” (Are there any tidelikes out there yet?) It’s way more of a shooter than Vermintide 2 is, though melee combat is still a major part of it, and the melee feels as good to me as Vermintide 2’s did.

But where Vermintide had characters and a little bit of a narrative thread, Darktide is just service-game mush. After a wonderfully immersive single-player tutorial, you’re dumped unceremoniously into Lobby Land, where you just queue up for shit and then do it. 

The missions are themselves well-written and compelling, if formulaic, but there’s just no scaffolding at all. Most people probably don’t need this—the most popular game by a mile is Fortnite1 or whatever. But good writing, in a game that looks and feels this good, would be so cool! (Allegedly, Dan Abnett, widely considered one of the truly excellent 40k novelists (and author of the previously-mentioned six novels I have read) wrote the story, or was supposed to write the story, but I have no idea what the hell he actually wrote.)

Back to Darktide: Every three levels or so you are subjected to a “story” briefing that’s just some asshole telling you you suck and are going to die. Spoiler: the last time, he tells you you don’t actually suck. There’s also something involving a traitor but that thread is so uninteresting and peripheral that when it was dramatically “resolved” in the final You Suck conference, I laughed out loud. This is all probably just beef with the kind of game it is—just got this Forza game, what the hell are all these cars?—but it’s so much flimsier than Vermintide 2, even. 

The environments are maybe a bit monotonous if you’re not invested in the setting, but if you are, they’re really great. The levels are wonderful little labyrinths where, at least at first, you feel like you’re constantly getting a bit lost, and they’re satisfying to master; the hordes of nasty little freaks are as fun as ever. However, unlike Vermintide 2, you have to play with other people, and of course they all just fly straight through the level as fast as possible, so it feels sort of like driving a motorcycle through a museum—by no means unsatisfying on its own terms, but you know.

I only ever played Vermintide on the lower difficulties; playing Darktide on the higher difficulties is a thrill pretty unlike anything I’ve ever played. This might not be saying much, because I’ve never really played any service game shooter co-op multiplayer PC blah blah blah types of games before. (I guess I should play Helldivers 2? I figured I’d just wait for the new Earth Defense Force, but here we are.) I was playing as a Zealot, which is to say a thickly Scottish-accented psychopath who specializes in melee-based crowd control, which is to say slashing massive hordes of Chaos zombies in the face, all the while screaming various pieties to the God-Emperor. The character banter is sublimely funny, and the voice actors really rose to the occasion; everything hits the perfect pitch of looped-out campy nastiness.

It’s great! It’s really very good. I just wish I had any reason to play it other than the pursuit of being really good at it, which, like, I was getting better at it than I thought I’d get, but I know I’m not going to get that good at it compared to people who are really good at video games, and people get so fucking good at video games, it’s wild as shit how good at video games people get, and besides, I have so much other shit I want to do, and also a constantly disappointed and borderline pathological need to comprehend and mentally systematize as large a quantity of media as possible, which makes the idea of spending 100 hours getting really good at the same fifteen levels a sort of actively stressful idea to me, which makes me wonder if I should actually give it a try, as a kind of exposure therapy or something. What were we talking about? Just give me a 15-hour campaign and then let me log off, or something. I’ll even replay it on hard! I’m replaying Space Marine on hard, and it’s fun! Whatever.

Warhammer 40000: Boltgun

I first heard about this game a few months ago, while I was reading about the tragically-named subgenre of “boomer shooters.” This was during a brief period of my life where I was playing through as much of the first Doom (original Doom, not 2016 Doom) campaign as I could every morning before work. I couldn’t tell if I liked the genre it started, or just Doom. (I still can’t, really.)

Anyway, I played Boltgun on XBOX GAME PASS ULTIMATE, and I like it a lot. It’s very fun. It looks and feels good. The main criticism I hear of it is that the level design is confusing and tedious, especially because you aren’t given any map to look at. This is true, sort of, and I don’t think the game would lose anything by having maps, but the weird convolution seems like a legit design decision to me, because I feel like running around in circles looking for a stupid key is a quintessential part of the original “boomer shooter” experience. The rhythm of shredding a bunch of dinguses and then being extremely lost can be charming, I think, especially if you use Steam controller mapping to toggle sprint on permanently. That said, my sense of direction is a trash can, so, like, maybe I’m just used to it, or something.

The most interesting thing about Boltgun considered in the context of a bunch of other 40k games is its tone. From what I’ve read—again, I am very new to all of this—40k started as basically Dune fan fic that was also a very broad satire of Thatcherite England: what if people were really as fucked and cruel and antisocial as neoconservative ideology posits they are, but also, you know, the God-Emperor of Terra facilitated FTL space travel with his giant brain? Gradually, however, as people filled in the gaps in the lore (and Games Workshop started selling a kazillion dollars in miniatures), it filled out into this weird half-goofy half-earnest thing, where compelling human stories are told in a way that makes it almost possible to believe the whole thing isn’t actually an insane farce. The fundamentally comic and functional setting, perhaps in spite of itself, actually opens up an interesting narrative space, one which doesn’t map perfectly onto the setting.

Boltgun leans fully into this silliness. In this, it’s pretty different from the other 40k stuff I’ve seen and played. Take Space Marine: I think Space Marine’s developers know how fucking silly it all is, and playing it is fun because it’s silly, but the game achieves its effect by playing things as straight as possible. Likewise, Darktide turns the grimness and the humor both as high as they will go, to fantastic, if undercooked, effect. But it, too, refuses to break kayfabe. Darktide is funnier than Boltgun, but the humor is almost completely deadpan. Boltgun is much more openly silly in the way that the original Doom is openly silly. It is brasher and brighter and loopier than anything else on this list.

In another register, Rogue Trader, a fantastic CRPG I will definitely write about if I get around to Part Two, allows the player to play as an “iconoclast”—which is to say, as someone who is neither a theocratic fascist nor a death-drive Chaos freak. My guess is that almost everyone who plays the game plays as an iconoclast, at least at first, because it is so manifestly the sanest route; but I also have a sneaking suspicion that it’s something of a compromise. Without getting into the lore too much, Rogue Trader puts you in the shoes of—you guessed it—a rogue trader, the single type of person in the entire Imperium of Man authorized to live an “iconoclastic” existence. But I’m genuinely unsure if even a rogue trader would be allowed to do some of the shit you do on an iconoclastic Rogue Trader playthrough. This is an empire that routinely explodes entire planets who are suspected of harboring traitors; this is an empire which propagates some of the most hilariously over-the-top doublespeak slogans I’ve ever seen in media (“innocence proves nothing”).

In any case, this tension between extremely broad and campy satire and a more serious, subtle narrative impulse—one driven in large part by people who grew up playing the game, reading the rulebooks, etc.—is one of the things that makes the setting so interesting, at least to a relative outsider. Boltgun is, of all the 40k shit I’ve played and read, the most staunchly goofy. Gone is the interpersonal drama of Space Marine, the psychologically-rooted humor of Darktide’s banter, the moral ambiguity of Rogue Trader or Dan Abnett’s Eisenhorn novels. It’s all slapstick and gags. I think this works, ultimately—not just as a tribute to the early 40k approach, but also as a tribute to Doom and the Doom clones it takes as design inspirations. But I think, ultimately, I find the open silliness less aesthetically compelling overall.

Anyway, thanks for reading! I’ll write about something less ridiculous soon, hopefully—or at least differently ridiculous. Bye!