Don’t make me play – Warhammer 40K Fire Warrior

Don’t Make Me Play is where I take a game that I either suck at or just sucks itself and run through it. The first one was the highly competitive world of Street Fighter IV, which you can read here. Paul recently tried out the immensely complex E.V.E. Online, which you should also read from here. This is my second go, where I attempt to work my way through the singleplayer of a simply awful game, where everywhere you go there’s wise Asian voices and shitty gunplay

It’s 2003. Video gaming as we know it is about to change forever. In this year alone would be released Max Payne 2, Tom Clancy: Splinter Cell, Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic, Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time, Call of Duty and Beyond Good & Evil.  Half Life 2 was set to release the next year. Things were looking good for the future of games, with many exciting boundaries to be pushed. Also released this year unfortunately was Deus Ex: Invisible War, Enter the Matrix, Tomb Raider: Angel of Darkness and this; a bad Warhammer 40K game from publisher THQ. Called Fire Warrior.

I was just at the peak of my Warhammer fad back then, so when I heard they were releasing a game in the setting I was ecstatic. On release day I rushed out and bought it on PC, nerdgasming over the thought of seeing Space Marines in motion and shooting lasguns. I got it home, it installed and I was about to play. Loaded up the first level after skipping the tutorial and bam, texture spikes everywhere that made it impossible to see more than 4 feet infront of me let alone shoot. Apparently the game was released unplayable for PC on day one, a gift I should’ve taken them up on and instead have left my imagination to wonder about what the actual game might’ve been like. My brother thoughtfully went and traded in the PC version to get the PS2 version so I could at least play it, and though I completed it I felt extremely disappointed with how subpar it played.

It’s 2010. Publisher THQ release a good Warhammer 40k game, called Dawn of War II: Chaos Rising. Whilst searching for the cheapest place to buy it from, I find Fire Warrior for sale on PC to the tune of £2 with free postage and packaging. The former Warhammer geek in me remembers never being able to play it on PC, so out of curiosity (whilst forgetting what the console experience was like) I buy it. Such are the subtle ways of Chaos.

So the rules for this challenge -
1) No cheating or fan made patches, no matter how frustrating low health/bugs/low ammo/bugs/bugs get.
2) No breaking the game disc out of frustration.
3) No Retreat. No Surrender. Complete the game, or at least make a damn good try.

Things bode well (read: ominously) for how good the support for this game is from the autorun, where clicking on the official website link leads to here. THQ have so whitewashed their own past with this game that the official website is now an information repository for the history of American immigration and its Natives. So I install, enjoying the nostalgia thrill of having to change CD’s midway through the installation of the game. I try and load it up and bzzzt…error…not 64-bit compatible. This is just Windows playing up thankfully, with the bullshit and chips compatibility mode needing some serious rejigging on my part to get working. I wish I hadn’t looking back on it.

This game commits so many fucking cardinal sins of gaming that I don’t think I’ll even begin to cover half of them in the course of this article. And it isn’t me judging it with a modern eye, this is with an mind to its gaming contemporaries of the time, both the good and bad. It’s one of those you have to wonder if the development team even went back and replayed what they made. Looking at Kuju; who’s previous experience with atmospheric first person shooters was Microsoft Train Simulator and Singstar, they were probably very pleased upon replaying to have made a game that very closely stuck to the rails and you’d be embarrassed to play infront of friends.

In reality I think it’s highly plausible that they were the cheapest bidders and knew idiot teenage fans like me would lap up whatever shit they slapped out with a Warhammer label on. Out of the 8 studios they have; 6 in England, 1 in America and 1 in Manila I take one fucking guess who they threw this dog to. If it wasn’t produced by an underpaid foreign workforce they have every reason to be ashamed. But considering their wikipedia page makes no reference to it, I’m thinking maybe it was actually English/American produced and they’ve whitewashed their past of this as much as THQ. The plot thickens.

Oh yeah, I have to play this don’t I? Shit.

I start with the tutorial. The only thing you can hold against Fire Warrior here is the grey, grey blandness plus badly framed concept art put disconcertingly into picture frames. Apart from the first grevious error, which is to fucking tell you the entire bloody story through pushing buttons. That’s it, nowhere else in the game do you learn what the fuck you’re doing. You have to play through the tutorial to learn at the end, and even then through pressing lots of buttons just to sit around and listen for a bit. They’d seen the Deus Ex tutorial where they had holograms at the end briefly explaining non-plot crucial detail about enemies, and just decided to put the entirety of their hamfisted storyline in there too.

Ok, so we’ve established this isn’t going to be a clever shooter and will take a huge dump on the vast but shaky lore of WH40k. Surely, surely then they’ve focused on just having fun and making a good action game? My ballsack have they. I should point out this isn’t just me setting out trying to find faults with the game. I really wanted to enjoy it, but after a while there’s just so many aneurysm inducing moments you can’t help but notice how they interrupt play, and once your good faith is broken enough all the other bad elements creep in to be noticed.

To start the game you’re rooted in place in a gunship, where hilariously a fellow fire warrior falls over dead and then clips through the floor. Jump out the gunship, start shooting people picking up mysterious healing kits and ilk. Here two of the games’ biggest flaws are revealed -

1) You can’t be sure to hit anything over a foot away from you.

2) The real big issue. You can carry two guns at once in Fire Warrior, like you do in Halo. You start with one Tau weapon, that’s mediocre and boring without much ammo lying about for it. AND YOU CAN NEVER SWAP IT OUT.

I am not shitting you. They limit you to two weapons, and make one permanently fill up one of those sodding weapon slots that just so happens to run out of ammo quickly with little to replace it with. So for your free slot if you pick up an interesting gun you’re often forced to use it on easy fights or have to pick up a standard issue lasgun again as that’s the only thing there’s ammo for. This is the stupidest thing I think I’ve ever see any game do, as it’s not even a little side issue but one that sticks with you throughout. Imagine playing any other game, and you had a dull starting pistol. You can never drop it, and you can only pick up one other weapon. Find the BFG? Well, I hope you have plenty of ammo for your pistol, as if not you’re either using that BFG on basic cannon fodder or dropping it for a dull standard issue weapon of the enemy’s. It’s so cockpottingly idiotic that I just can’t find the swears to adequately sum up my feelings of frustration at this. Even @!%^* can’t do it justice, a word I’m not even able to type out without it getting censored. Just how can you get the core of a shooter so wrong? I mean, fucking hell Kuju. Fuck-ing-hell.

Are my feelings clear on that? Jolly good. Carrying on, the lasguns were seemingly made by somebody who got the lasgun mixed up with twinklyflaregun. The opening level is boring narrow corridor fight after boring narrow corridor fight. You even have to collect the blue and red keys at stages from Leader figures, which brings me to another hilarious/painful aspect of Fire Warrior – the close combat foe. This early on it’s the commissar, who has a chainsword and a twinklyflarepistol. I don’t know what went wrong with his training, but all the commissar knows to do is run foward with his arm disconnectedly spam swinging his meele weapon towards you, every swing playing a high pitched whirring chainsaw noise.
“Cadet Ruskie!”
“Yes Sah!”
“I can’t help but notice, on the training mat right now…”
“Yes Sah?!”
“Your Arm…it just kept repeating the same 90 degree arc whilst you advanced. It was almost…hypnotisingly stupid.”
“Yes Sah! Learnt it from my Old Man Sah! Greatest fighter there was Sah!”
“Well it’s just that…it’s…just…you know what? I can’t be bothered to explain this to you. Fine job Cadet, carry on.”
“ThaNKyoU SAH!”

Things continue at a joyless pace fighting red and blue coloured foes, collecting red and blue keys till you go red and blue in the face. There’s a few crappy turret sections thrown in and glimpses of much cooler enemies that you never get to fight in the game. Then the introduction of the hateful bombs, which is basically a long drawn out method of opening a door where you plant one by holding down a key for seven seconds, before waiting 10 more for it to go off. Then we get to the first boss. Oh, what a doozy it is. Quite alot of the people I know that played this game gave up at this boss, as they weren’t having fun up to it and the foe itself seemed stupidly hard.

You face a jet fighter (or Valkyrie to the Warhammer geeks) that hovers in one spot which shoots a lethal machine gun or homing rockets. There’s no pause in the firing and the rockets can hurt you behind cover. Run far away to snipe the thing and it goes back up into the air, so you have to get up close and personal. I remember when I first tried this that I actually ran out of ammo shooting at it from a medium range without beating it. I couldn’t figure out how to damage the bloody thing. Only through trial and error did I find out that when you shoot the small fans, after a while they barely noticeably stop moving. But as the guns in this game are about as accurate as a hip shooting grandmother you need to stand right up close to the bloody thing to stand a chance of killing it. Even knowing what to do it took me a few tries, thanks to rocket spam. Kuju! (Imagine everytime I say “Kuju!” that I’m shaking my fist into the air swearing revenge upon them).

Upon tediuming the boss to death the same Chinese voice stiltedly and dispassionately tells me “Well done fire warrior” and the mission is over. Do you want to know who that dull Chinese voice is? Only Burt Kwouk, Cato from the Pink Panther films with Peter Sellers. Also on the voice cast is Brian Blessed, Tom Baker, Peter Serafinowicz and Sean Pertwee. Guess we’ve finally figured out where all the playtesting budget went ehy? The curious thing is that none of these people mention Fire Warrior on their wikipedia page. Even the small time like David Yip, whose wikipedia page gladly mentions that he played a freaking factory owner on casualty neglects to mention this title. It seems anyone involved, even outside the gaming world, would rather forget this game existed.

I carry on into a prison, which introduced me to the worst checkpointing system I’ve ever come across. Till now I’d only died fighting the bastard spammy gunship which just put me having to fight through 20 guys again and again to get to the big open space where the fight took place. Here you have to bomb about a dozen cannons with the drawn out planting a bomb seven second sequence on each one. Each cannon is guarded by two guards and a commissar. You then go up another level and have to defeat about 10 snipers, before activating a trap-door in the central courtyard. Going down you have to fight through about 40 guys and a few commissars to find a purple key to open a door into the courtyard. Once there you have to survive an ambush by snipers. That’s about a 15 minute section right there, and the snipers can kill you in one hit. AND THEY PUT THEIR ONLY FUCKING CHECKPOINT RIGHT AT THE START OF IT.
*deep breath*
KUJU!!!!!!!

I think I’m calm again, but I can’t even begin with the stupidity of that last part. After playing through those same 15 minutes for the third time I got in the trap door. This leads underground to the prison proper,  entailing more corridor fights except this time there’s a roof instead of orange sky. There’s some annoying infinite waves of guards till you shoot a red alarm, and shootouts on circular floors that have no cover and gaps that lead to your death should you step across them. The checkpointing then puts you 5 minutes back. Kuj…you know what? By this point it’s just *sigh*.

I progress further in, entering a big round room to have a fight with a space marine before saving the Ethereal from an electric lights show. Before doing that I actually walked away from the computer for 20 minutes before coming back to turn the torture device off (not the game I should clarify). Then I get sent into space and have to defend a Tau ship from invasion. Showing themselves to be remarkably adept at making even the coolest moments of Warhammer 40K dull, Kuju has you repelling the boarding party by walking around an unimaginative vessel of grey with blue futuristic lighting and data screens. There’s nothing noteworthy about it, sure some new weapons and foes are introduced but they aren’t worth the type space. A crappy collect three keys for one inexplicable forcefield pads out a great deal, then you make your way to the bridge. Here you have a fight with a big group of space marines, which is hard as fucking nails to win and yes, the checkpoint if you die sees you repeating 5 minutes of the level again just to get back to the fight.

The game then sends me onto the imperial ship to counter-board, which again though promising excitement just sees more placing of several bombs, difficult fights with unfair checkpointing and cooler weapons dropped for duller more ammo plentiful models. I fight my way further into the ship, fighting…*sigh*. I’m sorry guys, but I just can’t play anymore. It’s just too painful to go through all over again, the same disappointment leaking back to me. I remember the ahead levels don’t spice things up at all, even with the inevitable inclusion of chaos. The bugs (mainly graphical and crashes), poorly executed ideas and half-arsed effort have just worn me down.

This game for me is the epitome of lazy games design, something that I wanted to share with you. This article is just my big fuck you to Kuju. Fuck you for getting me excited, fuck you for making me pay money for this and fuck you for your crappy work. I had such high hopes for it, yet it fell so low. In a world with so much backstory and imagination they ignored it all to churn out this. The main thing to credit them for is at least having you play as somebody other than a Space Marine, but they weren’t let down by over ambition or budget constraints. There’s no flicker of gold in this shitheap, it’s just a cash-in that could have become a cash-cow had they even thought to put in the effort.

I’m glad gaming has moved on from these dark days, where even poor games often have some novel idea attached. I’m very happy THQ managed to bounce back from this and publish Dawn Of War. Infact, didn’t Relic produce another Non-Warhammer Strategy game? One that I was rather crap at and would find difficult to beat online even once? Guess you’ll have to wait till next week for that one folks.