Warhammer 40,000: Fire Warrior (PS2)
Despite being exposed to the Warhammer 40,000 universe through my friends discussing the characters, lore, and games, I had never consumed any sort of related media or played the tabletop game. Warhammer 40,000: Fire Warrior for the PlayStation 2 would be my first time truly dipping into the franchise I had heard so much about, and helpfully for anyone else who entered the series with this game, the tutorial mission actually features terminals that details a fair bit of the lore present in the title. It is still easy enough to follow the story without taking the time to listen to these terminals’ short audio files, but that’s mostly because the story isn’t really trying to do much beyond host the first-person gameplay.
Set in a science fiction future in the incredibly distant year of 40,000, humanity’s push into the stars has lead to them running into various alien races and supernatural forces that actually leads to the species becoming quite corrupt itself. This dark future for humanity seems to be why the villains of this game are actually humankind, the space-traveling empire of the human race aiming to wipe out a more peaceful race known as the Tau. The Tau are not without their defenses though, their Fire Warriors being their finest soldiers and the player placed in the boots of one named Kais who is just preparing to join the group when the humans attack. With the human Imperium holding a vital member of the Tau leadership hostage, you begin your work as a Fire Warrior fighting back the human race on your homeworld before things take an unexpected turn near the midpoint and a new, much stronger enemy force in service to Chaos usurps the role of primary antagonist with their dark powers and more impressive weaponry.
While the story does hold that one interesting development, most of it is a set of missions given to you by Tau leadership to add context to the next level. Beginning on the Tau’s Mars-like home planet after it has been militarized with trenches and encampments and moving into interior areas like a prison and the halls of the large spaceships of both factions flying above the planet, there’s an acceptable amount of variety and as you get nearer to the end of the game you start to find more interesting setpieces and mission structures like a level designed around sabotaging a massive enemy war mech while it’s still in the hangar or plunging into a corrupted area that seems almost hellish in design. Despite forward progress often involving gunning down the enemies in your path the mission objectives are usually something like activating the right switches or placing explosives, but some areas do have you facing off with augmented bosses or throwing a bunch of powerful foes at you for a required fight instead. The area design doesn’t settle into once concept too long even when you’re spending multiple missions in a spaceship or other environment that could get away with being homogeneous, but the stage layouts are let down by the other important elements of a first-person shooter: weapons and enemy design.
The Tau Fire Warrior can carry two weapons at a time and swap between them as necessary, although it seems that Kais really doesn’t want to abandon the weapons of his people so one slot is almost always devoted to the gradually upgraded Pulse branch of weapons. The Pulse Rifle is your starter and basically just a sci-fi twist to an automatic, and over the course of the adventure it is tweaked in the form of things like the Pulse Carbine with its grenade launching secondary fire and the minigun-like Burst Cannon. The end of this replacement chain though is the Rail Rifle, an incredibly powerful late game tool that can eliminate many enemies in a single well placed shot despite its slow firing rate. It is a bit silly the game makes a big deal about how you must do anything in your power to prevent the Rail Rifle from falling into enemy hands only to find dead allies scattered around with the rifle nearby for easy ammo refills. While this could have been a satisfying power trip for the final moments of the game, not only does it arrive when the new enemy force enters the picture, but they almost require the Rail Rifle to be used exclusively to take them down in any reasonable amount of time.
When the game begins, you’ll be using your Pulse Rifle and whatever human firearms you scavenge from the battlefield to have gunfights with similarly armed foes. The Las Gun is their slightly different sci-fi assault rifle and their sniper rifle and shotgun behave like the ballistic weapons we’re familiar with in our time. However, the low ammo count and situational usefulness of other weapon options means this period of the game is characterized by using your automatics so you’re not left high and dry ammo-wise. Some segments start to force the player to use certain weapons like a sniper level where you will be killed in almost an instant if you don’t pick off enemy snipers with your own long-range rifle before moving forward, but for a brief moment when enemies like the teleporting Tech Priests with their energy shields and the incredibly resilient Space Marines enter with explosive weaponry, you can actually find enough ammo for special weapons and begin to experiment with options outside of your safe automatic focus. However, before this can really get itself going, the Chaos faction enters with its supernaturally powerful foes who can teleport right in front of you and kill you in an instant if they land their shot well, and even if they don’t they can shear off enough health with a badly aimed one that the next guy can kill you if you’re too slow to retaliate.
The supernaturally powerful marines who join the picture come with new weapon options like the powerful Chaos Bolter guns that are strong and satisfying tools to use when you can find a chance to whip them out, but the shift in enemy design means that the Chaos Bolter is hard to justify using when it can’t kill foes quickly enough. Your Rail Rifle is far too strong against these foes and you need that special edge to avoid being torn apart. The high damage output of your Rail Rifle also means it is even the best tool for boss battles, some being fairly easy since the giant foe doesn’t move around much while others will blast you to bits with ease unless you take advantage of the fact that they can’t aim their best weapons at you if you run up and press yourself against them while you open fire.
What began as a mediocre shooter with potentially interesting level design grew into a game with promise as you can start to embrace new weapon types against foes that become more than just men with guns, but the introduction of Chaos ruins the back portion of the game as firefights became more like coin flips. Survival becomes more about being the first to draw, and if you aren’t you’ll be sent back to a checkpoint and hopefully survive the next time around now that you know a powerful marine is around a corner or will appear from thin air. The new enemy faction isn’t the only idea that went awry though, as the main game’s mission structure also has a secret objective for every level that could have added more depth to the proceedings but varies wildly in concept. In a stage you might find a courier you need to kill before they deliver a message or you could be tasked with taking out enemies without tripping the alarms, but some secret objectives are about shooting specific barrels that you aren’t told are important or do specific actions like killing enemies from certain positions or with a specified weapon. The game’s 21 levels end up fairly uneven because of their sudden shifts in design concepts and difficulty, but at least the obscure secret missions don’t seem to hold much benefit besides giving you a better performance evaluation at the end of a level.
Multiplayer can also be found in Warhammer 40,000: Fire Warrior, although the online portion is only going to be accessible if you pick up the PC version on GOG.com instead. Split-Screen is present though for local play, but there are very few maps offline and the weapon selection doesn’t come close the single-player game. The Rail Rifle does make an appearance but you must find it to use it so its incredible power is limited some, but the other power options are the missile launcher and grenades. The Bolter can still impress and kill quickly if it lands its shots, but otherwise you start with an automatic and most of what you find will be variations on that like the Pulse Carbine and Las Gun or the specialized tools like the Sniper Rifle and Shotgun that at least can find more purchase against human players who have no special resistances or powers. You can drop a gun to have it explode in five seconds like an explosive lure, but this puts things about on the level with the mediocre opening save for a bit more incentive to stray from automatics. However, local multiplayer is dealt a strong blow by the fact it has four maps with no single one available across all of the game’s three competitive modes. Deathmatch and Team Deathmatch are both races to get the most kills in a time limit but they can’t be played in the same levels, but the two Team Deathmatch maps are also available in the Capture the Flag mode focused on getting points for both stealing and successfully delivering the enemy flag as well as getting it back from the enemy. Perhaps because the two team maps are designed specifically to host those modes they felt they might be too spread out for regular Deathmatch, but mostly it feels like the game put most of its multiplayer efforts into the online mode that the PlayStation 2 version can no longer access.
THE VERDICT: While Warhammer 40,000: Fire Warrior’s plot is devoted to providing new places and enemies to face, that functional design ends up its downfall. The simplistic shooter the game begins as slowly picks up some steam as new enemy types and weapons start to encourage experimentation and differing approaches rather than the raw efficiency of automatics, but then a big twist brings in new villains who are too strong for anyone’s good. Firefights become about using your incredibly powerful rifle to hopefully instantly kill them before they instantly kill you, and even the foes that do require more work than that still are best handled with the Rail Rifle or performing strange tricks as survival becomes hard to ensure otherwise. The meager multiplayer options won’t pull it out of the hole either, so unfortunately the work of the Tau Fire Warrior becomes best known for its bad back end rather than that promising midsection it squanders.
And so, I give Warhammer 40,000: Fire Warrior for PlayStation 2…
A BAD rating. Making a first-person shooter get progressively harder is not a bad thing and the idea of making late game foes much harder to take down is one with promise, but rather than asking the player to take interesting strategic approaches to combat, it comes down to making sure you shoot your Rail Rifle at the right time so you’re not stuck waiting for it to be ready again. The forces of Chaos joining the picture is a great idea for adding an injection of freshness right at the point of the game where the options available to you were starting to grow, but their design squanders most of what makes a shooter appealing. You can’t utilize the diverse weaponry if it’s going to get you killed, and having good aim won’t avail you much if foes are popping into existence and firing before you can really adjust to their presence. Thankfully this back half isn’t so bad that it becomes grueling to push through, although more checkpoints would certainly make its worst moments more tolerable as you can hopefully move the gauntlets of kill-or-be-killed coin flips along at a better pace. Really though, the obvious improvement would to be to tone down the power of Chaos marines and the like, and the game does still manage some rooms or foes in the later levels that do give you chance to have a fair fight with the foes you almost always have to fight with bland efficiency otherwise. It’s odd that the multiplayer had the chance to dodge the game’s main issue with how weapons and enemy design’s intertwine, but by limiting it so much it’s hard to stay invested in the offline offerings and that potential ends up squandered as well.
I won’t say that Warhammer 40,000: Fire Warrior tainted my opinion of the franchise, but that’s mostly because it’s not telling a big story that changed my opinion on the lore and the problems with foes like the Chaos faction or the Imperium were almost entirely from the perspective of game balance. It’s possible the tabletop game has its own issues with those of course, but the gunplay here is a fairly easy to spot case of the guns and enemies not being designed to work in tandem with each other. Better ammo distribution, tweaked stats on the strongest foes and the Rail Rifle, and other little adjustments could do a lot for making this a tighter solo experience, but instead, the Fire Warrior’s firefights fizzle out shortly after they started to really get interesting.