Warhammer 40,000: Boltgun

Auroch Digital had one job: make the boltgun feel like a boltgun. Not a rifle. Not a hitscan pea-shooter with a 40K skin stapled to it. A bolt is a self-propelled, mass-reactive .75-calibre rocket that detonates inside the target, and for thirty years of licensed games that fact has been rendered as a slightly loud assault rifle. Boltgun renders it as a wood-chipper.

Released 23 May 2023 under Focus Entertainment, this is a deliberate 1990s pastiche — sprite enemies, chunky pixel gore, no cover system, no regenerating health, no reload button worth speaking of. You play Malum Caedo, an Ultramarine Sternguard veteran dispatched to the forge world of Graia to secure a power-source shard before Chaos does. That sentence is essentially the entire narrative. The game knows it, and doesn’t pretend otherwise.

The positioning is shrewd. The boomer-shooter revival — Dusk, Amid Evil, Ion Fury, Prodeus — spent five years proving there was an audience for fast, arena-driven, arcade-brained FPS design. Boltgun is the first to bolt that audience onto Games Workshop’s licensing juggernaut, and the fit is almost suspiciously perfect. 40K’s aesthetic was born in the era Boltgun is imitating. Gothic cathedral-bastions, skull motifs on everything, a colour palette of rust and blood: this is material that wants to be rendered in low-resolution sprites.

The reception splits along a predictable fault line, with critics landing around a Metacritic 75. That split is the review in miniature. Judged on the feel of the weapons and the fantasy of being a walking tank, the game delivers relentlessly. Judged as a piece of level design across a full campaign, it runs out of ideas well before it runs out of levels. Both readings are correct, and which one dominates depends almost entirely on how much patience there is for corridors.

• The Arsenal: Boltgun, shotgun, heavy bolter, plasma gun, meltagun, grav-cannon and vengeance launcher, plus grenades and a chainsword. Each occupies a genuinely distinct tactical niche — the grav-cannon crowd-clears, the melta deletes elites, the heavy bolter is a hose.
• Chainsword Executions: Melee kills restore health. This is the single best design decision in the game, converting the classic Doom Eternal aggression-as-healing loop into something that feels native to 40K rather than borrowed.
• No Cover, No Regen: Health and armour come from floor pickups only. Movement is your defence: strafing, dashing, bunny-hopping, circle-strafing. The game does not let you turtle.
• Arena Encounters with Secrets: Levels wind through cathedrals, corrupted canyons and industrial furnaces, seeding hidden upgrades, armour caches and lore fragments off the critical path.
• Free Horde Mode: Endless wave survival, added post-launch at no cost — a real value-add rather than a storefront tick-box.
• Forges of Corruption: A paid five-level campaign expansion for players who want more after the credits.

The Gameplay Loop

Boltgun’s core loop is a metronome: enter arena, doors lock, kill everything, doors open, explore for secrets, repeat. It’s the oldest structure in the genre and Auroch executes the combat half with real craft.

The critical mechanic is the interplay between armour and aggression. Armour depletes before health and is dropped generously by fallen enemies, which means the game is constantly rewarding pushing forward into the mess rather than retreating from it. Add the health-restoring chainsword execution and you have a system that punishes caution structurally, not just rhetorically. Turtling in a corner is death; charging a Chaos Space Marine, sawing him in half and absorbing the armour shards from his squadmates is survival. That is the fantasy of a Space Marine expressed as a mechanic, and it’s the reason the combat works.

Weapon design is where Boltgun earns its reputation. The boltgun is built around a low, percussive report and a visible impact delay — bolts travel, then detonate — and cultists are meant to come apart into a pixel confetti of viscera. The shotgun is the standard boomer-shooter workhorse. The heavy bolter trades mobility for a sustained wall of fire. The grav-cannon flattens tight clusters. The vengeance launcher handles the bigger daemonic threats. Weapon swapping is designed to be fast enough that mid-fight juggling is the expected play pattern rather than an advanced technique, and the ammo economy is generous enough that experimenting doesn’t read as a resource gamble.

The Level Design Problem

Here’s where it comes apart. Boltgun’s arenas are strong. Boltgun’s maps are not.

The stages between arenas are long, architecturally repetitive, and navigationally hostile: brown-and-grey industrial geometry that looks identical from four angles, hunting a switch or a keyed door, with no map, no meaningful waypoint, and level geometry that offers few distinguishing landmarks. This is the most common criticism of the game and it is entirely deserved. The 1990s aesthetic is a homage; the 1990s wayfinding is an inherited defect, and reviving it in 2023 wasn’t a choice worth making.

The problem compounds because enemy and environment variety thin out badly in the back half. Chaos Cultists, Bloodletters, Nurglings and Chaos Space Marines are a solid roster for six hours. They’re a strained one across the full campaign, particularly when the game’s answer to escalation is usually “the same encounter, but more of it, in a bigger room.” By the final act, players are fighting compositions solved four levels earlier, in environments that are hard to navigate in the first place.

Pacing and Checkpoints

Checkpointing is uneven by design. Some arenas are built to drop players back a few seconds before the fight; others rewind through a chunk of already-solved traversal, which turns a death into a chore rather than a retry. In a game built on high-speed, high-failure combat, checkpoint granularity is not a minor detail — it’s the difference between a loop that reads as tight and one that reads as punitive. Boltgun’s structure lands on the wrong side of that line more often than a game this fast should.

Story

There isn’t one, functionally. Malum Caedo grunts, the plot supplies a reason to be in each location, and lore fragments hide in corners for the faithful. As framing, it’s adequate. As a reason to keep playing, it contributes nothing — which matters more than it sounds, because when the level design stalls, there’s no narrative pull to carry players through the flat stretch.

The art direction is the game’s second-best asset after the guns. Boltgun uses the now-standard 2.5D hybrid: 3D level geometry with sprite-based enemies and effects, running at a deliberately low internal resolution. Crucially, it’s tastefully low-res — the pixel density is consistent, the palette is disciplined, and the gore is rendered with an obvious, gleeful specificity. Blood pools, chunks scatter, walls stain. It reads as authentic to the era rather than as a filter applied after the fact.

The sound design deserves separate credit. Weapons are mixed loud and low, with real bass weight, and the industrial-metal score does exactly what it needs to. Headphones or a decent set of speakers are the way to hear it; a laptop’s built-in drivers throw away half of what makes the shooting satisfying.

A 2D-hybrid game of this scope is light on hardware by design, and the modest rendering budget should run comfortably on modest machines. The UI is clean, legible and stays out of the way, which is more than the era it’s imitating usually managed.

Steam / PC is the definitive version, and it isn’t close. Boltgun’s design assumes mouse precision: fast turns, mid-air target tracking, snap weapon-swapping via number keys. High-refresh displays and unlocked framerates flatter a game built entirely on movement. If there’s a choice, make it here.

Nintendo Switch is a competent port with real compromises. The lower resolution target softens an art style that was already low-res, which is a harder trade than it sounds — pixel art degrades poorly when scaled and blurred, and detail that reads as intentional on a monitor can read as muddy on a handheld panel. More significant is the input change. Twin-stick aiming on a game demanding constant circle-strafing and mid-fight target switching adds friction the mouse version simply doesn’t have. Gyro helps if it’s used. It doesn’t close the gap. The Switch version is a legitimate way to play Boltgun on a plane; it is not the way to experience what makes Boltgun good.

Worth clearing up: there is no mobile version. No iOS listing, no Google Play listing. The upcoming Warhammer 40,000: Boltgun Boom from Nitro Games is a separate product from a separate studio and shares nothing with this game but a name.

Boltgun is a game with one extraordinary strength and one persistent, unignorable weakness, and it never resolves the tension between them. The moment-to-moment shooting is superb on paper and in design — weighty, fast, brutally readable, and more faithful to what a Space Marine is supposed to feel like than any prestige-budget 40K title has managed. Auroch Digital understood the assignment at the mechanical level completely.

What the studio didn’t do is design levels worthy of that combat. The campaign is roughly two hours longer than its ideas support, and the stretches between arenas too often degrade into architectural guesswork through interchangeable brown corridors. That’s the gap the Metacritic 75 reflects: the fights are memorable, the connective tissue is not.

At $21.99 the content is generous, but this is a hard recommendation for most people. For boomer-shooter devotees and 40K loyalists — on PC, with patience for getting lost — it’s one of the more satisfying shooters of the revival. Just don’t expect the map to help.