Warhammer 40,000: Fire Warrior (PlayStation 2)

Reviewed by Brett Todd
Review date: 12/01/03
Release date: 11/17/03

Warhammer 40,000 has long deserved a shooter. A veritable cult has grown up around Games Workshop's combat miniatures franchise over the past two decades. Popularity aside, the gritty 41st century universe "where there is only war" is a perfect fit for first-person action. It would be hard to mess up a game that features forces like the Imperium, Dark Eldar, Orks, and Necrons, who are all eternally locked in battle. Yet that's pretty much what Kuju Entertainment has done. The British developer best known for 2001's Microsoft Train Simulator has exchanged the depth and dynamism of the Games Workshop franchise for a shooter-by-numbers approach in Warhammer 40,000: Fire Warrior. Intense in spots, Fire Warrior carries little of the punch found in the tabletop game due to a positively antediluvian shoot-'em-up design and lots of key hunts.

The design never gets beyond ideas that have been kicking around since Wolfenstein 3D and Doom.

The design never gets beyond ideas that have been kicking around since Wolfenstein 3D and Doom, despite a Halo-esque rechargeable shield, a two-weapon restriction, and a story that turns Warhammer gaming on its head. Instead of playing the usual Imperium space marine, you take the role of Kais, a Tau warrior who takes on the Imperium. This changed focus is somewhat reminiscent of Warhammer 40,000: Rites of War, a 1999 PC wargame where you led the Eldar against the Imperium. At any rate, those who are familiar with the source material will no doubt appreciate the opportunity to venture off the beaten path. More-casual fans, whose main exposure to Warhammer 40,000 comes from playing the Space Hulk tabletop game and its old PlayStation and PC adaptations, might be disappointed at not being able to step into space marine armor.

Not that this really matters much either way, as the plot in Fire Warrior is so hopelessly muddled that it's hard to tell what's going on until you reach the midway point of the game. Instead of easing you into the story, Kuju immerses you in a war with absolutely no setup at all. You get only a brief, chaotic cutscene that shows the Imperium attacking a Tau settlement, and then you're charging through World War I-style trenches that have been excerpted from All Quiet on the Western Front. You have to know a fair bit about the Warhammer universe to make heads or tails out of what's going on here, although if you can figure out that the bad guys are the ones shooting at you, you can get by.

You get only a brief, chaotic cutscene that shows the Imperium attacking a Tau settlement, and then you're charging through World War I-style trenches.

So there isn't much to figure out. Each of the 21 fairly substantial levels (expect around 15 hours of play, which makes the game longer than the average console shooter these days) runs on tracks, with the final map being as straightforward as the obstacle course and firing range tutorials in the first map. You follow trenches, administration building hallways, ship passages, prison cell blocks, and other narrow corridors from one locked door to another. You only pause to take blue, orange, and magenta keys from corpses. (These keys actually look like those neon glowsticks that give kids wave around on the Fourth of July. Come on--colored keys? In 2003?). Every area carries with it a shut-in vibe, as if the developers were suffering from agoraphobia. Even during the few moments outside, you're surrounded by earthen walls that your soldier can usually stretch out and touch with both hands.