Warhammer 40,000: Fire Warrior centers on a young Fire Warrior by the name of Kais. Kais has been selected to be part of a force sent out to rescue the Ethereal Ko'vash, who have been kidnapped by Imperial Forces. Unfortunately for Kais, what was supposed to be a routine mission goes horribly wrong, and that's where you come in. Battle through 17 different levels to help Kais and his friends rescue the Ethereal Ko'vash, and teach the Imperial forces a lesson while you're at it.
Instead of opting to go with the series' traditional style of RPG gameplay, Kuju and THQ have chosen to make Warhammer 40,000 into a first person shooter. While the story is fairly minimal, Fire Warrior doesn’t hold back on the action. During the demo level, Kais is constantly under fire, and needs to use the environment to protect himself during firefights. Levels are designed with this in mind, so there are wide open areas for large fights, and narrow areas for smaller fights, but you'll always be ducking and weaving between the environments trying to get in a good shot on your enemy. Armament in the demo is limited to just a few laser rifles and grenades, which feel a little too stock standard for our liking, but we’re promised more than 15 weapons in the full version. At the moment, enemies are all too similar, and feature bogus AI, but we’re hoping this is worked out before the game ships. Hit zones are fairly responsive in comparison to other recent first person shooter efforts, which was fairly pleasing to see.
The real problem with the first person shooter genre on the Playstation 2 doesn’t lie within the quality of the games, but rather the pad that you're playing with. The Dual Shock, while being a good all purpose pad, has analog sticks which are far too sensitive for any sort of precision aiming. Fire Warrior does employ an auto aim mode to help combat this, and it works fairly well. If you're a manual aim loyalist, but hate the Dual Shock, you'll just have to settle for the later release of the PC version.
Fire Warrior is rather slick when it comes to visual presentation. The environments vary in size, and are packing some great textures as well as producing an enveloping atmosphere. The character modeling and texturing do leave a little bit to be desired, but you'll either have to make do, or hope they fix it in the final version. Weapon modeling is pretty good, and the weapons produce all the usual fancy special effects. Most importantly, Fire Warrior has a very solid frame rate, something which sets it above the other first person shooters on the Playstation 2.
In its current state, Warhammer 40,000: Fire Warrior looks to be building up to be a fairly solid title. It doesn't really add anything drastically new to the genre, but the game should provide a few solid days worth of blasting when it's released this September. Hopefully the multiplayer and other components we've not been exposed to yet can push this title onto everyone's radar. Warhammer 40,000: Fire Warrior is due to be released on September 19th.
Loading...
