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Review:

16th October 2003:
Warhammer 40,000: Fire Warrior
THQ takes the table-top strategy game of Warhammer and translates it into an action-packed first-person shooter for the PlayStation 2 and PC, but does it match the quality of other modern FPSs?
Posted by Marc Hull - PC,PlayStation 2 - UK and Europe

For those of you who were busy doing active things like rugby or football throughout your school days rather than shutting yourself away in a dimly-lit room with some friends playing table-top games, Warhammer is a strategy game devised by Games Workshop where you lay out a playfield on a table and then move small models (called miniatures) of various fantasy characters about it in an attempt to obliterate your friend's armies. Having never participated in one of these battles myself (ashemedly not because of playing sport but just because I was too lazy to do anything), I have to admit that I know shockingly little about them. However, I do know that they managed to spin-off a few videogames, most of which have concentrated on the strategy side of the game and therefore have usually been only for PC gamers. There are a lot of console gamers out there, though, who also play Games Workshop games, and THQ have decided to address this with Fire Warrior for the PlayStation 2.

Being based upon Warhammer 40,000, the futuristic version of Warhammer, Fire Warrior features space-ships, plasma weapons and high-tech environments as opposed to orcs and wizards, and this suits its first-person-shooter based gameplay well. Weirdly, unlike other shooters such as Half-Life or Halo where you're trying to save mankind, in Fire Warrior you play the part of a warrior for an alien race called the Tau who are fighting against the humans. However, don't think that you'll hate the game's enemies any less than in any other game - right from the first level where you're thrown straight into a massive battle-field and have to pick your way through trenches while human tanks trundle about above you'll realise just how evil we are; well, in the game anyway. The higher-ranking human generals are particularly hateable - with complete disregard for their own safety, they'll charge at you with chain-saws in an attempt to carve up your face - nasty!

As usual, when a new first-person shooter hits the market it's easy to draw comparisons with every other title in the genre, but Fire Warrior stands particularly close to one specific game; namely Bungie's masterpiece, Halo. As a young Tau warrior called Kais, you run about the game's various levels in a battle-suit which has a regenerating shield, similar to the Master Chief's in that the first few hits from the enemy will simply depleat the shield a bit, while subsequent batterings will remove chunks of your actual health, which can only be replenished by medi-kits dotted around the levels. You can also only carry two weapons - one of which is fixed and one that can be swapped with other weapons that your enemies may have dropped. Each weapon has a primary and secondary fire function, although for some guns both are pretty similar, with one usually exerting continuous fire and the other being a somewhat useless burst-fire function, and of course you can also throw any grenades that you may have picked up with a simple tap of the triangle button.

However, whereas Halo's levels were mainly large, expansive areas, Fire Warrior concentrates more on smaller, maze-like environments. Often completing a mission isn't a simple 'move from A to B' affair, but instead may require backtracking to find objects needed to advance. Unfortunately, all too often these objects are simply differently-coloured keys that are required to open their respectively-coloured doors, which produces gameplay that has come little further than the original Doom. Fortunately, there are also some objectives that require more than key-finding, such as having to place charges to clear debris and open up a new pathway, or protecting one of your fellow Tau. The game's storyline is also advanced mid-level by communication with various allies and even intercepted messages between your Imperial opponents, which helps retain concentration levels a bit.

In fact, one of Fire Warrior's strong points is its length, with over 21 levels to be completed, most of which will take even experienced players a fair amount of time to complete. Even once you've finished the game, there are still three difficulty settings and additional tasks to be completed, for which medals are awarded and bonus modes unlocked. All-in-all, while the story may take place over a single day, it'll take you much longer to find all that this title has to offer! This is further extended by the multiplayer mode, which allows for both 8-player online deathmatches and 4-player split-screen bouts set across unique maps.

However, whether you'll actually complete the game or not is another matter, since one of the areas where it doesn't quite match the likes of Half-Life and Halo, or even THQ's other big FPS, Red Faction, is in its combat. With most of the weapons being electricity-based, so that you simply see a ball of light shoot towards your foes, you just don't get the same kind of feeling from firing off a round in Fire Warrior as you do in other games. It seems to be mainly down to a combination of the sound-effects, lack of recoil and eventual result of you firing - none of which match the experience of firing Halo's humble pistol.

The enemies you come across also seem to be the cause of most of the problems, with both variety and artificial intelligence being merely average. Although the press information we got with the game boasts 22 different enemy characters to fight, most of the time you'll only come across two, and none seem to act with much of a will to live. Quite often you'll find yourself in a room full of enemies that will simply stand there and shoot at you, or run towards you, simply to try and take off some of your health. There's hardly any retreating or hiding behind cover; in fact, they all seem to value killing you more than their own lives. Your weapons hardly seem to affect them either; they will take hits and hardly be stunned until their last bit of health has drained away when they'll sway about a bit before finally collapsing to the floor. This makes combat somewhat limited, with most battles simply requiring you to run from side-to-side, firing at an enemy for half-a-minute until he keels over, then moving onto the next. Multiply this a thousand times, and you've basically summed up all the fighting in the entire game, bar a few slightly-more-exciting boss battles.

Fortunately, the game's graphics and music fare quite well; each of the cut-scenes are accompanied by a stirring orchestral score and each of the game's environments is nicely detailed with usually a lot going on around you. As you might expect, there are plenty of nice lighting effects for weapon-fire and explosions, and the levels rarely degenerate to simply a mass of corridors; usually each room has some interesting and unique features in it.

Overall, despite not matching up to some of the well-known first-person shooters available at the moment, Fire Warrior is still a reasonable game that hardcore first-person shooter fans will probably enjoy, but it doesn't bring anything new and innovative to the genre. If you're looking for a good shooter for your PlayStation 2 then I'd probably suggest getting TimeSplitters 2 and Red Faction 2 first, but if you've already got those then this is probably worth taking a look at.

Marc Hull

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Review Summary:

Fire Warrior is a huge first-person shooter set in the Warhammer 40,000 universe that will probably be a must-buy for Games Workshop fans. However, for the rest of us this is a good attempt, but doesn't quite match the standards set by the recent group of shooters.

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Warhammer 40,000: Fire Warrior
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