W40K: Inquisitor-Martyr - Review @ PC Gamer

PC Gamer reviewed Warhammer 40,000: Inquisitor—Martyr:

Warhammer 40,000: Inquisitor—Martyr review

Warhammer 40,000: Inquisitor—Martyr, which I am going to just call 'Martyr' from now on if that's cool with you, is a rare action-RPG set in the 40K universe. It seems odd nobody's done 'Warhammer plus Diablo' before now, but that's what Martyr is. 

The inquisitors are 40K's secret police who investigate heresy, and an odd choice for a game of killstreaks and loot rather than mystery and interrogations. You choose from three flavors of inquisitor—crusader, psyker, and assassin mapping onto warrior, wizard, and rogue—and then plunge into a giant spaceship monastery called the Martyr which has been taken over by cultists and daemons.

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Actually, there's a lot you have to play for 10 or 20 hours to see, whether it's systems like the underused moral choices, of which there are only a few in the entire campaign, or the vehicle sections that let you drive a tank and a mech. In some investigations I got to make decisions that altered missions like whether to hire hackers or psychics to scope out an underhive before going in, but too rarely. All this cool stuff is used and tossed aside, and to get to it you have to fight a lot of samey enemies in dark corridors where the camera won't show you what's going on.

It's frustrating because when it's good it really is good. There's a cover system that feels right when you're hunkered down with a rifle lining up an aimed shot, which involves a targeting system like a spinning roulette wheel, which stops on the body part that wins a bullet. Pillars and other bits of level furniture fall to pieces once the bolter rounds start flying. They patched the jetpack and now it's a proper whooshy slamdunk. Everything's technogothic, with automated doors and even your storage locker having the human faces of lobotomized criminals or clones who've been cyborgized into service.

There's a quote in the 40K books that goes, "The universe is a big place, and whatever happens, you will not be missed." That's what Martyr makes me think of. A big universe of stuff, but spread so thin the good bits are easy to miss.

Score: 59/100