Warhammer 40000: Fire Warrior was a game I owned many years
ago on the PlayStation 2. I enjoyed it at the time, but I got to a certain
point and got stuck, never played it again and then foolishly traded it in.
When I saw it was available on GOG, I bought it and I have finally gotten
around to beating it…
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Near the start of the game in a typical
war-torn 40K battleground... |
Fire Warrior is a first-person shooter set in the Warhammer
40000 universe, where you control the titular Fire Warrior – a Tau soldier of
the Fire Caste. On your first active mission, you are aiming to rescue an
Ethereal from an Imperial governor, but later you get caught up in a plot to
unleash the forces of Chaos upon the unsuspecting galaxy once more. Throughout
your journey, you engage in a ship battle, make uneasy alliances with the Space
Marines, blow up a Titan and confront the forces of Chaos in their rawest
form...
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The muzzle flare from the Autogun takes up
more or less the whole field of view... |
So, is Fire Warrior any good? Sort of. It was entertaining
enough. But arguably the most interesting part of the game is comparing it to
what was happening with First-Person Shooters at the time. Gaming was in its
sixth generation of consoles, and with that came some smatterings of competence
in 3D gaming after a wonky start on the previous generation. Controls for FPS
games were on their way to being standardised, multiplayer functionality was
creeping in (though it was far from usual for the PS2 in the UK, since
broadband was only just starting to be used domestically,) and even the Sci-fi
games were aiming for the more realistically proportioned arsenal of only two
weapons at a time, rather than whatever you could carry. Leading the charge was
Microsoft’s Halo: Combat Evolved, and many of the mechanics of that game were
borrowed for Fire Warrior, including the limited weapons, and a personal shield
that would protect you for a short while and recharge if you could avoid fire
for a few seconds. In that respect, Fire Warrior was definitely chasing trends
rather than setting them, but Kuju chose the right part of the 40K lore to make
the game from – the Tau. At that point, the Tau were new to the 40K universe,
having been released not even two years before, so there was no reason to
suggest they could not use the shield, or pick up other weapons and use them if
they so choose – they had a blank canvas to design the mechanics of the game.
It looked like it could potentially be a contender to Microsoft’s sci-fi
shooter.
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It had multiplayer as well, but let's not pretend
that's worth talking about nearly two decades later... |
Well, that didn’t happen, largely because Fire Warrior is
nowhere near as good as Halo. The plot fit the 40K lore well enough but was of
no surprise to anyone who had been following the universe for any length of
time. The shooting was OK at best, but the Imperial Guard (as they were at the
time) took far too many hits before going down, and the Space Marines and Chaos
forces were brutally hard to deal with. The guns did what they were supposed to
do, though with a surprising lack of punch from the Tau weapons, and the Bolter
which handled more like a rocket launcher than anything else. The graphics were
lacklustre, even for the time, though the sound was handled surprisingly well.
And the level design, while functional for the most part, had some wild
variations in checkpoint placement and areas of cheap deaths. Additionally, the
version I played on PC was not without a few bugs.
With that having been said, I enjoyed the game. I’ve always
enjoyed the 40K universe so I’m usually willing to give the flaws in any game
that represents it a free pass. It’s short enough that it doesn’t outstay its
welcome, and the difficulty of the enemies can make for some truly thrilling
battles in the right places. It’s an entertaining game to play, to experience
the shooters of the time and their evolution into what we know now – but with Fire
Warrior’s contemporaries outdistancing it, and many developments improving
quality of life since then, I would struggle to recommend this to all but the
most curious of 40K-based video game collectors.
Final Score: 2/5: If you're sure.
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