Warhammer 40K Space Hulk: Deathwing - Enhanced Edition is the latest release for this first person shooter in the role of perhaps one of the most badass librarians that I’ve ever seen. Equipped with either gun and blade or something more massive and your first, you’ll be going through dark corridors against hordes of enemies accompanied only by your left and right hand men. It’s a good thing they are there because you’ll be yelling MEDIC often!
I was impressed by a lot of features that Deathwing had to offer. The large environments that you traverse are rife with enemies, blocked doors that you could hack or simply punch REALLY hard to knock it off of its hinges, crumbled passageways and good old fashioned turrets out to blast you into oblivion. Both your starting allies, one designed as your tank and the other being your medic, are useful to have and can be set into positions to maximize your stand against incoming waves of enemies while you wait for something to finish scanning. With all of these features though, Deathwing felt long, slow and sluggish because of the controls and a few of the environmental design choices.
I get that you get put into the role of a massive hulk of a man in a powered armor but you would think that you would move faster. Walking around, especially with the set atmosphere, feels like a horror experience with you just waiting for the next thing to jump out at you, and while it does, it’s not a horror title and there’s no jump scare. It just happens. It often felt like there were two competing ideas that clashed. One was to install a sense of horror that never happens, and the other is a run and gun through a space ship however you simply just moved too damned slow.
In order to run through the environments you really have to hold down on L3 and there’s no way in order to switch it over to a toggle or to change the sensitivity. Often when pressing down to the point of it hurting, my librarian would stop running because it was no longer sensing that I was holding down on the button in order to run. This seriously made things long as you pretty much had to get used to walking around.
The other factor that got to me was that head bobbing as you walk could not be disabled, only reduced. After a while I would get motion sick as things are fine when you’re running but when you’re walking it just got to me. If I can disable it, it’s off. It may be more immersive for some but it should be able to be turned off for those that can’t deal with it. While that issue isn’t the end of the world, as it meant smaller play sessions, the cross hairs for your weapon would not stay still. At all. It was all over the place making aiming, even when zoomed in and highlighting your enemies, an awful experience making it honestly safer to take a spray and pray approach or use a flamethrower. The flamethrower was awesome.
Often my issue with the environments is that everything looks the same. Okay, yes you’re in a decripide space wreck and its dark, but everything looked the same and without the map, I would have been toast. The map features are great but they never actually told you what corridors were crumbled even as you’ve been by making your already long winded detours that much longer if you couldn’t decode the door or punch it off its hinges. This I loved. Tired of being chased down? Enemies keep opening the door? Lock it. Enemies chasing you down and you don’t have time to hack a normal sized door? Slash at it or punch it down. Either is acceptable and both are satisfying ways to go on through.
I really wanted to enjoy my time with Warhammer 40K Space Hulk: Deathwing - Enhanced Edition but some of the design choices just made it seem long and drawn out. Adding in killer load times, and sometimes it wasn’t worth reloading from a previous save but instead starting the mission over because you didn’t get out of the way of a missile turret fast enough.
Game Information
Sony PlayStation 4
Developer(s):
Streum On Studio
Publisher(s):
Focus Home Interactive
Genre(s):
First Person Shooter
Mode(s):
Single Player
Other Platform(s):
PC
Source:
Provided by Publisher
Article by Pierre-Yves
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