Warhammer 40,000: Inquisitor – Martyr Review

Too inquisitive?

Warhammer 40k Inquisitor Martyr has been in early access for some time, and initial reports from this lengthily-titled Games Workshop product weren’t exactly super positive. But does the finished product live up to some of the promising early trailers?

Story:

Inquisitor Martyr makes good use of the 40K license, with a pretty epic start to the storyline as you come across the floating carcass of the Martyr, a huge Imperial spaceship which was thought lost to space. But when you land, you not only find that the ship’s inhabitants are still there, but are now chaos worshippers, and nor is the ship the drifting hulk you thought it was. Queue a race across the galaxy to stop the ship…

Gameplay:

The game takes inspiration from Diablo and other action RPG games, with a top-down view, numerous abilities and a strong focus on levelling up and loot. Unlikely Diablo 3 though, there is a strong focus on individual missions rather than the somewhat more linear story path of Blizzard’s most recent attempt at the genre. The missions themselves are also pretty short, with most taking somewhere between 10-20 minutes.

There are also often objectives to complete, including some secondary ones which can be discovered along the way. On top of that, there are often optional clues to find which can even span multiple missions and systems, which provide further rewards if you are able to complete every single element. Whilst some enemies will drop loot, the game also has a loot box element where you are awarded new equipment for completing each mission. On top of the story missions, there are a huge range of optional missions in every sector which will provide additional rewards and experience. Each of these has a suggested difficulty level based on the overall power of your equipment (similar to the system in Destiny), which means there’s an almost overwhelming amount of content in the game.

Unfortunately, the loot boxes are one of the first problems (and it’s not even the one you’re thinking of!). There’s no need (nor any way I can see) to pump in real money; the problem is that there are very limited weapons. When you’re trying to compare 200 identical looking autoguns of varying colours, stats and powers, you quickly realise that a) the weapon design and naming is a bit dull and b) there simply aren’t enough weapon types. It’s the latter point that then leads into the next major flaw.

There’s only three character classes, and a few weapon types, which means that combat gets very samey, very quickly. The abilities are generally all variants of the same thing. With the autogun, you get the choice of: shoot things, shoot things quicker, or shoot more slowly whilst also backing away from the target. From that perspective, it means that things get quite stale quite quickly, despite the fact there’s plenty of interesting missions to play through, and a generous amount of content to boot.