Boltgun delivers a potent power fantasy, but the thrill of being powerful wanes due to a lack of challenge in the mid-to-late game.
What is a power fantasy?
A power fantasy is an imagined scenario in which one imagines being far more powerful than in real life.
They may imagine themselves as a legendary warrior, superhero, ruler, or god.
Video games enable players to engage with such fantasies in the confines of a virtual world. Rather than imagining themselves being powerful, video games render the fantasy for them.
Games have a variety of methods at their disposal to make players feel powerful:
- Enemies can be made easy to kill.
- The player can be made hard to kill.
- Sound and visual design can be fashioned to accentuate the force with which the player acts upon the world; weapons, for example, can be made loud and enemy deaths excessively gory.
- The player’s character can be made to look, speak, and act like a badass.
- The conflict of the game can be made so morally black and white that the player’s willingness to act in the most violent and unsubtle ways possible cannot be impeded by troublesome questions of morality.
What Boltgun Does Right
Boltgun fulfils all these criteria to some degree.
Most video game power fantasies hinder the player’s ability to indulge in the thrill of power by burdening them with complex mechanics and making combat difficult. In such cases, the aesthetic of badassery does much work to deliver the power fantasy to the player.
Boltgun is somewhat unique in that it combines the aesthetic of badassery with gameplay that enables the player to act with the ease of an overwhelmingly powerful being.
You play as a Space Marine, one of the most iconic and powerful types of soldier in the sci-fi genre. Your footsteps thunder with the weight of your body, and you tower over most enemies. You move with blinding speed and leap the height of buildings. Your chainsword cleaves enemies in two, and your boltgun annihilates them in explosions of blood and gore.
The game drops you onto a planet overrun by the forces of chaos. The monsters, demons, and heretics that stand between you and your objective are so comically evil that there is no question of the righteousness of the brutality of your actions.
Your character speaks and acts with the zealotry of a holy warrior of the God-Emperor of Mankind, proclaiming his devotion to the Imperium and sentencing death upon his enemies with every righteous word.
True to the lore, Malem Caedo is a crusading medieval knight taken to a gloriously absurd and technologically advanced extreme. He is an agile two-legged tank, a superhuman fuelled by pure hatred and an unquenchable thirst for slaughter.
For those looking for a power fantasy, playing Boltgun for the first time will be pure bliss. It is a power fantasy in its purest form and a gift for Warhammer 40k fans everywhere.
Unfortunately, as the game goes on, some minor (but only minor) cracks begin to form.
The Descent Into Tedium
Boltgun delivers a fantastic power fantasy experience. Unfortunately, dominating enemies with ease can only engage players for so long. The potency of every experience has an expiration date, and for power fantasies that expiration date tends to be quick.
In Boltgun, most enemies–being of the human or low-level monster sort–die to a single boltgun round. Health, contempt, and ammunition are plentiful; there’s so much of it that I had more trouble avoiding it to make the game more difficult for myself than I had finding it when I needed it. Additionally, powerups make the player even more powerful than they already are, rendering some potentially difficult sequences trivial.
While this gameplay is undoubtedly gratifying, the ease with which you dispatch enemies begins to grow tedious after several hours. The simplicity of the tactics necessary to defeat unthinkingly stationary enemies grows repetitive as you cycle about combat arena after combat arena, mowing down enemies and farming up health and ammunition pickups in almost unthinking motions.
Upping the difficulty unfortunately does not fix this, as the hard setting still leaves you with plenty of health, contempt, and ammo pickups and enemies with braindead AI incapable of tactical decision-making and pitiful damage output.
This tedium is the inevitable consequence of every power fantasy that makes combat easy and not just aesthetic. The player may enjoy the thrill of overwhelming power at first, but they will eventually begin to tire of their pathetic enemies and crave stronger foes or at least ones which require more creative tactics to kill.
Boltgun offers a few such enemies—the madly charging Aspiring Champions and the heavy projectile-tossing Flamers and Plague Toads—but these are too small of a minority. Most enemies merely stand still as you shoot them. The Chaos Marines actually spend more time laughing at you than shooting, resulting in many of them dying before they can fire off a single shot. Apart from the Aspiring Champions and some bosses, enemies deal hardly any damage and are consequently easily dispatched. Even if, in a moment of thoughtlessness, the player is somehow overwhelmed by the high numbers of enemies the game throws at them, health and armour are plentiful and the basic AI with its short-range engagement radius is easily cheesed.
This may be fun for a while, but by the end of chapter 1 the fantasy begins to run its course.
How To Keep The Fantasy Alive
When something is easy, we tend not to want to do it for long. We crave a challenge, something that will force us to learn, adapt, and improve.
This may seem contradictory to the concept of power fantasy. If we are supposed to feel super powerful, wouldn’t making the game harder ruin our illusions?
But making something harder doesn’t mean making it so hard that it becomes genuinely difficult. A game can still be relatively easy even after increasing the challenge.
The key word here is ‘relatively’ because what a new player will find easy will differ from what a player with several hours of experience will find easy.
At the start of a game, players will be unfamiliar with the way a game works. For the game to seem easy to them, it must start very easy.
As they gain more experience, they will become more competent, and what was once easy for them will now seem very easy. It will be so easy that they will quickly tire of it, even if they are looking for a power fantasy.
To keep the game feeling easy, but not too easy, the difficulty must be increased. Even if the difficulty is increased to a level a newcomer would find hard, it would not seem hard to an experienced player.
The experienced player may notice the game is getting harder, but they will also see that they are getting better. The fact that they can handle more formidable threats with the same level of ease will actually make them feel more powerful as their superiority is confirmed by the ease of their success against ever-increasing odds.
Increasing difficulty also forces the player to enact tactics that were previously unnecessary. They will be forced to move more skillfully, shoot more accurately, consume resources more efficiently, and so on.
As a result, they will naturally begin to emulate the powerful character they are roleplaying. No longer clumsily wielding their character’s power, they will start to internalise the skilful behaviour of their character also, rendering the fantasy more complete.
How Boltgun Fails
Boltgun fails (again, only in a minor way) because the game begins very easy (which is fine for a while) and continues to be very easy until the final level, which I’d argue is the only hard one.
In addition, there ceases to be any new enemies about two-thirds of the way through the game, meaning the player stops having to learn anything new. As a result, the gameplay becomes somewhat repetitive and tedious. The thrill of Boltgun’s power fantasy wanes as the gap between the game’s difficulty and the player’s skill widens.
Shortening the game by an hour or two would solve the repetitiveness part, but that would still leave the issue of the gameplay being overly easy.
This is not to say the game doesn’t get harder. It does, but not by much.
As the game progresses, the game throws more enemies at you. By the end, the arenas are swarming with them.
This doesn’t make the game much more difficult, though. Health and contempt are still plentiful. Enemies still stand around or charge at you in straight lines, making them easy to evade. Enemies still have short engagement ranges, meaning you can often back off and shoot at enemies from a distance—not the sort of behaviour that should be encouraged in a power fantasy. And powerups remain game-winning items.
There are a few scenarios in which the game is genuinely difficult and the player’s skill is tested, but they are few and far between.
The greatest difficulty, in my view, is not the enemies themselves but the sheer amount of effects that cover the screen in some late-game arenas: blood, gunfire, explosions, projectiles, magic auras. The sheer amount of stuff on screen makes it difficult to see sometimes, and the lack of feedback from taking damage makes it difficult to know if you’re taking a lot of damage unless you keep glancing at the health counter in the corner of the screen.
As great as Boltgun is (and it is great—my criticism here is only minor), Boltgun could have done more to increase its challenge while preserving and even extending the durability of the power fantasy it offers.
Some solutions include:
- Making enemies deal more damage from the start.
- Reducing health and contempt pickups.
- Making powerups rarer and harder to find.
- Making enemies move more, especially the Chaos Marines who should be capable of manoeuvres similar to your character’s.
- Expanding the range at which enemies can shoot.
- Introducing more enemy types to force the player to adapt to new threats.
- Putting the player in more unusual scenarios
- Reducing ammunition to force the player to fire their weapons more sparingly.
- Tasking the player with more varied objectives that force them to multitask or play the game in unusual ways.
Honestly, Boltgun is so good already that increasing the damage output of all enemies would probably be enough to solve this issue.