Neocore Games and Games Workshop’s Warhammer 40,000: Inquisitor – Martyr, has officially launched on Steam. The Hungarian developers have been focusing all their time and attention on the isometric, hack-and-slash title that takes the Diablo-style gameplay motif and slaps it into the Warhammer 40,000 universe.
The game was originally supposed to be released on May 11th last month. Neocore had been working on the title consistently during the Early Access phase in order to iron out some of the kinks and get it working in proper order. It did hit a slight snag and was then delayed to June 5th.
Now the game is completely available over on the Steam store for $49.99. During the first week of being on sale you can get it for 10% off for only $44.99.
It features a traditional Action-RPG experience, where players will battle across various terrain against the forces that stand in opposition to the Imperium of Man. You’ll need to venture across the Caligari Sector with up to three other friends, upgrading your character, defeating bosses, and unlocking new skills across different character classes, each with three different sub-specializations.
While the game seems like the kind of prayer being answered by Warhammer fans who wanted a Diablo-style game, the launch hasn’t quite gone over as well as some may have expected.
There’s been some issues with the servers being able to handle the load, which in turn has caused a lot of people to forfeit being able to play the game at all.
Neocore issued an apology explaining what went wrong and how they plan on fixing it, writing…
“First of all, we are terribly sorry for the server issues. It was a combination of complex issues, but it was mainly the global chat that overloaded the servers. We have temporarily disabled global chat to solve this issue so everyone is able to play at least (Party chat, etc. will continue to operate). Of course, this is a temporary solution, expect a full update solving the issue completely.”
This didn’t sit well with the community, who was forced to deal with the always-on DRM even while wanting to play the single-player portion of the game.
In fact, this is shades of the Diablo III launch all over again, which also had always-on DRM that also prevented people from playing the single-player portion of the game due to server issues.
The reviews right now seem to show a lot of negative feedback toward the game coming out of Early Access a little too early, and for the server issues hampering gameplay. The very positive rating Warhammer 40,000 Inquisitor – Martyr had just ahead of its release has now soured down to a mixed rating.
On the upside, a lot of the negative reviews are actually borderline positive. Many gamers note that there’s still a lot of potential for Warhammer 40,000 Inquisitor – Martyr and Neocore just needs to fix up some of the gameplay pacing, some of the bugs and performance issues (some are reporting the game drops down to 20fps on occasion) and get a handle on the always-on DRM (or remove it). Maybe once all these things are settled the user review scores will go back to being positive.
Until then, if you were interested in the game, it might be best to wait for the updates and patches to roll out first before diving in.
