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Warhammer 40,000: Kill Team Review for PlayStation 3 (PS3)

Warhammer 40,000: Kill Team Review for PlayStation 3 (PS3)

Basic, Flawed, Repetitive: Perfect for an Ork

The next chapter In the eternal story of the struggle between Space Marine and Ork has come in the form of Warhammer 40,000: Kill Team, and pretty much the entirety of the game is explained by its title. It’s a Warhammer game, and you control a team that kills pretty much everything.

Kill Team is a 3/4 perspective shooter. Sometimes. Other times it’s a top-down shooter, and other times it’s a behind-the-back shooter. If you couldn’t tell by this point, the game has a couple problems with its camera, but I’ll get to that later. It’s a downloadable dual-stick shooter available for the Xbox and PS3 that seems to be built entirely for die-hard Warhammer fans and general lovers of carnage and death.

Warhammer 40,000: Kill Team Screenshot

The story is insultingly simple. A massive Ork Kroozer (yeah, that’s how it’s spelled) is approaching earth, and it’s up to you to board the ship and disable it while slaughtering any Ork that crosses your path. And trust me, a lot of Orks will cross your path. There is no attempt whatsoever to make the game cinematic in any way, shape, or form. In fact, the only tidbits of story you get are through your omnipresent dispatcher that tells you where to go, and splash screens that come up when the game is loading. Even then, the dispatcher provides more hints than story and the splash screens rarely contain text past a few sentences. Simply put, the story of this game is: “Hey, look! Orks! Kill them good!”

Frankly, that’s not all that hard to do because the game is extremely easy. You can choose between several different classes in several different Chapters (factions basically), but they are all basically just variations on characters who are more powerful in melee combat or more powerful at range. You can equip perks which increase your damage, health, special move charge rate, and whatnot, but they never do anything more than make you a bit better at killing Orks than you already are. You can also unlock new weapons to equip to your characters, but these too are generally just the same weapon you had before with a slightly higher damage or fire rate.

Warhammer 40,000: Kill Team Screenshot

During the game you can pick up power-ups that give you things like rapid fire, spread shot, invincibility, health regen, and a bunch of other nifty effects for a limited time. This, combined with the ability to alter and tweak your loadout to your liking, means no two people will necessarily play the same—except that’s a total lie. No matter what Chapter, class, weapon, perk, or power-ups you have, the game always plays exactly the same. You either hammer on the melee button if you are a melee class or point the stick toward the bad guys if you are a ranged class. Then you just watch them die. No skill required, no real challenge, just tons of Orks running directly at the barrel of your gun.

Warhammer 40,000: Kill Team Screenshot

Now, there’s a bit of catharsis to this. Every kill gives you points in a reaffirming retro number pop-up that might remind you of Battletoads. Every Ork dies with a pleasing scream that makes you just want to find more to slaughter. Every shot you fire and every power-up you get fills bars at the bottom of the screen that build up toward unlocking new perks and new abilities, and this just keeps going on and on in a chain of Skinner Box reinforcement that makes you want to keep playing the game (especially if you are playing with a friend).

But then there are the flaws. First of all, it’s nearly impossible to see what you are doing, even with the brightness turned all the way up. The environments are so dark and the enemies blend into it so well that you really can’t tell the difference between a pile of rubble and an Ork that wants to shoot you in the throat.

Warhammer 40,000: Kill Team Screenshot

Second of all, the camera in this game actively hates you for some reason. It will always swing to a position that makes for the absolute worst vantage point for whatever you are currently doing. Sometimes it’s not clear that you can’t advance before surviving a couple waves of enemies. The camera will lock in place, but you’ll still be able to walk off screen, generally into some sort of death trap. Other times you will be forced to walk straight into the camera in order to proceed, which prevents you from seeing the enemies that are just waiting to hack you to bits. It’s endlessly frustrating.

Then, of course, there is the cinematic camera which feels a bit awkward and out of place. Every so often the camera will zoom in to show a slow-motion death scene of one of the Orks you just killed. Unfortunately, you kill Orks by the thousand, and even when the camera zooms in you can’t tell which Ork you killed or why it was important. Even worse, the game keeps moving when the camera does its funky slow-motion thing, and since it’s focused on the enemy and not you, the cinematic effects generally end up hurting you rather than making the game look cool.

Kill Team is a short-lived game. You can blow through it in a mere five hours, and forget it shortly thereafter. You can always waste time with Survival Mode or the online leaderboards, but no matter how you look at it, you’re just not getting a whole lot for your ten-dollar investment. Maybe at five dollars I could see purchasing a shallow game just for the fun of mowing down droves of defenseless enemies, but as it stands, there are better dual-stick shooters out there. Frankly, unless you are a Warhammer nut, this game is an easy one to pass up.

RATING OUT OF 5 RATING DESCRIPTION 2.4 Graphics
The game is too dark, and it is often hard to tell the difference between an enemy and that barrel you just blew up. 3.6 Control
It’s hard to screw up a dual-stick shooter. Two sticks. Shoot. Go! 2.3 Music / Sound FX / Voice Acting
The music is very generic and the voice work outside the narrator is nothing more than random Orkish grunts. 3.0 Play Value
The catharsis is fun, but the game is honestly very shallow. 2.8 Overall Rating – Average
Not an average. See Rating legend below for a final score breakdown.

Review Rating Legend
0.1 – 1.9 = Avoid 2.5 – 2.9 = Average 3.5 – 3.9 = Good 4.5 – 4.9 = Must Buy
2.0 – 2.4 = Poor 3.0 – 3.4 = Fair 4.0 – 4.4 = Great 5.0 = The Best

Game Features:

  • Customize your own personal Space Marine.
  • Unlock perks as you play the game.
  • Team up with a buddy in co-op mode.
  • Compare yourself to the world using online leaderboards.

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