I'm going to be honest, doing a quick playthrough of the first few hours of Warhammer 40,000 Inquisitor Martyr was a bit difficult. If only because simply relaying the title to my wife took a good chunk of my set aside playtime....
Anyway, dumb bits aside, I actually found this game to be a perfect candidate for the First Six Hours time constraint nature. Martyr is a pretty standard action-RPG, and evidently the first of the genre in the lexicon of the Warhammer mythos. I'll be honest, I have absolutely no experience with this deeply lore-built franchise, but I also didn't find that to be a hindrance to my enjoyment of the game. The gameplay is pretty typical to the genre: top-down, isometric in appearance, murdering mobs with weapons and magic-like skills, collecting loot and clearing essentially dungeon floors.
Sure, I didn't understand nearly every other word in the computer logs I was reading, but I got the vibe of this franchise pretty quick. It's metal as hell, full of giblets and dark moody atmosphere. Every characters' line read is aggressive, even when it's just informative. The soldiers have shoulder pads that would make Marcus Fenix feel insecure, the women are murder dominatrixes with body length ponytails. The protagonist's home base ship is adorned with skulls, and humans are sacrificed to tech gods living inside and controlling space ships. To a layman, it is a little incomprehensible, but a lot awesome nonetheless.
I actually really find the setting to be a huge draw with this title. The esoteric sci-fi inquisition motif is very unique to the ARPG genre. There are demon gods and such in games like Diablo, there's sci-fi in XCOM, but there's an interesting combination of the two at play here that makes unraveling the bizarre machinations of this world a nice drive to move forward.
The gameplay itself keeps that flowing along nicely as well. As I said its pretty standard hack and slash with hotkey skills type gameplay, but it also features a nice collection of firearms for a delightful variety of ranged and close combat, that are quite fun to experiment with. At the end of a set of levels, you get set in a mini tower-defense type segment as well. You get a couple of AI characters to set facing doors, set up a couple of minefields, and then take on a few waves of baddies in a delightfully frantic breaking up of the standard corridor running gorefest. It was a welcome addition to big bosses and regular combat.
You get your choice of three different classes, Crusader (typical tank type), Psyker (your mage equivalent), and Assassin (pretty much an assassin), and they each feature their own subclasses, mix/matching and balancing close and long-range styles of combat. But just like its unique setting, it also tweaks the classes a bit from what we usually expect. The tank class can have movement speed raised making a real locomotive beast instead of a sluggish oaf. The Psyker uses fascinating psionic powers as opposed to traditional magic. The assassin can be silent and invisible while packing a shotgun for explosive reveals. It all keeps things fresher while not being overly complicated.
The simplicity of certain elements really gave this title an edge for the unique notion of time crunches in games. The levels are fast and fun, taking only a few minutes to feel like you're actually moving forward. There is a pretty deep seeming skill tree for each class but isn't so big that you're having to scour spreadsheets or min/maxing in the first hour of every play session. The way leveling up rolls out and the things that are being boosted by taking passive skills make it very easy to focus your character as you'd like. Also, the loot isn't overwhelming. You receive just enough stuff to feel rewarded and get that dopamine hit, but not so much that you're comparing fifteen different shotguns before you can even move to the next room. It's very conducive for just jumping in and blowing through some murder-y fun within just a couple of hours, with each chapter split into multiple quick to digest areas.
As with most things, there are some negatives here though. One primary one for me is the co-op. Now, in this day and age, I can't really complain that a game features couch co-op, but Martyr handles it in the worst way. Playe- two can choose from twelve different characters, each representing the main classes and their subclasses, but they cannot gain new items or experience points, cannot talk to NPCs, cannot save any of their progress. They're basically just back up, sharing the level with the first player. It is serviceable but is an outdated method that really does not allow the second player an ability to connect to their character and to an extension, the game itself.
There's a bit of random jank as well. NPC talking heads are pretty last-gen looking, some non-gameplay moments are missing sound effects, and the textures would not load on the character inventory screen at times. It's all little stuff, and none of it was game-breaking at all, but it is there. This game does feel like a budget title or a last-gen port at times, but when the game is actually playing, those issues are not at all deal breakers in my opinion. That being said though it wasn't a bug. but a huge annoyance: there is absolutely no alert to the player when they select "restart" or are using the Space Map for level select. You accidentally hit one of those, and you're restarting, no questions asked. Just something to remain aware of.
At the end of the day though, even my biggest complaints couldn't be beaten by the value of this title at the moment. Martyr is currently being offered as part of the Xbox Games With Gold program and is free for players who currently have an Xbox Gold account. For free, you really can't beat a game like this. Fully realized, though not overly complicated ARPG that can be enjoyed in little bits, with a unique backdrop, and even couch co-op if you don't mind player-two just being a tag along. Who can say no to cultist giblets in space?