The end of this replacement chain though is the Rail Rifle, an incredibly powerful late game tool that can eliminate many enemies in a single well placed shot despite its slow firing rate. The Pulse Rifle is your starter and basically just a sci-fi twist to an automatic, and over the course of the adventure it is tweaked in the form of things like the Pulse Carbine with its grenade launching secondary fire and the minigun-like Burst Cannon. The Tau Fire Warrior can carry two weapons at a time and swap between them as necessary, although it seems that Kais really doesn’t want to abandon the weapons of his people so one slot is almost always devoted to the gradually upgraded Pulse branch of weapons. The area design doesn’t settle into once concept too long even when you’re spending multiple missions in a spaceship or other environment that could get away with being homogeneous, but the stage layouts are let down by the other important elements of a first-person shooter: weapons and enemy design. Despite forward progress often involving gunning down the enemies in your path the mission objectives are usually something like activating the right switches or placing explosives, but some areas do have you facing off with augmented bosses or throwing a bunch of powerful foes at you for a required fight instead. Beginning on the Tau’s Mars-like home planet after it has been militarized with trenches and encampments and moving into interior areas like a prison and the halls of the large spaceships of both factions flying above the planet, there’s an acceptable amount of variety and as you get nearer to the end of the game you start to find more interesting setpieces and mission structures like a level designed around sabotaging a massive enemy war mech while it’s still in the hangar or plunging into a corrupted area that seems almost hellish in design. While the story does hold that one interesting development, most of it is a set of missions given to you by Tau leadership to add context to the next level.
With the human Imperium holding a vital member of the Tau leadership hostage, you begin your work as a Fire Warrior fighting back the human race on your homeworld before things take an unexpected turn near the midpoint and a new, much stronger enemy force in service to Chaos usurps the role of primary antagonist with their dark powers and more impressive weaponry. The Tau are not without their defenses though, their Fire Warriors being their finest soldiers and the player placed in the boots of one named Kais who is just preparing to join the group when the humans attack. This dark future for humanity seems to be why the villains of this game are actually humankind, the space-traveling empire of the human race aiming to wipe out a more peaceful race known as the Tau. Set in a science fiction future in the incredibly distant year of 40,000, humanity’s push into the stars has lead to them running into various alien races and supernatural forces that actually leads to the species becoming quite corrupt itself. It is still easy enough to follow the story without taking the time to listen to these terminals’ short audio files, but that’s mostly because the story isn’t really trying to do much beyond host the first-person gameplay.
#FIRE WARRIOR SOUNDTRACK SERIES#
Warhammer 40,000: Fire Warrior for the PlayStation 2 would be my first time truly dipping into the franchise I had heard so much about, and helpfully for anyone else who entered the series with this game, the tutorial mission actually features terminals that details a fair bit of the lore present in the title.
Despite being exposed to the Warhammer 40,000 universe through my friends discussing the characters, lore, and games, I had never consumed any sort of related media or played the tabletop game.