Warhammer 40,000: Boltgun 2 Review — Bigger, Bloodier, and Almost the Perfect Sequel

Warhammer 40,000: Boltgun 2 is the rare sequel that understands exactly why people loved the original and refuses to mess with it. Auroch Digital's follow-up to 2023's surprise boomer-shooter hit launched October 14 on PC, PS5, and Xbox Series X|S, and the critical verdict has been emphatic: an 81 on Metacritic with 90% positive reviews, a 93rd-percentile showing on OpenCritic, and scores ranging from 80 to 90 across the board. In this Warhammer 40K Boltgun 2 review, after running the campaign with both heroes, I land at an 8.0 — a superb shooter with enough rough edges to keep it honest.

For the Emperor: what Boltgun 2 actually is

You are a weapon of the Imperium — either Ultramarine Malum Caedo, returning from the first game, or Sister of Battle Nyra Veyrath, the sequel's new playable hero — carving through the forces of Chaos in a retro FPS that wears its Doom and Quake DNA proudly. Fast movement, chunky pixelated gore, arena fights, secrets tucked behind every suspicious wall.

The sequel's pitch is "more": more enemies on screen at once, more weapons, more varied objectives, and a campaign that branches so your route through it isn't identical to your friend's. Nearly every change targets the first game's biggest weakness, which was a tendency to run out of surprises before it ran out of levels.

The gunplay is the best the boomer revival has produced

Let's start with what matters. Boltgun 2's shooting feels phenomenal. Bolters sound like thunder and turn heretics into red mulch, the improved melee system gives you a real answer when things get close, and the boss fights — singled out across multiple reviews — actually have ideas instead of just bigger health bars. Movement is fast and slippery in exactly the way the genre demands, and the game rarely slows down long enough for you to notice it's a retro throwback.

The level design deserves the praise too. Levels are bigger and more interconnected than the original's, with secrets that reward the old habit of checking every wall. The branching campaign routes mean your choices decide which missions you take, which gives the game a replayability the first one never had.

Two heroes, one slightly uneven roster

Nyra Veyrath is a great addition on paper — a Sister of Battle with her own movement feel and weapon roster, not a reskin of Malum. In practice, the two heroes blur together more than they should. Nyra's weapon selection feels thinner, and neither character's toolkit does anything radically different from the other's. It's variety, but it's shallow variety. That's the sequel's central tension in miniature: everything is bigger, but not everything is deeper — the one thing this Warhammer 40K Boltgun 2 review can't overlook.

If October's release calendar has you choosing between retro revivals, our Castlevania: Belmont's Curse review covers the other big throwback of the month — and it's a much closer call than you'd think.

The problems: repetition, bugs, and a story that barely exists

The most common criticism — and the one I felt most — is repetition. Boltgun 2 throws enormous numbers of enemies at you, but the encounters aren't choreographed so much as piled on. Hold the fire button, strafe, collect the health pickups that litter every arena, repeat. The default difficulty is too easy, and the harder settings mostly add chaos rather than craft. The harshest reviews landed here hardest: the shooting gets stale in record time if you marathon it.

Then there are the bugs. Enemies getting stuck, attacks clipping through walls, dodgy wayfinding in the bigger levels, a soundtrack that rarely reaches the intensity of its best moments. None of it is game-breaking — this is an 8.0, not a 6.0 — but it keeps the game short of the top shelf. And the story does little with one of fiction's richest settings. You're here to purge, not to ponder. Gears of War: E-Day this is not — and Hellraiser: Revival shows what happens when a shooter leans harder into atmosphere.

Verdict: Warhammer 40K Boltgun 2 review score — 8.0

Boltgun 2 is a textbook sequel: it builds on what worked, fixes what didn't, and delivers one of the most purely fun shooters of the year. The gunplay is elite, the levels are sprawling, and Nyra gives you a reason to run it back. But the repetition, the uneven hero balance, and the launch rough edges mean it stops just short of greatness.

For the God-Emperor — and for anyone who thinks shooters peaked in 1996 — it's essential. Just play it in sessions, not marathons.