Warhammer 40,000: Shootas, Blood & Teef is an absurdly stupid 2D action game with almost no substance and a frustrating control scheme, but it's fun as heck.
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- Title: Warhammer 40,000: Shootas, Blood & Teef
- Release Date: October 20, 2022
- Price: $19.99
- Suggested Audience Age: Rated T for Teen by the ESRB
- Availability: Switch, Steam, Xbox, PlayStation (delayed)
Physical Collector's Editions here - Recommended for fans of: Old School Action, Cartoony Gore, and Assaults on the English Language
Geek to Geek Media was provided with a review copy of this title.
The newest video game in the Warhammer franchise not only has two misspellings in its title, but it ignores the Oxford comma.
Geek to Geek Rating: 0 out of 10
Just kidding. Grammar aside, Warhammer 40,000: Shootas, Blood & Teef is a pretty fun, totally mindless run-and-gun shooter with a cartoony art style and lots of gore. I like it, but a few design choices keep it from feeling exceptional.
Drop Into War(Hammer)
I’m an absolute newcomer to the world of Warhammer. The trailer for Space Marine 2 last year piqued my interest, and since then I’ve played a bit of the original Space Marine, Vermintide 2, and Battle Sisters. I’ve even picked up a few books I’ve found at thrift stores, but I haven’t actually read them yet.
Basically, what I know of Warhammer is that it’s a big, expansive story that has stories set in both a fantasy-style setting and in a far future science fiction world. Also, I know that both rat people and Orcs are very gooshie and filled with lots of liquids that its fun to spray all over.
Shootas, Blood & Teef puts you into the role of an Orc who ends up betrayed behind enemy lines during an assault on a human-held world.
So, naturally, you start shooting everything in sight.
Dumb n Fun Run n Gun
Sometimes, Shootas, Blood & Teef will ask you to hold down the A button to interact with a spigot to open a door.
Other than that, all you do in this game is shoot everything in sight.
In the first level, you slaughter your way through a bunch of Orcs until you can call yourself their chief, then you start battling through loads of hummies in a quest to claim yourself a ship. There are also tanks and rats and all sorts of other enemies who you'll never get a good look at as you pump them full of holes.
Throughout the game, you gather currency that you can spend to buy new guns. You can carry up to five classes of weapons at a time, and there are a few unique guns to pick from in each one. Unfortunately, the guns aren’t named when you are swapping between them, so mostly I just found one assault rifle I really liked and stuck with that.
Other Oddities
The unnamed guns aren't the only part of Shootas, Blood & Teef that don’t click with me, but they are a big one. I feel like five weapons are too many to swap between in a game like this. I prefer the Contra format of one standard gun with pickups for variety.
I also kind of struggle with the visuals in this game. I like the art style a whole lot, but the camera feels like it is pulled back so far that I don’t really get to appreciate the over-the-top visuals. It’s not so far out that it ever impacted my ability to jump around and shoot, but when one the one cosmetic you can buy is a hat it sure would be nice to be able to see that hat. Being pulled back so far also meant that sometimes the Switch dropped some frames to show all of that carnage at once.
Finally, the biggest flaw in Shootas, Blood & Teef is its control scheme. The game is built around a twin-stick setup, with you using the right analog stick to swing your gun around in a full 360 degrees to aim. All your jumping and shooting is therefore controlled by the triggers. The game does let you remap those to the face buttons, which feels more natural to me, but you are still required to use the right analog stick to change where you are aiming. Call me old-school, but having to keep my right thumb on a stick in what is essentially a 2D platformer feels wrong.
Final Thoughts
I’m not well versed enough with the world of Warhammer to talk about how well Shootas, Blood & Teef represents Orc culture, but it does a great job of making their shoes fun to step into. The silly art style, absurd violence, nonstop action, and big boss battles are all a lot of fun. All the problems I have with the game are personal preference issues. Even then, they mostly aren’t major.
Still, I would love this game five times as much if it let me switch to an old-school style control scheme where you could aim in 8 directions with the D-Pad instead of having to use the right stick.
Geek to Geek Rating: 3.5 out of 5 stinken shynen stahs
Between this title and having to correct myself every time I wrote “Nostalgia” instead of “Nostalgaia” in my last review, letters are starting to lose all meaning.