In my continued isolation from the world, I’ve been able to get a few co-op games in over the past year with some friends online. The Ascent was one we started earlier this year and we’ve since moved on to a couple others, including today’s subject: Warhammer 40,000 Shoota’s Blood & Teef. It’s a goofy name, but if you’re familiar with anything Warhammer 40,000, you immediately know who what faction you’ll be playing. With the unending tidal wave of Warhammer video games that have been flooding the market for the last decade, I have to rely on my friends to pick out the treasures that float to the surface. Is Shootas Blood & Teef a diamond in the rough, or is it just another lump of coal in the endless fields of mediocre Warhammer games?

The Short of It

What I’ve Played

• Story to completion in co-op

• Approx 4.5 hours

Pros

• Funny moments and story

• Variety of character types and weapons

• Lots of references to Warhammer 40k universe for fans

Cons

• A number of annoying bugs or issues with online play

• Despite there being a variety of weapons, half of them are not very good or useful

• Friendly fire with melee attacks is annoying

• Aiming is not as accurate as you would like with a controller

The Rest of It

Story

You play as Gargaz, an ork of the Warhammer 40,000 universe who is having a blast shooting up humans in a drop-ship. Unfortunately, the warboss gets a little jealous of his topnot hairstyle and betrays him. He rips off Gargaz’s hair, kicks him out of the drop ship, and abandons him behind enemy lines. Determined to get his hair back, he seeks revenge and must defeat the hoards of enemies to get it.

It’s a delightfully dumb plot for a game, as most games focusing on orks in the Warhammer 40k universe have. The orks are often the butt of jokes made in the universe for being angry, petty idiots that are extremely difficult to kill. You can assume there won’t be any big twists or turns in how the plot progresses in a game like this. Instead, what should be expected is a bit of comedy, which there is plenty on display here.

You do have to hold a basic understanding of the Warhammer 40k universe to get much of a laugh beyond a simple chuckle. The humor is pretty straightforward and simple, revolving around orks saying something stupid or goofy. As someone who is a casual fan of the universe, I had some good laughs from the game’s charm. I also don’t think it would have been able to maintain the humor for very long, so it’s probably for the best that the game is so short, in that regard.

Gameplay

This game is a side-scrolling shooter akin to classics like Contra. You move, you shoot in all directions, and you use special abilities to kill the seemingly endless waves of enemies as you progress through the level. It’s a pretty straightforward experience. However, unlike the classic Contra game, you can cycle through five different weapon types at all times without having to worry about powerups. They consist of a pistol, a shotgun, a machine gun, an RPG-type gun, and an extra gun that has something of an area of effect like a flamethrower. Of these five different types, there are three variations of each, which all operate very differently from each other. For example, you might have a regular shotgun, or a double-barrel that has a rapid-fire function, or one that just shoots fire for some reason. As you go through the game, you can find and collect teeth, which act as the currency you need to buy these different variations. Once I found the combination of guns that worked best for me, I rarely swapped out for any other guns in the collection. Only in a few rare instances did it make sense for me to swap one version of the gun for another. Perhaps I had my own preference, but I still think there are some guns that are vastly inferior to others.

In addition to your various guns is a melee attack, which you can use when you are swarmed and need to reload your weapons. Since you have unlimited ammo for your weapons and you can cycle through them quickly, I usually just swapped over to the next available gun if I ever exhausted my rounds and there were still guys coming after me. I also didn’t use it too much while I was playing because I learned that it actually causes damage to your buddy in co-op. Why this was decided, I’m not sure, as it would only make sense as a choice if you wanted to just mess around with each other and annoy one another. You wouldn’t want to do it for very long if that’s the case, because both of you share health. If one of you dies and respawns, 50% of the living player’s health is taken and given to the resurrected. So while there was a melee option that was effective for eliminating a number of enemies, I didn’t have many reasons to use it.

The other tools in your arsenal are your skills. One of which is tied to the type of ork you choose to play. Several different types have a focus on playstyle. I mostly played the default type that had a focus mostly on guns and projectiles, so he came equipped with an ability that allowed you to throw up to three Molitov cocktails at enemies. But there were also options like one that was more focused on melee (which I obviously didn’t use), one that was focused on status effects, or one that focused on mobility, which I tried for a little bit. The mobility ork had a bonus effect added to his dash, in which the path behind him would be set ablaze and enemies would get damaged if he dashed by them. There are fun little quirks to each type that are worth trying out, but none of them ever felt like one was better than the other. Much like how I stuck to my guns, I mostly stuck to the default type of ork once I tried everything else out.

Regardless of which ork you choose, you all get access to several core abilities, including a dash, a double jump, and a WAAAGH! mode. The WAAAGH! mode builds up as you shoot enemies and take damage. When the meter is full, you can release the fury, which really just amounts to your ork emptying the magazine in his gun and shooting a little faster than normal as he screams. There were certainly some guns that benefitted from this far more than others. Using a pistol and this ability was far less effective than using a Bolter machine gun that had explosive rounds. So I often held onto the ability until I was fully loaded and encountering a lot of tough enemies at once. However, it didn’t take too long for the meter to replenish, so it wasn’t really a resource management issue.

All in all, Shootas Blood & Teef has enough bite-sized mechanics to make the gameplay work over the short amount of time it takes to complete it. If the game was much longer, there wouldn’t be enough there to keep it interesting. When you consider that all the different ork types are unlocked at the start, and when you consider the fact that collecting all the teeth to unlock the weapons you would want doesn’t take long, you could hit the comfort zone of the right ork and weapon build pretty early on in the game. While there are different enemies, environments, and a couple of bosses to break things up, there’s not much variety. Aside from the later levels in which gravity is altered, it’s mostly a matter of running, jumping, and shooting until you reach a door you need to open. I’m not saying I didn’t have fun, but I think that it was wise to keep the length of the game relatively short for the depth that was there.

In some ways, I think the game could have taken some mechanics and level design further. There are a lot of places in which you have to ascend the level and climb up buildings in some platforming sections. However, there were rarely ever any jumps that challenged you or forced you to be creative in solving a puzzle or getting a reward. I think the later level that had the gravity manipulation sections had a ton of opportunities to make you try jumping in different directions or even steering yourself with your gun through space. It just never got beyond its simple, core design, which is fine, but it could have been a little more engaging.

Presentation

Shootas Blood & Teef has a design that clashes with what you typically see in a Warhammer 40k video game. Most of the time, it’s dark with a ton of detail. This is bright, colorful, and cartoonish. The movements of the characters are all exaggerated in a way that mimics paper puppets. If you light an enemy on fire, they’ll flail and run around for a second before turning into a blackened silhouette with two white eyes as though it were a Loony Toon. So even though you are going around and killing tons of orks and human soldiers, it’s presented in a light-hearted style to match the goofiness of the writing. The cutscenes were where a lot of funny moments happened to further play off the style, but the quality of them was pretty severely compressed, so it didn’t look nearly as crisp as the regular gameplay.

The music was perfectly acceptable with some heavy guitar riffs and bombastic orchestral notes to amplify the action, though I mostly kept it turned down during my co-op sessions. It’s what you expect of a Warhammer game. I’ve always enjoyed the music in Warhammer games, but if you’re sick of hearing the same type of music, you might be disappointed here. If you’re a fan of the Warhammer 40K universe, however, I still think there are plenty of little references for you to enjoy. My friend was pointing out all the weapons featured on walls and noting the types of space marines we were up against with a small amount of giddiness that I think would be common for the average 40k fan playing this.

The last thing I’ll mention is the bugs, which were probably my biggest gripe in my experience. Since we were playing this game online, I’m sure there were plenty of moments where our connection lagged in some way or another, causing bugs that other people might not encounter, especially if playing solo. However, the frequency with which I encountered them was a little annoying, especially when I had to adjust my playstyle to counter it. There were plenty of instances in which I was hit by something I couldn’t see or by something I had avoided on my screen but not on my friend’s. It was an experience that reminded me of the many matches I had in Dragon Ball FighterZ before they implemented rollback net code. When you’re having fun playing some co-op with a friend on a goofy game like this, it’s forgivable, but it was still annoying when it happened.

TL;DR

Shootas Blood & Teef is a straightforward, 2D platform shooter that manages to be a fun, funny, brief experience. It’s very short, but it’s also so simple that it doesn’t overstay its welcome or get too boring as a result. It could have done more to be more complex and it has its issues with bugs, especially in online co-op environments. But it also achieves what it sets out to do just fine. It has some funny writing and countless references to the Warhammer 40,000 universe that most fans will be able to recognize and enjoy. If it’s cheap and you’re looking for a short and sweet shooter, you could do far worse.