Nobody expects the Warhammer Inquisition!
Enter the Chaos-infested Caligari Sector and purge the unclean with the most powerful agents of the Imperium of Man. Warhammer 40,000: Inquisitor – Martyr is a grim Action-RPG featuring multiple classes of the Inquisition who will carry out the will of the Emperor even in the darkest reaches of the Imperium. THE NEXT MILESTONE IN THE EVOLUTION OF ARPGS. The first Action-RPG set in the grim future of the 41st Millennium takes the genre to its next level: an open-world sandbox game with a persistent universe with a huge variety of missions, tactical, brutal combat encounters in destructible environments and a storyline influenced by the community of players. Use the cover system for tactical advantage, shoot off limbs and perform executions in epic boss battles and become a Protector of any solar systems with your glorious actions!
The original version of Warhammer 40,000: Inquisitor Martyr came out for PC and PS4 back in 2018, the PS4 version is actually on sale at 80% on the PlayStation Store till 18th November. The PS5 version has just launched and includes the base game, Prophecy expansion, a new ranked game mode, 12 new missions in unique game areas, 5 pets and 7 cosmetic items which all sounds nice but there are a few issues that I have…
The first being that there doesn’t really seem to be much of an upgrade from the PS4 version. The framerate stutters all over the place and doesn’t go anywhere beyond 30FPS, which is really surprising considering the full price tag of this Ultimate Edition and the actual hardware of the PS5. There’s screen-tearing that was apparent in the original version that is still here too. Apparently the PS5 version has been boosted to 4K with higher resolution textures, but I have to admit that I wasn’t exactly wowed by what I saw and honestly was surprised it didn’t look half as good as I expected.
The gameplay itself ticks the boxes of a dungeon crawler but it doesn’t really do anything to stand out. You will also need to sign up for a NeoCore account to play the game fully by signing up with your email and setting up an account, which is always a fun process for console players…. (Sarcasm highly implied). While new and exclusive content is welcome for PS5 players, it still feels like the “upgrade” should have been free as opposed to coughing up half price for the version (if you own the original) when there’s little improvement in terms of visuals or performance from the PS4 version.
Voice-acting is also pretty bad and some warning that some of it would come out of the DualSense speaker would have been nice, but luckily you can switch this off in the settings. The PS5 version does actually use the DualSense features well by implementing its haptic feedback well. It will also be adding the adaptive triggers in a future patch.
The Verdict
All in all, it’s hard to recommend the PS5 version of Warhammer 40,000: Inquisitor – Martyr with its lack of improvement over the PS4 version. With better optimisation and a more stable framerate it could been a great dungeon crawler, but currently there’s better ones on the market that perform better.