Warhammer 40,000: Inquisitor - Martyr

The pitch

Warhammer 40,000: Inquisitor - Martyr puts you in the boots of an Inquisitorial agent -- Crusader, Assassin, Psyker, Tech-Adept or one of several later-added classes -- hunting heresy and Chaos corruption across the war-torn Caligari Sector. Structurally it's a Diablo-style action RPG: isometric combat, a loot and gear treadmill, skill trees and a mix of story missions and repeatable endgame content. What sets it apart from most 40k video game adaptations, according to its own review corpus, is a genuine commitment to the setting's grim, oppressive tone rather than a generic fantasy skin with Warhammer branding painted over it.

Developed and published by NeocoreGames -- the Hungarian studio also behind the Van Helsing action RPG series -- Inquisitor - Martyr entered Steam Early Access on 31 August 2017 and exited to a full 1.0 release on 5 June 2018, making 2017 its original release year under this review's lane rule.

A rough start, honestly documented

The launch-era reviews, from 2017 through much of 2018, are consistent about what didn't work. Several reviewers call out the game's "open world sandbox" marketing directly as misleading, with one long, detailed review from July 2018 stating flatly: "forget 'open world sand box': this is simply a lie... nothing is epic, nothing makes you feel like you are actually exploring a huge open region." Endgame content in particular drew criticism for feeling thin relative to what a genre built on repeatable, evolving endgame loops needs to hold players' attention. None of this reads as reviewers rejecting the core concept -- the setting and lore accuracy draw praise even inside otherwise negative reviews from this period -- but the consensus is clear that the game shipped without enough content or polish to support its ambitions.

The turnaround: a specific, dated update

What makes Inquisitor - Martyr's story worth telling nine years on is what happened next, and it's unusually well-documented compared to most games in this review's coverage: NeocoreGames shipped a major overhaul, referred to across the review corpus as "the 2.0 update," in May 2019, reworking combat and adding substantial new content. The before-and-after in player sentiment is stark and consistent. "The game has been significantly improved with the 2.0 update and is finally fun to play," reads one widely-read review; another, describing years of on-and-off play, states plainly that "the game is currently the best it has ever been" as of a 2022 revisit. This isn't a single enthusiastic outlier -- it's a pattern repeated by multiple long-time players independently returning to the game specifically because of that update, which is a meaningfully stronger signal than the usual vague "it's gotten better" comment games sometimes accrue over time.

The complaint that outlived the turnaround

What the 2.0 update didn't fix, and what continued to dog the game's reputation for years afterward, was a specific design decision: Inquisitor - Martyr required a persistent internet connection to play, including its ostensibly single-player campaign. Reviewers across nearly every year from launch onward name this directly and specifically as their reason for hesitating or declining to recommend the game, independent of how they felt about the combat or content. "This game need a constant connection to servers to play single player, and if you lose connection for even half a second you get booted back to the main menu," reads a 2022 review; a 2025 review describes being unable to play during a server outage years into the game's life, still frustrated by the same structural choice. It's a rare case where a specific technical decision, rather than balance or content depth, is the dominant recurring complaint across a game's entire review history.

NeocoreGames eventually addressed it directly: a dedicated offline single-player mode, allowing the base game and its story DLC to be played without any connection (seasonal and multiplayer content excluded), shipped on 23 May 2024 -- nearly seven years after the game's original Early Access launch. That's a genuine, if very late, response to the single most consistent complaint in the game's review history, and it's worth knowing about explicitly for anyone who tried the game years ago, hit the always-online wall, and never went back.

Monetisation and value

Inquisitor - Martyr's DLC catalogue has grown substantially since launch -- 22 separate paid packs at the time of writing, spanning new classes, cosmetics and content expansions. Several reviewers, particularly from 2019 onward, flag the scale of that catalogue as excessive relative to the base game's NZ$79.99 price, one commenting on "15 dlc already" back in 2019 when the number was considerably smaller than it is now. That said, the base game and its DLC are both frequently discounted in Steam sales, and multiple reviewers specifically recommend waiting for a "complete edition" bundle or a steep discount rather than buying piecemeal at full price -- one reports getting the base game and expansion bundled at 90% off and calling it "completely worth it" at that price, a very different verdict from anyone paying full catalogue price.

What the achievement data shows

Global achievement completion follows a familiar shape for a long-running action RPG: early tutorial and campaign milestones sit at 47-85%, and the curve falls steadily through later content. By the far end, endgame and challenge-specific achievements sit well under 1%, consistent with the review corpus's description of a smaller, more repetitive endgame loop that a meaningful share of players don't engage with heavily even after enjoying the main campaign.

Verdict

Warhammer 40,000: Inquisitor - Martyr is an unusually well-documented turnaround story: a thin, disappointing 2017-2018 launch, a specific and widely-credited overhaul in May 2019 that genuinely changed player sentiment, and one structural complaint -- the always-online requirement -- that outlived the turnaround by years before finally being addressed in 2024. For 40k fans specifically, the lore accuracy and tone have been a consistent strength throughout; for action RPG fans more broadly, it's a slower, more tactical alternative to genre leaders that rewards patience with its setting more than its endgame variety. Buy it today, on a discount and with the base game plus a sensible DLC bundle rather than the full 22-pack catalogue, and you're getting a meaningfully better and more flexible game than the one its early reputation was built on.