Our Verdict
Warhammer 40k: Space Marine 2’s properly vicious combat and impressive presentation are let down by a bland story and uninteresting mission design.
Warhammer 40k is overwhelming. The details of its universe have accrued over decades into something that seems unapproachably huge. It’s still possible, though, to appreciate the surface elements of its aesthetic – to be compelled by the over-the-top charms of its towering and glowering armored soldiers, the candle-lit majesty of its gothic sci-fi structures, and its unabashedly grim vision of a far future characterized by never-ending war. This has made Warhammer 40k games an appealing proposition for the casual observer. Dipping a toe into the setting through a throwback shooter like Boltgun or the Dawn of War strategy series is easier than finding any other entry point. Spending a dozen or so hours soaking up its style and fiction is a good way to enjoy what 40k offers without needing to get fully invested. Warhammer 40k: Space Marine 2 is, theoretically at least, another compelling tour of this setting for the Warhammer curious.
It’s a third-person shooter that stars a grimacing supersoldier with a chainsaw sword and, within its first hour, features that space marine ripping apart monsters with blades and bullets, trudging onto vast battlefields swarming with slavering giant insects and puny human soldiers like a big, blue, two-legged war elephant. Space Marine 2 is straightforward and eye-catching – gore and exotic drama presented without excessive preamble or pretense. It also, unfortunately, doesn’t offer much more than this fundamental level of enjoyment.
This is disappointing, in part, due to its nearest point of comparison: the first Space Marine. Back in 2011, Company of Heroes and Homeworld creator Relic Entertainment branched out from its strategy genre roots – the studio had also made several Warhammer 40k strategy games – for the first Space Marine. The result was a tightly designed, fast-moving action game that offered immediately satisfying and properly weighty melee and gun-based combat, starring the square-jawed, forever unsmiling space marine Demetrian Titus.
Now, 13 years later, Space Marine 2 has returned with a new studio behind it and a style of play that hearkens back to its predecessor while losing the sense of focus that made that earlier game work so well.
It all starts promisingly enough. Space Marine 2 whips through a combat-heavy introduction, showing off exactly what you can expect to be doing over the hours that follow – namely, switching between a range of melee weapons and guns to mow down waves of enemies. This combat is as weighty as it ought to be. The controller rumbles with each of Titus’ thudding steps, imparting a sense of his massive size, and each of his armaments, from a chainsaw sword and giant hammer to carbine rifles and automatic pistols, hit home on enemy bodies with a properly brutal feeling of heaviness and accompanying splashes of syrupy red blood.
Fights have an excellent sense of momentum, urging you to press into the fray to stagger enemies and tear them apart, Doom 2016 style. Each ‘execution’ restores chunks of an armor bar that, when depleted, sees a non-regenerating health bar chipped away until death. It all looks great, too. The missions are filled with wide vistas of crumbling cityscapes devastated by war, open skies pierced by the spires of unfathomably enormous pseudo-cathedrals and war machines. Combined with scenes of blocky spaceships and chugging tanks flying down onto or rolling across battlefields, it feels like playing with a tableful of miniature Warhammer models.
Space Marine 2’s plot kicks off well, too, soon finding Titus in command of a squad whose loyalty is tinged with suspicion he may be touched by a corrupting influence that their order’s militantly religious worldview finds abhorrent. But the story and combat design soon blur into something less distinct, losing purpose as repetition sets in. The plot meanders through flat story beats, and it becomes clear that the game’s action set pieces will typically consist of open rooms and hallways that fill with waves of mindlessly aggressive enemies.
The sequel has evidently been designed for online play from the ground up, sticking Titus into a squad with two other marines. The pair are AI-controlled in single-player and player-controller in co-op. While, at least on the standard difficulty, the AI teammates are helpful assistants, the campaign’s broader lean towards co-op is less successful.
Saber’s pedigree as the maker of Left 4 Dead-style co-op shooter World War Z makes itself clear in positive and negative ways. On one hand, the studio’s experience creating a game where waves of brainless undead enemies swarm onscreen means that applying the same design approach to floods of tyranids, an alien species of insectile lizard creatures, works well. Watching these monsters come boiling up fortified walls to attack you, creating scaffolding from their bunched-up bodies like living tidal waves, is impressive. Shooting and cutting down these enemies in bulk, though, gets old a bit too fast.
One issue is the range of enemies. Compared to the cartoonish orks of the first Space Marine, the tyranids – one of two major enemy factions in the game – are poor replacements. As a collection of monsters that communicate with fangs and claws alone, they simply aren’t as enjoyable an enemy as a force of militarized green hooligans that use some form of tactics in battle. The purple bird men and gun-toting Chaos Marines introduced in the second half of the game face the same issue, failing to inject personality or any real variety to combat. Another problem is the looser structure of the campaign and co-op mode’s levels, which, in order to accommodate you being joined by other, potentially distracted teammates, sacrifices carefully orchestrated spectacle for a series of hallways and battlefields that simply fill with waves of enemies, or the occasional boss fight, for the length of the story.
Space Marine 2’s successes and flaws extend to its additional co-op mode, Operations, which is spread across six levels, based on the same environments and set during the same events as those seen during the campaign. Space Marine 2 includes a 6v6-player multiplayer mode as well, though its matchmaking either wasn’t working or there were too few players online before launch to check it out before writing this review.
Operations uses a clever narrative conceit, casting three customizable marines – the same set of classes available in the PvP multiplayer – as another squad Titus and Co. hear from and coordinate with during the story mode’s missions, showing a different view of battles depicted during the campaign. Fighting off waves of enemies while completing objectives is a good enough time, but its overall similarity to the co-op play of the campaign means that it feels like more of the same, only with the added ability to choose from different classes of marine, customizable in appearance, weapon loadout, and upgrade path.
None of Space Marine 2 is bad. The look, sound, and general feel of the game, especially the all-important design of murdering vicious marines and alien freaks en masse, are all enjoyable. It’s only a lack of focus in storytelling and mission design, coupled with bland enemy encounters, that keeps it from standing out. As an accessible entry point to the setting, those casually interested in Warhammer could do much worse. It’s just too bad that Space Marine 2 isn’t as strong a showcase as its predecessor.