I finished Space Marine 2 this evening and these are my raw thoughts. Expect SPOILERS
I have incredibly fond memories of 2011’s Warhammer 40,000: Space Marine. I was just about to move to Sheffield for university. I was weeks away from getting fully back into Warhammer after years away. Space Marine hit at exactly the right time. I kept the purity seal from the collectors edition for a decade. I have such love for a perfect 7/10 game.
Space Marine 2 (SM2 henceforth) hits at a very different time. I’m still into Warhammer 40K but I’ve not played the latest edition and have no plan to. I’ve been playing other wargames in other settings. What’s more is that I have come to accept that the brand of 40K has change a lot from what I fell in love with. The raw Blancheian style combined with miniatures & books that lacked the corporate shine of today. I am still painting Marines, but niche old metal lads from 20 years ago. So SM2 had an uphill battle to fight.
The game picks up some hundred or so years after the events of the first. The titular Space Marine is still Titus and he’s in the Deathwatch as penance for his alleged Heresy. He’s badly injured and undergoes the Rubicon upgrade to become a Primaris, ending up back with the Ultramarines. There’s some fairly standard 40K plot that happens involving Tyranids and Chaos. It’s an entertaining romp.
The developers then slap some bloody lovely graphics and sound on that story. I don’t think we’ve ever seen such a visually rich depiction of the 40K universe. Epic battles, Space Gothic architecture, so so so many candles. All the equipment and vehicles look perfect, I imagine aided by the modern CAD design processes at Games Workshop now.
The issue is the game play is dull. The combat loop is fine. You’ve got dodges and parries like every other game. All the bolter varieties feel essentially identical. The melee weapons are better, with the final reveal of the thunder hammer being glorious. Outside of the combat loop you’re walking down very pretty corridors. Once you reach the end of the corridor you press X to INTERACT with some button or obstacle which I’d bet is to mask loading. Seriously, the amount of time you spend walking down a corridor, waiting for your squad mates to ASSEMBLE in an elevator, for you to press X to INTERACT to put the elevator in motion, then to sit waiting like Mass Effect. The Battle Barge is the same. It’s analogous to A Hub where you can slightly tweak your loadout. There are empty corridors with interactive buttons that take you to a cutscene. I never felt like I was making a meaningful decision. Where is the game bit of this video-game.
There are a few multiplayer modes which I will not be entertaining. Dressing up your Space Marine looks cool but that requires Xbox Live which I stopped paying for ages ago.
A mindless romp for sixty whole pounds quid? Wouldn’t recommend. Maybe if you’re going to rinse the multiplayer with friends it’d be a different proposition. SM2 arrives at a time when I’ve recently uttered the sentence “I think this is my last console generation”. Any game would struggle to excite me with that idea rumbling around the ol’ brain.