Is there a term for sequels that arrive long after all hope for one is lost? Something far divorced from the idea of Duke Nukem Forever, instead rubbing shoulders with more esteemed company like Crash Bandicoot 4: It’s About Time and the ilk. Something a great deal more complimentary, encouraging a reception that this may just bloody well be worth the wait. Prodigal son sequels? Hail Mary entries?
That is the impression I got from my taste of Warhammer 40,000: Space Marine 2 – the short and sharp experience feeling like some divine rebuttal to my online postulations that the odds are stacked too high against a property like Space Marine. “Surely they can’t pull off something great…” I would say, eroding my expectations to the point where I’d settle for anything after all these years. Girding my loins against the eventual disappointment was to my benefit, surely.
But miss me with that depressing garbage, because clearly I was wrong.
What captured me about the original Warhammer 40,000: Space Marine was the unapologetic nature it directed towards being a giant metal man. Thunderous footsteps heralded your arrival anywhere you went, combat often saw you wading into a throng of insurmountable odds, to which you’d then walk out the other side, no worse for wear. This was the DNA that made that game succeed as a Space Marine game, whilst also being a good game in its own right. And Space Marine 2 is clearly aware of this, being as faithful as one might expect given the near zealot-like nature of the property – delivering that unmistakable feeling of being a genetically enhanced super soldier with only glorious purpose.
The narrative chapter presented in the preview takes place later in the game, when the hive fleet is well underway with its fleshy invasion of these systems. From a Warhammer 40k perspective, when Tyranids set their sights on a planet the usual military response is to nuke the entire thing – so seeing Titus and crew descend to the surface on not just one world, but several, suggests that these planets are massively valuable – possibly explaining why the big guy has been sent there. This allows for a mission structure where you deploy to specific worlds to complete missions with up to two mates, playing a little like a Left4Dead campaign where you work on key strategic objectives that may just save these worlds from being devoured entirely.
And boots on the ground, you will be thankful for being the hulking human that you are. The fleshy bug-things of the Tyranids are a fearsome foe, eschewing the soccer lad energy of the Orks from the first game. Each time you encounter them, you are likely to have their numbers break upon you like a wave – the smaller Termagants and Hormagants gleefully swarming you and needing to be felled with bullets and wide sweeps of your melee weapons. Among them you will often find their bigger brothers, Tyranid warriors with terrible ranged weapons or awful melee options, disrupting your bloodbath by injecting a slightly more concerning taste of danger. You’ll often see a reticle taking aim at you from afar – meaning that a venom cannon is preparing to fire, and you will need to consider breaking the line of sight or dodge rolling at the right moments. Other times you may see a warrior similarly wading through his smaller brethren with two giant bone swords crossed in front, deflecting gunfire as they move in to make your melee excursion a little trickier. Being one of the Emperor’s finest, it’s nothing you can’t handle, but that doesn’t mean you get to stop paying attention.
Melee in the game is a little less mashy than its predecessor on account of the game having a slightly more involved breadth of weapons, combos, and a proper parry system. Familiar in implementation, enemies will at times display a colour coded chevron that will conveniently tell you what they’re intending to do.. If you are quick on the finger, you can parry a blue coloured chevron to deflect damage – and if you nail the timing, you will then get to do a snap-shot from your pistol for massive damage in spectacular fashion. Doing this against a giant monster is intensely satisfying, seeing your stoic man-mountain deftly flick away a scything talon that could easily cleave a car in half – before popping a cap in their toothy maw.
Of course, there are plenty of ranged options for dealing with dickheads that are further away. In fact, it’s a veritable buffet of boomsticks running the gamut of plasma, boltgun, or Melta weapons, all famously loved by players of the tabletop game. Initially seeing three different, distinct bolt rifles had me questioning if maybe the Saber team had been a little too excited to represent the entire arsenal of the Space Marine faction. But after forcing myself to put them through their paces, I realised that each had a distinct niche and playstyle for players to discover. My groove was clearly packing a plasma pistol for some hard hitting pews, with a bolt carbine as backup for its intensely fast firing speed into a swathe of regular chaff enemies. The one weapon archetype that I didn’t see on offer was a flamethrower – but I would assume that is a limitation of the preview build because I can’t fathom a big killing fest without righteous flame.
From what little we see, Titus is the same duty-bound colossus of humanity you met in the first game, only now with a couple of skeletons in his space-closet. The interstitial tastes of narrative between the greater portions of action hint at distrust and confusion from his colleagues, alluding to a long absence on his part after the events of the first game. Hilariously, the very character trait that defined him in the first game – being a bit of a maverick who will go off-book if it is the right course of action– has now come to haunt him. Doubly amusing given that his teammates are quick to go off script and cause him to scowl at them like a disappointed parent. A century away from his mates has left him alienated from them, and the colossal fustercluck at hand means he can’t address his absence right now – there are more pressing, toothy matters to attend to.
Replaying the narrative offering of the preview a few times over hammered home how short and sweet the portion really was. For as grand and incredible its presentation was, it really did represent only a flicker of what was happening within this grim future. That is not to say it felt meagre – quite the opposite. It was like a narrow slice of a delicious cake, rich and creamy and satisfying in every way you could imagine – almost intimidating to consider that there was more where that came from. And by the word of the bakers offering this morsel (Saber) there is a lot more to be discovered, given the format of the game.
I don’t think people are properly prepared for just how stunning the game looks. It’s not often I find myself just staring for the sake of really processing all that I am seeing, but Space Marine 2 is one of those titles that has managed to nail that perfect balance of being visually dense and convincing to look at, without feeling cluttered and overbearing to take in. This is a godsend given how the action ramps up on screen – readability is sacrosanct, so when everything and everyone is animating to blast bullets and spill blood, it was a relief that my tired eyes could make sense of it all.
Every gameplay trailer or preview presented to me had me scrutinising the advertised ‘Swarm’ technology to try and grasp its secret. As fun as it is to declare that you can display ONE MILLION TROOPS in your video game, anyone with any practical sense knows that some level of trickery will be involved. So seeing it in action, I was pleasantly surprised to see that it is not all bluster and posturing – Space Marine 2 will absolutely throw vast hordes of enemies at you, and they aren’t just creatively rendered 2D sprites like a PlayStation 2 FIFA Crowd. Sure there is some arcane artistry happening with the LoD’s on display – but for the most part, when you SEE a bug and SHOOT a bug, that bug will hot step towards you for a bite. Also, when the teeming horde of bitey bastards start to crash against a lower wall, they will ebb and flow like a sentient tide trying to get to you. They will even do that neat ‘zombie tower’ schtick that DayZ presented, with the flood of bugs stepping on each other to eventually spill upwards and into your personal space.
Of course with an experience this fun, the most enticing concept would be to share it with your mates. This was where I ran into the most difficulty, if only because the Co-op and Operation modes didn’t really seem to want to function correctly as part of our preview build. Trying to access these missions solo would see me stuck in infinite loading screens, with a similar thing happening when I tried to play it with another journalist friend – myself and the famous gamer Skill-Up spent nearly an hour trying to squash bugs together and could have nearly recorded a podcast in the time it took for us to eventually give up.
On two occasions I did manage to get into a game, where I was then sad to realise that this is not suitable for one person to play – because when you are killed as a solo, there is no respawn. When I did get into a game with another person, the online play was smooth as butter and offered all the pleasures of the game across a social space; just now with added the benefit of unique classes and intelligent backup. Oh, and a respawn system for when someone eats shit. It is a stroke of brilliance that such a hefty portion of the game on offer can be played with mates, because the reality is that the only thing better than being a superhuman tank is being a superhuman tank with your superhuman tank friends. Much to my surprise, I also discovered that the customisation options within the co-op modes were far more robust than I expected being that I had long accepted that this game must have some Faustian bargain to be as good as it is. I openly thought that painting your own beautiful Space Marine Barbie would be bare bones and marred with shitty microtransaction practices, but hallelujah and praise the Emperor, this is not the case.
While the preview was awe inspiring, there was still the occasional oddity. Sometimes a canned execution animation would humorously shunt my camera a few metres away, resulting in a violent zoom back into the bloody action – similarly, occasionally a creature waiting to be executed would stop animating briefly, almost like it was considering if it was a good idea. This could well be the unfinished state of the preview build, but it did at least show some element of imperfection in an otherwise incredible package. All that matters is that Space Marine 2 is delivering exactly what it has been promising in its marketing materials – a visceral, exciting third-person action shooter that captures that grim-darkness-of-the-far-future feel.
Most importantly, I have never been so happy to be so wrong about something.
Warhammer 40,000: Space Marine 2 launches on September 10.
Previewed on PC // Preview code supplied by publisher
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