Warhammer 40,000: Space Marine instantly became one of my favourite games on the Xbox 360 when it landed back in 2011, so getting a preview code for the long-awaited sequel in the same week as the 360’s online shutdown felt strangely poetic. Thirteen years is a long damn time though.
I’m a very different person now to who I was back then, the video game industry operates on a wildly different landscape, and Warhammer has both exploded in mainstream popularity and undergone seismic evolution both as a hobby and game in its own right. Titus of the Ultramarines returns as the protagonist, and he’s rather different.
I was working video games retail at GAME back during the hype cycle ahead of the original’s release. One of my regulars happened to work at Space Marine’s publisher THQ. “Everyone internally refers to it as God of War-hammer,” I remember them telling me with a chuckle. They were bang on the money with that label, and Space Marine 2 carries the vibe forth wholeheartedly.
The combat loop, most of the time anyway, is about firing as much lead at the enemy as you can while the distance is being closed between you and the ravening hordes. There are no cover mechanics at all, and melee is where most of your time in action is going to be spent.
The original game outright forced players to get bloodily stuck-in as an integral part of survival, as a stunning melee bash followed by a ludicrously brutal execution animation was the only way to restore health in the heat of battle. Space Marine 2’s combat functions much the same way, but with a key rework of that healing mechanic which feels ripped wholesale from Bloodborne.
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Damage taken shows as a white segment on the otherwise red health bar. This dwindles down over the course of a few brief moments, during which time that amount of lost health can be restored by successfully landing an execution or parry.
Titus still has a shield meter that must be worn down before he starts taking health damage, but it no longer regenerates while outside of combat. Melee executions performed with no white-zoneage occuring only restore shield. Healing stims can be found in the world, but only one may be carried at a time and it’s destroyed upon use.
Enemies hit much harder in Space Marine 2 than in the previous game, but this is balanced by the fact that you no longer instantly die when your health hits zero. The sequel instead utilises a more modern mechanic of knocking you down and requiring a teammate to hastily revive you. This works on a ‘three strikes and you’re out’ basis, however, and boots you back to the last campaign checkpoint when ‘mortally wounded.’
In practice it’s all a bunch of fairly subtle changes. I took some time to adjust to them after having recently replayed the original, but I warmed to them quickly. Combat on the whole also feels a touch more weighty than it did previously – largely, I think, due to improvements made in the impact and fidelity of audio-visual feedback given. It’s all recognisably Space Marine though, from top to bottom, which pleases the heck out of me.
The scope of my Space Marine 2 run
The preview build for Space Marine 2 was fairly limited in scope, consisting of one late-game level from the campaign, two levels from the new PvE Operations mode, and the ability to have a good poke around in the menus of the multiplayer customisation and progression systems. Both the campaign and Operations modes support three-player online co-op, though scheduling issues meant I was only able to get limited time playing with company.
The campaign level is pretty much what I expected going in: Space Marine brought into the age of 4K HD and the modern WH40k universe. I thoroughly enjoyed what was featured, but nothing about it surprised me.
Operations, meanwhile, are quite above and beyond what I expected in Space Marine 2. Each allows you to take one of your multiplayer characters through a strike mission undertaken on Titus’s order, which runs adjacent to his story. They’re an intensely Left 4 Dead bit of business, and are remarkably fun. Beyond the two included in the preview, icons for a further four were shown. While I’m certainly eager to play the others, I’m even more enticed by the possibilities of where the mode could be taken in the future given how vast the WH40k property is.
The multiplayer progression in Space Marine 2 is broadly what you’d expect from a shooter of the modern era. Separate perk trees and experience tracks exist for each of the six classes, as well as for each weapon. Character customisation options are also mostly gated behind XP walls, though a mildly concerning number of skins tagged as ‘DLC’ are already present.
I wish that Space Marine 2‘s armour painting system was more freeform and deep, so as to better represent the physical Warhammer hobby, but then too much freedom would inevitably undercut their DLC cosmetics economy.
Buffs and nerfs
The biggest improvement in Space Marine 2 is simply the sense of scale, made possible by thirteen years of technological advancement. While the previous game effectively portrayed an Imperial forge world besieged by Orks to the standards of the day, Space Marine 2’s Tyranid invasion is something else.
You and your two squad mates will brawl your way through dozens upon dozens of bug swarms, all while hundreds more descend upon the doomed soldiers of the Imperial Guard and their tanks in the inaccessible background. The dense gothic-industrial architecture is dizzying in scale and lush in detail, and on several occasions it compelled me to forget all sense of mission urgency just to witness the spectacle.
Only two ranged weapons can be carried this time around, instead of the original’s three, but the upside is that your Marine is much more naturalistic in how they carry and switch between them in Space Marine 2. Titus himself has been recast with Northern Irish actor Clive Standen, who does a fine enough job, but brings such a wildly different tone and take compared to the Shakespearian stoicism Mark Strong imbued the character with.
Space Marines themselves have always been genetically-altered, murder-happy, religion-brainwashed super-soldiers of a deeply xenophobic, utterly brutal, and horrifically fascist colonial empire in WH40k lore. Given this, it always felt a bit uncomfortable to celebrate them without even a whiff of comment, criticism, or even the broader narrative context of the rotten civilization for which they’re bred to fight and die for.
A preview always has to be taken with the massive caveat that what we’ve played is but a small, generally lacking in overall context piece of a whole. It’s fair to say: the original Space Marine was largely about the power fantasy of being a Space Marine. 2011 was a different and somewhat more culturally innocent time, and so collectively we mostly just brushed past it with the original game.
Thirteen years is a long damn time though, and the preview build for Space Marine 2 didn’t fill me with confidence that the sequel will show any more interest in touching upon these contextually vital themes. Frankly, that worries me, but I’ll reserve judgment until the game releases early next month.
Warhammer 40,000: Space Marine 2 will release on PC, Xbox Series X/S, and PlayStation 5 on September 10th, with four days early access granted to those who purchase the Ultra Edition.
