General Information
It gives you all of the chaos of so many of the classic Warhammer 40,000 images from books and comics and boardgames over the years; you know the sort of thing, those pics of hulking great big heroes facing off against impossible alien odds. It puts you knee-deep in blood and guts alongside your stoic space brothers as you cut, thrust and shoot your way through a sea of Tyranid filth.
This is Gears of War on crack with its roadie run intact, and Epic Games' sci-fi epic is an obvious touchstone in several important ways. Yes, you can charge into the screen as it shakes, an over-used and slightly tired mechanic these days, but one that's still effective in drawing you into the action onscreen. But these Space Marines, much like those found in the original Xbox game, also move with the same weight and purpose as Marcus et al. There's a power and purpose to everything they do. And everything they do is murder, whilst saying stuff that makes them seem very hard and very gay for each other. It's good.
There's no sticky cover system to worry about though, thankfully, Space Marines don't cower in fear, and so it's stripped away in favour of large open levels with nowhere to hide. The various areas you'll work through in both campaign and operations modes are huge, actually, largely empty but for exploding barrels, and that's for a very good reason. The swarm tech needs room to breathe, baby. Ah yes, the swarm. We've heard a lot of talk about the Tyranid swarm over the years (not really, we've only ever painted a handful of Warhammer models very badly), and it's crucial to this game, and to the core of the fantastic action at hand, that swarm actually means SWARM this time.
We've already been treated to Saber Interative's impressive "swarm tech" through our time with the excellent World War Z. If you've played that, you'll know the fear and panic that even a moderately large number of braindead zombies can generate when they're headed your way. Now, replace the braindead shamblers with a rather clever bunch of alien bastards, and then turn the numbers way up - we're talking hundreds, if not thousands of the blighters - and let us rip and tear.
It's in the moments before the Tyranid swarm arrives here, as you see this seething mass peeling down some futuristic hill in the distance, when you realize the entire scene in front of you is alive and moving in your direction, that Warhammer 40,000: Space Marine 2 really gets your attention. Forget about everything, prepare your weapons and get ready to do what space marines do best. Then, when it arrives, when the space s**t finally hits the fan, you're treated to a combat system that gets everything right. It gives you enough control, it gives you enough style and options, and it melds perfectly with epic scenes of carnage to provide the ultimate Warhammer 40k power fantasy in shooter/melee form.
Over the course of a thrilling six chapter campaign that acts almost as a training ground, as a precursor to the meatier action of Operations, we get all the overly-pompous barking, ridiculously hammer-headed dialogue (written and delivered with a ton of wit and charm) and lore that fans could possibly want. We get a bunch of the best looking campaign settings we've ever seen. Again, it's all very reminiscent of Gears of War, in how that game's visuals sort of shocked us awake when we first booted that up on Xbox. There's some jaw-dropping vistas, great big space wars in full-on chaos mode, to roadie run through here and once you meet your enemy, the fantastic gameplay and clever mechanics are revealed in full.
There's as much melee combat here as there is shooting, your health bar is replenished by doing damage to foes within a set window after taking a hit, and everything is set to encourage you to push forward, to be that space marine in the posters. You know, the one with hundreds of enemies climbing up their body as they hold aloft some bigger foe in order to put a pistol against its head and pull the trigger. That legend.
The swarm is deadly if you let it get on top of you, so you always need to be employing a series of simple melee combos to keep them at bay, flinging grenades to clear a space, or finishing off a sequence of sword swipes with a meaty big AOE attack. Clubbing lesser Tyranids to death is excellent fun, it feels heavy and bloody and responsive. The shooting is impressive too, again very Gears of War in how it controls, and a wide variety of enemy types ensure that you'll need shotguns, flamethrowers, precision sniper rifles and all that jazz to deal with every encounter you face. It feels like a while since we've had to consider anything in a shooter, so it's nice to have that back, a little intelligence to how everything is placed in order to have you use all the weapons and tools at your disposal.
So the bones are familiar, there's nothing in the shooting or melee at this level that's particularly unique - it just feels really good. But then, the devs get clever, adding a bunch of slick contextual stuff. Hold in attack to daze a foe at the end of a combo, for example, and you bring up a red aiming reticule that lets you target a shot right into some alien's daft mug. There's a ton of finishers to pull off, snapping necks and ripping big rotten space baddies in half above your head. All of this stuff is so well woven into the core mechanics that, even as it wrestles control away to do something awesome, it still feels as though you are totally in command. Even the temporary invulnerability that these finishers and things incur is worked into the action perfectly. It gives you a chance to recharge, gives you a little space to swing the camera around and gauge your options. You'll find yourself pulling off executions of larger foes just to give you a little mental tea break from battering all the little guys. It's quite something.
We won't ruin any of the fun of the story mode's narrative here, it's a big daft thing with a ton of huge set-pieces and skyboxes full of laser fire to run amok in. It also mixes things up with some fun sequences; stuff like having you protect a space brother with your sniper rifle, facing off against a swarm in the dark, or using flamethrowers to clear space as you work to switch some power button or other. It's all designed for co-op with pals, so the objectives were never gonna be that deep, but they get the job done and, most importantly, don't get in the way of the brutal action.
And it is brutal. Even on normal difficulty this one can get hairy, but turn the difficulty up to max and you - and any buddies along for the ride - are in for a proper fight. Each chapter is topped off by a big boss battle, too. There's some surprisingly clever and tough stuff to face off against, and we can already see ourselves blasting through it on every difficulty to earn every badge and find every collectible datalink or talisman - trinkets used to get one more chance upon death, extra shields and so on.
So, the six chapter campaign is excellent. We haven't played any of the online modes yet because the servers ain't live, which is a shame, but it's Operations that we're actually most excited about, surprisingly. What we thought was going to be a co-op aside to the campaign, is actually the mode that you'll likely spend far more time in, and that's because it's where the game's class systems, upgrades and unlockables come into play.
In Operations, you play through a series of scenarios that stem off of the storyline from the main campaign. The first one, as an example, sees you play as a team of marines that are sent off to do a mission by your character in the main story mode. It makes everything feel much more cohesive as a result, and the action here is more enjoyable because you get that sense of progression in ranking up your chosen class; whether it be sniper, vanguard, tank, etc, and a far greater mix of weapons and core skills to play around with.
Just as in story mode, where protagonist Titus has a special that charges up and allows him to go into berserk mode for a short period, here each class has a unique power to use as it becomes available. We've been playing mostly as a Vanguard, who has a grapnel launcher that pulls him over to enemies in an instant, but there's also camo-cloaks and jump packs in the mix here too. Yes, jump packs!
Skill trees, which we kinda hate at this stage, are here, of course they are, but they feel pleasingly unfussy and straightforward - this isn't a game designed for sitting in the menus and counting numbers. Oh, and the customization. This is gonna keep a lot of people playing for the long haul, and we're sure it opens up even more in the online mode, but unlocking super cool armor suits, new character faces and styles, and a ton of other bits and bobs (all by simply playing the game and beating challenges) is rewarding and moreish, and we cannot wait to hoover up every bit of DLC, every new armor pack and unlockable facial scar that they hit us with.
We are fully in the zone with Warhammer 40,000: Space Marine 2. You don't need to know anything about the tabletop boardgames, or painting wee minifigures or spilling paint all over your kitchen or anything like that to get involved. This is a spectacular co-operative action game, simple as that, a great big chunky love letter to Warhammer, and one of the best things we've played this year, thanks to how pure and focused it is every step of the way. You want big space marines sawing alien scum in half whilst proclaiming their undying love for each other? Step right this way, friendo.
Finally, and in terms of performance, on Series X things are looking good for launch in both quality and performance modes. We'll let the likes of Digital Foundry give you exact results on everything, but in performance mode everything looks and plays well enough that we left it here for the most part. A switch to quality definitely sees fancier reflections on the ground, and it felt smooth enough, but we'd rather the highest possible framerate with this sort of non-stop action. With regards to bugs too, beyond the Tyranids themselves, we had little issue. A little pop-in here and there has been about the height of our problems, which is impressive given just how fantastic this one looks and sounds at every turn.
Conclusion
Warhammer 40,000: Space Marine 2 is a spectacular achievement that gives Warhammer fans everything they could possibly have wanted when it comes to roleplaying their favorite chonky space boys. Saber's swarm tech is deployed to dazzling effect, and with purpose and context, too. This is the Tyranid swarm of your nightmares, and you've been given all the slick melee moves, sick finishers and great big shooty guns you'll need to stave it off. Think Gears of War with hundreds of enemies onscreen at once, with the cumbersome cover system removed and the speed dialed up and you're in the right place. And what a place to be, whether solo or with pals online, this is one of the best action games we've played in a long while.
