Every once in a while, we get a video game that reminds us of what it means to play something that is just pure, simple, and unabashedly fun. In an era where developers are more focused on maximizing profits through live service games, in comes Saber Interactive with Warhammer 40000: Space Marine 2 to bring us back to the golden years of the Xbox 360/PS3 era. You’ve heard all the songs and praises shouted towards this game when it was first released. About a month down the line, this late review of Space Marine 2 is here to assure you that you should still believe the hype.
A solid, tightly designed campaign packaged alongside a sizeable multiplayer coop experience filled with its own progression system and extensive customization options already makes this game a bang for your buck. What makes it all the more impressive is that there is no reliance on predatory monetization. Every cool new cosmetic in the game can be acquired by simply just playing the game. And as of now, significant future updates such as more maps, missions, gear, enemy types, and even a dedicated horde mode will all be coming for free.
On paper, this type of game shouldn’t exist in today’s market. It’s a one and done purchase that can’t generate any more significant income for the developers through expansions or microtransactions. The campaign lasts 10 hours, the co-op mode only has 6 modes, and the PvP is about as barebones as it can be. But Space Marine 2 does something that cements itself as one of the year’s best: It’s an extremely fun time to be had.
The visual showcase, sense of scale, masterful audio mixing, and incredibly satisfying gameplay, all packaged within the dense universe of Warhammer 40K, makes Space Marine 2 the ultimate f*ck yea experience.
For the Emperor!
The campaign of Warhammer 40000: Space Marine 2 is exactly what a video game campaign should be. It is a well-paced 8-10 hour experience that contains little to no filler or padded content meant to artificially extend the running time. It’s digestible, easy to jump in and out, and gripping from start to finish. The shorter than usual run time allowed Saber Interactive to pay attention to filling up the screen with intentional content. It all sounds, looks, and feels awesome.
The first game was clearly inspired by the dude-bro testosterone template of Gears of War which was cool in concept, but it was definitely a product of its time. It’s bland grey aesthetic and simplistic mission design didn’t really age well. While it’s still perfectly playable nowadays on modern hardware, and I do recommend doing so because it’s still a cool game with a great story, Space Marine 2 just blows it out of the park. This is exactly what sequels should do. Take what worked in the original and crank it all up to insane levels of polish.
Set approximately 200 years after the events of the first game, Space Marine 2 puts players back into the heavy boots of Demetrian Titus. Once a Captain, Titus has spent the last hundred years serving as a Blackshield in the Deathwatch, atoning for what he believes to be a disgrace to his former chapter. His penance is interrupted when an Archmagos of the Adeptus Mechanicus requests help to save the planet Kadaku from a Tyranid invasion. Titus goes but is critically injured. Saved by the Ultramarines, Chapter Master Marneus Calgar has Titus undergo the Rubicon Primaris procedure, enhancing his strength, speed, and intelligence to keep him alive. Titus is then persuaded to rejoin the Ultramarines for a shot at redemption.
What comes next is an insane rollercoaster that you never want to get out of. Insane action? Check. Incredibly atmosphere and spectacle? Check. Classic tension between you and your fellow testosterone-filled Ultramarines? Check. It’s all here.
The Tyranids are a great new faction to fight against given how played out and tired I was already of the Orks. What they lost in goofy personalities is made up for in the animalistic tendencies. Tyranids know nothing but to brutally destroy their prey. It also helps that majority of them look like alien velociraptors, which is always a plus in my books. The game constantly makes you feel that no matter how badass the Ultramarines are, you’re always outnumbered and just at the brink of failure when it comes to fighting against these things. They are overwhelming in numbers and even follow the World War Z thing where they just stack on top of each other to climb a wall. It’s impressive on both a technical and spectacle perspective.
Speaking of which, Space Marine 2 is probably one of the best-looking games to ever be released. Playing this on an AMD Ryzen 5 5600X with a 4070 GPU setup really showed what my rig was capable of. A far cry from the colorless look of the first game, Space Marine 2 is colorful, brutal, and dense in the way it presents its environments, skyboxes, and character models. It’s a masterclass in art direction and truly brings the world of Warhammer 40K to life. You simply have to see it to believe it. Incredible work.
Gameplay is actually very simplistic and similar to the first. You have a primary, secondary, and melee weapons with a special move that you can charge up. You also have a dodge, block, parry, and execute abilities. It plays extremely well with a controller as well. While it may sound basic, the way the Tyranids burst into bloody bits, and feel of being surrounded on all sides, and the sheer amount of enemies, big and small, that charges its way towards you is a sight to behold. Take what the modern Doom remakes have done in terms of push-forward combat, and you’ll find something similar here.
It may not be as fast and fluid as the Doom guy plays given how Saber Interactive did an incredible job at adding a sense of weight to the Ultramarines, but it is definitely just as brutal, cool, and satisfying to play with. This is third person action at its finest. The only real gripes I have with it is that even in the higher difficulties, the windows for parrying and dodging are extremely forgiving and that the game lacks an FOV slider.
Eternal servitude
After finishing up the incredible campaign, you can still continue on with the story with the PvE coop missions. What’s great about these is that they’re integrated within the main story. There are moments where Titus will need something accomplished, but he’ll be preoccupied with something else. Another group of Ultramarines will then be tasked to carry on the order. The PvE coop missions places you in the shoes of that group as you and your friends help Titus with what he needs. It’s an interesting and smart way to recontextualize the mode into something that is less than a tacked-on feature and more of a great extension and extra look into the story.
There are currently 6 missions available as of now. While the map is the same, the enemy types and placements are randomized so there is still some semblance of replayability. You can change the difficulty for each mission but what drags the experience down is how you earn currency to improve your equipment.
When it comes to farming weapon levels, the key is earning currency. Since all stages drop the same type of currency, most players opt to repeatedly farm the easiest stage at a certain difficulty. For instance, to farm gold currency, we endlessly ran Stage 1 on Difficulty 4. Why? Because it was the easiest, and if you try a harder stage and fail, you get no currency at all. This repetitive grind can quickly become monotonous, especially since you need to do it for every class, each with multiple weapons.
But then again, it’s the sense of scale, quality of the gameplay, and epicness of the set pieces that carries this whole thing to the finish line. Even if it is a coop mission, it doesn’t lose the quality that you can see in the campaign.
The upcoming roadmap is also another reason to get excited for Space Marine 2’s coop experience. I have incredibly high hopes and expectations for the horde mode. This game has quite literally the perfect infrastructure for it already. If done right, the Space Marine 2 horde mode can easily solve the lack of content the game has for players who want this to be a longer-term experience.
And of course, living up to it wanting to be the ultimate throwback to the 7th generation of console gaming, there is a very barebones PvP mode! And you know what? It’s absolutely fantastic. Remember when games like Dead Space 2, Tomb Raider, and Uncharted 3 would have tacked on multiplayer modes? Space Marine 2 follows suit. Just imagine a team of Ultramarines trying to beat one another. It’s about as cool and a janky as it sounds. Melee combat always feels like a toss-up and hitboxes are extremely huge given the character sizes which makes shooting so amusingly fun. This isn’t your typical e-sport worthy competitive PvP. It’s just dumb fun to be had.
Warhammer 40000: Space Marine 2 Review Final Verdict – 9.5/10
Aside from a select few, the Warhammer IP has always struggled in terms of having good video game adaptations. A lot of it is due to how deep the source material goes and trying to condense it into a contained experience can feel like an impossible task. While I’m not going to sit here and say that Space Marine 2 has hit every possible mark it should and shows the full scale of the franchise it’s in, it’s definitely a phenomenal experience that does away from every problematic trend modern gaming has fallen into.
It’s a self-contained experience with incredible visuals, gameplay, and extra modes to treat you once the credits roll down. And what makes it all the sweeter is that more significant content is coming, all for free.
Warhammer 40000: Space Marine 2 is peak gaming regardless of if you’re alone, with friends, or with random people online. The Emperor would definitely be pleased with what Saber Interactive have cooked up here.
This review was made using a game code for the PC provided by the publisher.