Warhammer 40K: Space Marine 2 delivers maximum Warhammer to glorious effect
Phwoaaaaaaargh.
Often, the first question for any Warhammer 40K game is simply, "Is it Warhammer 40K enough?" This is one of those franchises where the brand itself becomes the thing some fans want to play: it must be grim, it must be dark, it must have sufficient gore, and must have both recognisable nods and oblique references that adhere strictly to our "Core Brand Values". Also, I suppose, there should be a video game in there somewhere.
Worry not though, any fan-Inquisitors in the audience: in the slice of Space Marine 2 I played, I ran more or less the entire gamut of 40K-isms within the first couple minutes - and admittedly, I think that's brilliant. Your squad of Space Marines bicker about treachery and point fingers over presumed betrayals of the Empire, before unloading from their transport into a vast, embattled gothic citadel. Groups of Imperial Guardsmen quiver, assemble, and occasionally get shot by a Commissar for displaying cowardice, beneath the flapping baby-wings of servitor cherubs. The voices of a deep, manly choir soar. You grab a weapon and a sidearm and choice of knife, power sword or chainsword - you know full well what you're picking here - then you clunk through more gothic corridors, a gate slides shut behind you and, in the most 40K moment of all, find yourself immediately overwhelmed by a swarm of Tyrannids without so much as a "press B to crouch" in preparation.
Thankfully, another point of 40K accuracy saves the day here: you are wonderfully overpowered in Space Marine 2, at least in this mid-game story mission (and on the standard difficulty at which I played). You can flick between a bit of frantic button-mashing and more considered parry-and-combo business as the mood strikes and get by just fine. This is good. You are the Emperor's will made flesh. Using your bare fists to pull apart Tyrannid skulls by the dozen is exactly where you ought to be.
On higher difficulties and at more climactic moments, you'll need to engage with Space Marine 2's systems a bit more actively. At the basic level, you have a dodge, for avoiding unblockable melee attacks with the classic red ring of warning or heavily-telegraphed sniper fire. As mentioned, your melee weapon can also parry other melee attacks, or be used to block by holding the button down. You've a few different grenades to choose from, too, and an ultimate ability of some kind - and as returning Lieutenant Demetrian Titus from the first Space Marine for this campaign, that's a kind of war cry buff that gives you extra damage and heals you back to full health, with a fairly hefty two-minute-plus cooldown.
Where things get slightly more interesting is in the importance of timing, target prioritisation and combos. Different combinations of tapped and held melee attacks will mix up the complexity in a fairly standard way, but timing a parry perfectly gives you a window to tap the right trigger for a kind of special headshot animation that opens up heavier enemies for an execution. Executing enemies refills one of your shield bars, offering a nice modern Doom-like cycle of using offensive moves as a defensive tool - suddenly, lower health means you're actually on the hunt for heavies to kill, as they're easier to tee up for the finisher.
These are modern touches to what remains a decidedly, and frankly lovably, old-school video game. The campaign is strictly linear from what I played, with occasional side alleys offering smashable crates with temporary shield boosts, ammo and health packs inside. You'll trudge from rally point to rally point with your accompanying squadmates by your side, swapping out weapons from those you find in the environment, almost Halo-like, on a bit of a whim, and lopping down almost incomprehensible hordes of xeno scum as you go. In the busiest moments, combat can be close to unreadable in fact, but strangely that's never really a problem - if anything it's an asset. Close your eyes and trust your chainsword to work its way through the gristle as required, like any good Space Marine should.
The campaign section finished with some more spot-on 40K scene-chewing: accusations of heresy and warp-addled minds and, of course, Chaos. A fairly standard but enjoyable boss fight ensues: a floating baddie with ranged attacks, area-of-effect attacks and periods of vulnerability and invulnerability, combined with masses of grunts on the ground.
This, I should warn, is where some hefty technical issues started to really kick in for me. My first moments were addled by an audio bug where mouths moved about two seconds after dialogue triggered, but in moments like the beginning of this boss fight, the game slowed to a stop-motion stutter. Most likely, this is perhaps PC gaming's infuriating shader compilation stutter issue rearing its head. Standard troubleshooting issues for other causes, such as moving the game to my fastest NVMe SSD drive, for example, didn't fix it, and it was at its worst when a lot of first-time effects were onscreen at once - though fair warning, I'm no tech expert here, and things can of course change as we get closer to launch.
Interestingly, these tech problems weren't nearly so much of an issue in the online PvE sections of Space Marine 2 I was able to play. The campaign can be played solo or with friends (you can drop in to play a 'guest' role as Titus' finger-wagging squaddies Chairon and Gadriel for up to three-player co-op), there are also separate online missions in a mode called Operations. These are triggered from a terminal in a hub area and can be automatically matchmade. Plus, you can play them as your own custom Marine.
This is the other side of the modernisation coming to an otherwise very classic gameplay experience: effectively, the Operations mode seems like developer Saber Interactive's take on Fatshark's Warhammer 40K: Darktide from late 2022. You'll select your mission difficulty (with higher ones ill-advised without some proper meta-progression in your character), group up, and drop in to work through linear missions with massive multi-stage hordes around certain objectives. At first pass, these are missing some of the supreme atmosphere work found in Darktide's more claustrophobic quarters in the bowels of its hive city. Space Marine 2's action is also schlockier, at least on the lower levels I was stuck with as an unlevelled character. Under these conditions, missions were primarily geared around standing at the top of a ledge as hundreds of Tyranids scale it and simply mashing melee.
The flipside is that progression is more structured and less loot-based: there are multiple skill trees for active and passive bonuses, multiple classes with lightly varied combat styles and, crucially, a highly detailed paint-your-own-marine cosmetics system with a good chunk of its options available for free as you simply progress through the game.
On the class front, I opted for the Vanguard, which offered close-range specialisation with a booming meltagun and a special grapple hook on short cooldown that yanks you towards enemies like Doom Eternal's Meat Hook. The result was a cycle of scalpel-like precision, picking the heaviest threats, launching towards them, scything them down and launching towards the next, while squadmates focused on the broader hordes. The moment-to-moment difference between classes doesn't seem to be quite as stark as they are in Darktide - which is hardly a deeply tactical shooter in its own right, but one where a giant shielded Ogryn and a flimsy, head-popping Psyker at least offer maximum variance - but there's some hope it can get there. The Sniper class here, for instance, can use camouflage to go invisible and pick off heavies from range, while the Assault is a purely melee-and-pistol build with a jetpack. As for the Bulwark, they can potentially play the big-guy-with-big-shield role. I'd need much more time with each, mind, to really see how they evolve.
In some senses, though, this isn't so much a concern with Space Marine 2. This series, like the franchise it's part of, is about unthinking fanaticism after all. Technically, I suppose, it's about the rather horrible places that can lead you, but it's far from its primary purpose. Rather, the joy of Space Marine 2 is in hurtling bluntly into the fray, giggling as blood and alien limbs fill the screen while, somewhere in there, you're stabbing something with its own claw. It's in mashing the emote key to yell some fevered cry of glory to the Emperor and tickling that part of the brain that simply loves to shoot at a rushing wave of squishy aliens on a long, narrow bridge. One of the better parts of the brain, I reckon. This is a double-A game in triple-A clothing, in many senses, simple pleasures and just occasional jank, with a layer of grim, gothic fidelity over the top. Bliss.