Space Marine 2 Is More Space Marine, and Not Much Else

In the grim darkness of the far future, there is only light attack, light attack, heavy attack.

In 2011, Warhammer games got a shot in the arm with the release of Space Marine. A Gears of War-ian shooter that broke the franchise out of a rut of niche gaming offerings, it felt like the starting point for a whole new wave of high-quality Warhammer games. That starting point never really came, for Space Marine at least. Games Workshop has waxed and waned between a small-scale curation of the Warhammer franchise to throwing the brand at any developer who looks vaguely in its direction in the past 13 years, leading to a breadth in quality as wide-ranging as the catalogue of Warhammer games has become deep. But a sequel never came until now: at long last, Space Marine has returned to cross its own Rubicon Primaris in a very different Warhammer gaming landscape to the one it left all those years ago… except it rather much acts like nothing has changed at all. (Editor’s Note: This review of Space Marine 2 does not feature analysis of its PvP multiplayer mode, as despite multiple attempts I was never able to actually find a match with other players during the review period. I played on PC and cross-platform play was not made available until embargo lift and the launch of early access, so expect to see an update to this review before Space Marine 2‘s full launch September 9 for thoughts on multiplayer, once the player base is more sizable!) Set during the height of the Fourth Tyrannic War—the battle between the Imperium of Man and the alien swarms of the Tyranid Hive Fleet Leviathan that opened the narrative for Warhammer 40,000‘s 10th, latest edition—and over a hundred years after the events of the first Space Marine, Space Marine 2 follows the protagonist of the original, Titus, as he returns to his chapter of the Space Marine legions, the Ultramarines. Reduced to a Lieutenant after years of penitent service after being charged with heresy during the first game, Titus finds himself upgraded into the latest generation of Humanity’s supersoldiers, leading an uncertain squad of marines on the front lines of the Tyranid’s invasion of the Recidious System—threatening the exposure of a mysterious Imperium project with dubious connections to Titus’ past, as well as humanity’s greatest enemy: the perpetual threat of the forces of Chaos. Little, then, has really changed between Space Marine and Space Marine 2. Aesthetically, of course, the sequel is greatly improved, and perhaps the most sumptuous a Warhammer game has ever looked. Both the detail of its gothic-infused universe and its scope are rendered immaculately in Space Marine 2, including dense jungles and techpunk industrial works, the ornately religious architecture of Imperial worlds, and the smallest details in Titus and his battle-brothers armors. In trading its primary villains from the Space Orks of the first game to the Tyranids (it’s not a spoiler to say that, just like the first game, the forces of Chaos eventually show up to take the brunt of the attention), Space Marine 2 trades a little personality in its antagonistic hordes for an even grander scale to them. Accurate to the tabletop, the Tyranids are a hivemind swarm race of not-entirely-xenomorph-alike aliens, and contemporary technology brings with it Space Marine 2‘s admirable feat of managing to render dozens upon dozens, if not hundreds, of enemies on screen at a time as they charge towards you. There’s no charm in hearing a bulky green Ork yell “Oi! Lads! It’s da Space Mareenz!!!” in a dodgy British accent this time round, but the Tyranids and their sheer scope as an opposing force make for an ideal fantasy that Space Marine 2 manages to execute just as well as its predecessor did. It does so, once again, for largely following a similar formula. Space Marine 2 operates on a mix of ranged and melee combat—while Titus and his fellow marines Chairon and Gadriel (who, in a fresh addition for the sequel, can be played by other players in online campaign co-op) find themselves regularly outnumbered, their oversized guns can often level a good chunk of their incoming foes in a hail of bolter bullets and plasma fire. But a regular scarcity of ammunition, the sheer amount of enemies, and the game’s mechanical encouragement will always eventually ask you as a player to get stuck into huge swarms of enemies in close-ranged combat. Successful blocks are rewarded with powerful parries that can either immediately kill smaller foes that regain depleted pips of armor shielding that safeguard your actual health bar (which can only regenerate to a point, and must be replenished with rare health packs), or open larger ones to counterattacks that will eventually lead to a staggered stance, ready for a grisly execution animation that likewise regenerates your armor. The fantasy of the Space Marines is felt at its most keenly in this interplay: you’re sturdy, but you’re not invulnerable… but you can feel like you are if you take the offensive to your opponents rather than pinging at them from range, even when your opponent is a seemingly endless sea of chittering alien footsoldiers or a massive, hulking beast. Again, it’s as satisfying as it was in the first game: the enemy might have changed and your arsenals might have broadened to reflect a plethora of iconic pieces of 40K wargear, but Space Marine 2 largely plays essentially the same as its predecessor does. Thin the hordes at range, get in close, melee combo, execution. It’s fun and grisly and over the top—there’s not enough variety in the execution moves for the amount of times you’ll do them, but they’re always a gory delight, leaving your screen and Titus alike drenched in gobs of red—but it’s as basic in 2024 as it was in 2011, with little in the way of acknowledgement of just how evolved the shooter and hack-and-slash genres have come in that time. This is an issue that also comes with Space Marine 2‘s structure. Over the course of the 8-10 hours it’ll take you to finish its campaign, you largely spend your time sprinting down tight corridors from one open combat arena to the next. Space Marine 2 might visually capture the scale and spectacle of Warhammer wonderfully, but it keeps you as a player at arm’s length, funneling you down a single path, to do the same kinds of things—defend a point, flip a switch, defend a point, go into a lift, defend a point, interact with a nebulous device—repeatedly. There’s little evolution to how combat plays out over the course of the campaign. You have access to different weapons, sure, but for the most part they all play relatively similarly with no particular advantage in any given encounter to tailor your load out beyond personal preference, and Titus does not learn new skills or open up extra abilities; he plays identically in the first and last missions. Even when the narrative switches from the Tyranids as a primary threat to the Chaos Space Marines of the Thousand Sons, little about the core mechanics of the game really changes: you’re still doing the same mix of ranged and melee combat, still running from combat arena to combat arena. The formula’s ability to stay welcome over the course of the campaign is hindered by its relatively threadbare narrative. The original Space Marine was hardly the greatest story ever told in a game, but it climaxed with some compelling examinations of the Space Marines and their relationship with their fallen brethren, and how their brotherhood can be interpreted differently across the generations of these long-lived supersoldiers. Space Marine 2 gestures broadly to this as it navigates a story of Titus attempting to regain the trust of both his chapter at large and his new subordinates in Gadriel and Chairon, but it never goes further beyond having someone occasionally question Titus’ motives, only for Titus to prove them wrong and move on to the next thing he needs to kill. It captures the feeling of Games Workshop’s grimdark universe well enough, and fans will appreciate that, but it has neither the time nor the commitment to really dig deep into these characters and really understand what drives their sense of duty and brotherhood, lacking the depth of some of the modelmaker’s most interesting stories about these archetypal heroes. A Warhammer neophyte could get through Space Marine 2‘s story just fine with the context clues it provides, but there’s a genuine question of if they’d really want to, given how bare-bones and basic both its storytelling and gameplay are at the end of the day. There is, at least, more to do once credits role on Space Marine 2‘s campaign—again, similar to the first, there is a suite of multiplayer options beyond the co-operative campaign. This time around the PvE horde mode has been replaced by Operations, a three-player mode that is, essentially, a mini narrative campaign that runs throughout the story of the main game. While it’s structured basically identically—completing similar objectives as you shuffle from one combat arena to the next—bizarrely it’s where Space Marine 2 begins to at least incorporate a little extra depth compared to its main campaign. Here your Space Marine can be selected from one of six classes inspired by different roles from the tabletop game, from scouting snipers to heavy weapons specialists, or sword-and-board bulwarks to fast, jet-pack-equipped assault troopers, each one with their own unique ability and skill tree that can be progressed across a level up system, and each with access to trees that open up cosmetic unlocks for both individual weapons and your marines themselves, from armor variety to colors to either replicate iconic chapters from the game or customize your own. The 6v6 PvP multiplayer likewise has its own separate unlock systems for the classes, expanding customization to the Chaos Space Marine factions available in its Imperium vs. Chaos constraints. However, with just six Operations missions and a handful of PvP maps across its three game types at launch—at least one new PvE mission will release this year, with new PvP maps, modes, and a co-operative horde mode scheduled for 2025, all for free—it’s hard to say just how much longevity there really is at hand to keep you playing regularly once you’re done with the campaign, making Space Marine 2 a tough sell at launch, especially if you pay a premium for editions that offer four days’ early access. Space Marine 2 feels like a sequel to Space Marine that came out a couple of years after the original, rather than nearly 15 years later. In some ways, this is good: Sabre Interactive has taken what worked so well about Relic Entertainment’s original game, and offered it again to audiences in a lavishly detailed scale fit for modern gaming technology. For many, that will be enough: Warhammer games may have diversified in scale and genre in the long years since, from RPGs like Rogue Trader to tactical strategy in Total War: Warhammer or Chaos Gate: Daemonhunters, but rarely has Games Workshop’s world been so immaculately rendered as it is here and in this style of game.. Between a narrative campaign that, while threadbare, leaves things open for more stories to tell in this slice of the Warhammer universe and hopeful support for its multiplayer modes, the blueprint is there for timelier sequels that can advance Space Marine as a franchise beyond these tried and true core pillars. But it doesn’t really offer anything beyond that promise that Space Marine initially laid out all those years ago—making Space Marine 2 feel a little more stuck in the past, rather than necessarily a herald for what can be done with Warhammer games in the not-so-dark future. Space Marine 2 releases on Playstation 5, Xbox Series X and S, and PC on September 9 (or today, September 5, with pre-orders of certain editions). A copy was provided for review purposes. Want more io9 news? Check out when to expect the latest Marvel, Star Wars, and Star Trek releases, what’s next for the DC Universe on film and TV, and everything you need to know about the future of Doctor Who.
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