So far, 2024 has been a good year for action game fans, and Warhammer 40,000: Space Marine 2 is about to make it a great one. The original Space Marine is how I was properly introduced to the Warhammer universe. I still remember watching a hands-on preview by John "TotalBiscuit" Bain and getting hyped up seeing the Chainsword rip through Orks and the Bolter turn heads into mist 13 years ago.
While the original game from 2011, which finally gave us proper Space Marine action, was made by Relic Entertainment, Saber Interactive has taken up the mantle for the sequel. Fans of cooperative action games may remember Saber as the minds behind the World War Z games, and I'm happy to say the studio has taken the best parts of that and injected it straight into Warhammer.
After spending over a dozen hours inside Space Marine 2, going through its campaign, the separate Operation missions, and PVP multiplayer action, I think I'm finally ready to give my thoughts on this action-filled, brutal, and satisfying sequel.
While my points will cover the campaign and gameplay in detail, I've tried to keep this review spoiler-free to keep the storyline and all the cool moments it presents as fresh as possible for anyone jumping in for the first time. With all that out of the way, here is my review of Warhammer 40,000: Space Marine 2.
Campaign
From the moment that the Warhammer 40,000: Space Marine 2 campaign starts, it clearly communicates to the player just what kind of action game this is going to be. Our protagonist falls out of an aircraft, proceeds to walk it off, and then saws through thousands of critters with sharp teeth and claws to accomplish an objective single-handedly, just in the prologue. This sets the tone quite nicely: Space Marines are badasses.
The story has you taking the role of Titus, a soldier who is part of the most powerful group of fighters: the Ultramarines. Even though some corporate shenanigans have him being demoted to a lieutenant, Titus is called back to repel the Tyranid escalating invasion. He is joined by two other Space Marines, which can be bots or other players, and the latter choice is obviously the way to go. Having actual people protecting your back or accidentally abandoning you while joining in on the carnage is exactly how the game is meant to be played, I think.
The war story the campaign presents takes you to multiple planets, dropping our trio to the most desperate situations as regular soldiers look up in awe, expecting you to make miracles happen. Guess what? You simply do what they expect of you. Each level offers brilliant visuals, taking us through everything from landscapes infested with poisonous spores that have transformed the worlds into swamps to gargantuan high-fantasy cities with the sky on fire with the amount of tracer fire being fired upon at the enemies filling the sky.
The levels themselves are quite linear, and objectives are simple at most times, but the fantastic level designs and some delightfully inventive twists were a blast to go through. A couple of examples include even a short sequence where the lights go out in a small room before a horde hits, with only the weapons fire and swords lighting the way, and the fantastically fun levels containing jetpacks where you're stomping everything to dust from the air.
The armor feels heavy, and I mean actually heavy. Saber's animations and camera movements have managed to make it seem like each step of a Space Marine is making the ground sorry for existing. The visceral execution animations are a joy to witness too. Seeing our protagonist grab a Tyranid by its tail and slam it down on its friends, or rip off a spiked claw from a cloaked, Predator-like Lictor and send it through its own skull, or even take out a Chaos Marine by popping the helmet like a soda bottle, all give off such metal vibes. The animations are spectacular, with each weapon offering multiple types of executions to explore with for each enemy. The bombastic gameplay of the campaign is just oozing coolness that has no issues letting you be overpowered.
Gameplay
Seeing thousands of enemies charge over the hilltops and constructing ramps out of their own bodies to climb over fortified positions gave me a strong feeling of Déjà vu. This is where we are finally seeing World War Z's amazing horde technology coming back into play. Instead of zombies like the studio’s earlier game, Tyranid swarms can literally coat the screen as they come screaming through buildings or across fields, giving you only moments to prepare before they hit like a crashing wave. Thankfully, Space Marines are equipped with some heavy weaponry.
Every weapon comes with its attack combos, and they are simple to remember and even easier to execute. You don't have to do any special movement inputs or multiple buttons for spectacular maneuvers that carve up dozens of enemies that are surrounding you. It's all done with one button. Tapping the melee button three times and holding it on the fourth will get you a 360-degree enemy-clearing stomp to get some breathing room while holding that button on the second click would have a more forceful pushback, but only in a certain direction. These are unique for every weapon, with everything from the iconic Chainsword and Powersword to my personal favorite, Thunder Hammer, being available to you for wiping out enemies from existence. Even in the thick of battle, with thousands swarming your squad and an objective in view, combos never become difficult to pull off.
Space Marines aren't complete without their trusty guns, and Saber has delivered on this front too. Multiple types of rifles, carbines, incinerators, and pistols are available to choose from, each being more suited to different kinds of jobs. When coupled with the melee weapons, you will be twirling like a heavily armored ballet dancer, popping heads in one direction and chopping heads off in another direction.
While button mashing can get you far, especially in lower difficulties, there's a certain flow to the combat that you must stick to. Tearing into a boss enemy while dozens of smaller critters poke at you from the sides, while also getting blasted by long-range attacks, can seem overwhelming at first, but that's where the counter shots, parries, and executions come in to save the day. Managing to push back enemies, do a parry, or dodge as an attack is about to hit will offer dazzling opportunities to do a quick shot with your trusty gun. These shots fill up the armor bar, which is a godsend in the middle of massive battles.
Doing significant damage to an enemy will also make them blink red. That's the game communicating that a brutal and satisfying execution can be performed with the press of a button. The best part of all this is each of these actions kick off an animation that makes you invulnerable to damage as they are active while also making nearby enemies get pushed back (sometimes even crushed in an area around you), so you get some breathing room to reorient yourself in the battlefield and go for the important targets.
The only problem I ran into was with the parry system’s notification marker. When an enemy is about to make a staggering attack on your Space Marine, the game provides a blue marker to let you know that a parry is possible. If this is a smaller enemy, it doesn’t matter when you press the parry button; you instantly kill the little beast. However, when it’s a larger and tougher enemy, it seems the parry timing also considers the attack animation, so you have to press it right as the attack is about the land, sometimes multiple times in a row. This is easier to do in calmer situations with a few enemies, but when surrounded by hordes, any blue notification can be a small critter or a big guy lunging. I feel that these could have been two separate icons, or perhaps different colors, at least to make differentiation between them an easier task in battle. Thankfully dodging away provides the same buff as a parry, so that was what I mostly utilized in fights.
To put everything into perspective. In a standard fight, I would be picking off targets with my gun as they charge from a distance, start sawing through them once they group up, parrying and taking counter shots to keep my armor filled up, dodging away from unblockable attacks, throwing grenades to clear out pockets of bad guys, make sure my teammates are doing okay, using my ultimate ability, executing smaller critters to clear some space, taking shots at far away snipers, reviving teammates, and finally progressing through the hordes, like the tank that I am, towards the objectives. It's fantastic. The combat has been tuned to almost perfection.
Operations
Alongside the campaign, Space Marine 2 offers Operations as a selection of side missions you can tackle with your friends or randoms via matchmaking, filled to the brim with even more action. This is where I think the game can expand upon in the future without having to put in entire campaign portions with high-budget cutscenes and set pieces. If you've played Vermintide or Darktide games, Operations are more akin to those experiences: linear with simple objectives but with unending action with dynamic enemy reactions. Even with all the enemy-swarming mechanics and multiple types of monsters, the title does not ship with a horde mode. Operations try to take up the slack here.
Space Marine 2 ships with six of these PvE Operations, and like those other games I mentioned previously, there's class and weapon progression, customizations, as well as multiple difficulty modes to conquer. An AI Director is also present here, which games like Left 4 Dead and World War Z have utilized in the past. To simplify the process, the Director adjusts the number and variety of enemies that are thrown at players on the fly depending on how much trouble they are having at any given moment. If the squad is breezing through the level, the Director will beef up upcoming waves and sprinkle in more heavies, while those that are getting already hammered and barely making it through will get more rest periods and heals spawned for them. This happens outside of the selected difficulty too, all to ensure replayability, and it works here.
There are six classes to choose from when jumping into missions, and each of them comes with special abilities that can be upgraded by playing. After browsing through most of them, which included a Sniper that can go invisible, a Space Marine with a grappling hook, and a shield-toting supporting class, I settled on Assault class because of its extremely versatile jetpack powers. By leveling up and gaining XP, each class can be customized in both looks and performance, with separate weapon enhancements also available. It did seem like it would take a long time to unlock anything worthwhile in this mode, though.
Moreover, from a story perspective, Operations provide an interesting twist. They take place right alongside the campaign's events, just following other squads of Space Marines. These squads communicate with Titus and other Ultramarine characters that appear in the campaign to complete missions that occur concurrently with the main campaign's events. It's a fun little explanation that adds more to the immersion. I just wish there were more of them at launch.
If you're looking for PVP multiplayer, a separate mode named Eternal War is also available. Most of the time I've spent on the campaign and co-op portions, but the few multiplayer games I did jump into gave me mixed impressions. Its gameplay has the same hectic Space Marine melee and gunplay mechanics as the other modes, but now in a six versus six format. It's simple and focused on arcade action, with TDM, Domination, and King of the Hill modes available. An issue I kept facing was the servers. I was constantly being put in high latency matches ranging from 200 to 300 ping. Surprisingly, the rounds still worked mostly okay, just with some stuttering enemies. If you are interested in the game for its campaign and co-op elements, much like I am, I don’t think the multiplayer will be a big draw. But it's still a good button-mashing shooter experience to spend some time in.
Graphics, performance, and audio
Space Marine 2 is a beautiful game. Despite being a third-person perspective entry, every level has so much detail in its environment. The mushroom-filled swamps, the underground caves, the gritty internals of extremely 40K halls, and the literal castles in the sky are breathtaking at times. Even though the game does not use any ray tracing tech, performance seems to be a slight sticking point.
I played the game at 1440p on my Lenovo Legion 5 Pro, housing an RTX 3060 Laptop GPU with 6GB VRAM, an AMD Ryzen 7 5800H CPU, and 16GB of RAM. The is installed on the internal NVMe SSD. It required putting the settings mostly to medium to achieve 60FPS. This was not constant, however. Some levels dropped that frame rate to the 40s at times, mostly when looking towards massive environments as the screen fills with Tyranid hordes. Enabling DLSS (FSR also available) made the frame rate a little bit more consistent, though with the number of moving parts (mostly creatures) the title has at all times on screen, upscaling tech doesn’t look very nice when being used. Unfortunately, there isn’t a benchmarking option to easily compare hardware.
A friend playing the game on an ROG Ally (2023) handheld PC was also surprised by the performance. The settings were put mostly on low with dynamic upscaling enabled, and the device was plugged in for maximum performance, but Space Marine 2 managed to keep the frame rates steady in the 40s range throughout the campaign. This might not be the case with all handhelds, though. Saber has explicitly said that the title has not yet been verified on Steam Deck, and your mileage may also vary on other handhelds like the Lenovo Legion Go. The only bugs I faced in my playthrough of the campaign, Operations, and multiplayer modes were a few connection and ping issues when connecting. Though my friend in the ROG Ally did crash a few times during the intro mission, it was smooth sailing after that.
Graphics and performance aside, the audio is where the main problem of this game lies. The sound effects of weapons and guns are loud and boomy, as they are supposed to be, but looking away from other sources of sounds seems to quieten them a bit too much. Environmental sounds, enemy roars, distant explosions, and dialog from nearby NPCs all seem to get muted the moment you look away and sometimes do not come through at all. It’s unclear what is causing this, but something is certainly up with the surround sounds the title is trying to push to the player.
A Field of View slider is also something I hope the developer will implement in the future. Despite being a third-person experience, when your Space Marine is taking a large amount of space on screen, it would have been nice to expand the FOV a little more to see more of the space you’re fighting in. I’m pretty sure TotalBiscuit would have had some things to say about this omission.
Conclusion
Warhammer 40,000: Space Marine 2 is one of those rare games that land delivering exactly what fans want, does its job better than anyone expected it to, and doesn’t overstay its welcome — even though I want it to. The combat is spectacular, combining the absolutely massive hordes mechanic from Saber Interactive’s previous title plus the raw power of Space Marines into an action game that holds nothing back. Aside from the parrying inconsistencies, the combat has been a joy to experience throughout the campaign and the side Expeditions. The roar of the Chainsword, the crackling of the Lightning Hammer, coupled with the massive boom of Space Marine weaponry, all give of such metal vibes, I cannot wait to jump back into the game again once I’m done writing this review. Adding cooperative multiplayer into the franchise is one of the best decisions the developer could have made. Fighting Tyranids side by side with friends is simply glorious, easily multiplying the brutality that’s on screen.
When a game's gameplay and presentation are on point, the negatives tend to disappear. Even still, I do have some annoyances regarding the audio mixing issues, optimization, confusing parry notifications, and the lack of a FOV slider. Not having an actual horde mode to enjoy when the combat is this satisfying feels like a massive missed opportunity for launch as well.
Even with its issues, Saber Interactive has managed to deliver one of the best action games that I have ever played. This is an easy recommendation for anyone wanting to have an authentic Warhammer Space Marine experience or simply a well-built action game that makes you an overpowered killing machine without any regrets.
Warhammer 40,000: Space Marine 2 launches on September 9 for PC, Xbox Series X|S and PlayStation 5 with a $59.99 price tag. Those pre-purchasing the Gold or Ultra editions can jump into the game right now.
This review of Warhammer 40,000: Space Marine 2 on PC was conducted on a pre-release copy of the Steam version provided by Focus Entertainment.
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