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 what some fans want to play: it has to be grim, it has to be dark, it has to have enough gore, and it has to have both recognizable nods and oblique references that adhere closely to our “core brand values.” Plus, I suppose, there should be a video game in there somewhere.
But don’t worry, Inquisitor fans in the audience: in the slice of Space Marine 2 I played, I pretty much performed the entire gamut of 40K-isms in the first two minutes – and I have to admit, I think it’s brilliant. Your squad of Space Marines squabble over treachery and point fingers at perceived betrayals of the Empire, before descending from their transport into a vast, besieged Gothic citadel. Groups of Imperial guardsmen quake, rally, and occasionally get smacked by a Commissar for showing cowardice, beneath the fluttering, baby-like wings of their cherubic servants. The voices of a deep, virile choir soar. You grab a gun and a sidearm and choose between a knife, a power sword, or a chainsword (you know what you're picking), then you clatter through more gothic corridors, a gate closes behind you, and in the most 40K moment of all, you find yourself immediately overwhelmed by a swarm of Tyrants without so much as a “press B to crouch” to prepare.
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Thankfully, another 40K accuracy point saves the day here: you are wonderfully overpowered in Space Marine 2, at least in this mid-game mission (and on the standard difficulty I played on). You can switch between a bit of frantic button mashing and more thoughtful parrying and comboing when the mood strikes and still get by just fine. That’s a good thing. You are the Emperor’s will made flesh. Using your bare fists to smash Tyrannical skulls by the dozen is exactly where you should be.
On higher difficulties and at more climactic moments, you’ll have to engage with Space Marine 2’s systems a little more actively. At base level, you have a dodge, to avoid unblockable melee attacks with the classic red warning ring or heavily telegraphed sniper fire. As mentioned, your melee weapon can also parry other melee attacks or be used to block by holding down the button. You also have a few different grenades to choose from and an ultimate ability of some sort – and as Lieutenant Demetrian Titus returns from the first Space Marine for this campaign, it’s a sort of war cry buff that gives you extra damage and heals you to full health, with a pretty hefty cooldown of over two minutes.
Where things get a little more interesting is in the importance of timing, target priority, and combos. Different combinations of tapping and holding melee attacks will mix up the complexity in a fairly standard way, but perfectly timing a parry gives you a window to tap the right trigger for a kind of special headshot animation that opens up heavier enemies for a execute. Executing enemies recharges one of your shield bars, offering a nice modern Doom-style cycle of using offensive moves as a defensive tool: suddenly, lower health means you're effectively hunting for heavies to kill, as they're easier to set up for the finishing blow.
These are modern touches to what remains decidedly, and frankly, delightfully, old-school video games. The campaign is strictly linear from what I’ve played, with the occasional side alley offering breakable crates with temporary shield boosts, ammo, and health packs inside. You’ll shuffle from one gathering point to the next with your squadmates at your side, swapping weapons from the environment, almost Halo-like, on a whim, and cutting down almost incomprehensible hordes of xenos scum as you go. At its busiest, combat can be almost unreadable, in fact, but strangely that’s never a problem, if anything it’s a plus. Just close your eyes and trust your chainsword to slice through the gristle as required, as any good Space Marine should.
The campaign section concluded with some even more 40K scene-chewing: accusations of heresy and twisted minds and, of course, Chaos. A fairly standard but enjoyable boss fight ensues: a floating bad guy with ranged attacks, area-of-effect attacks, and periods of vulnerability and invulnerability, combined with masses of grunts on the ground.
This, I must warn, is where some serious technical issues really started to bite me. My first moments were confounded by an audio bug where mouths would move about two seconds after dialogue was triggered, but at moments like the start of this boss fight, the game slowed to a stop-motion stutter. Most likely, this is perhaps the PC game's annoying shader compilation stuttering issue rearing its head. Standard troubleshooting for other causes, like moving the game to my faster NVMe SSD for example, didn't fix the issue, and it was at its worst when a lot of effects were on screen for the first time at once – though fair warning, I'm not a tech expert here, and things may obviously change as we get closer to launch.
Interestingly, these technical issues weren’t as much of an issue in the online PvE sections of Space Marine 2 that 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’s finger-waving squadmates, Chairon and Gadriel, for up to three-player co-op), and there are also separate online missions in a mode called Operations. These are triggered from a terminal in a hub area and can be matched automatically. Additionally, you can play them as your own custom Marine.
This is the flipside of the modernization coming to an otherwise very classic gameplay experience: in fact, Operations mode feels like developer Saber Interactive’s take on Fatshark’s late-2022 Warhammer 40K: Darktide. You’ll select your mission difficulty (with higher ones being discouraged without proper meta-progression in your character), group up, and drop in to work through linear missions with massive, multi-phase hordes around certain objectives. At first glance, it’s missing some of the supreme atmosphere work found in Darktide’s more claustrophobic quarters deep in its hive city. Space Marine 2’s action is also more subpar, at least on the lower levels I was stuck with as an unleveled character. Under these conditions, missions were mostly about standing on top of a ledge while hundreds of Tyranids scale it and simply melee each other.
The flipside is that progression is more structured and less loot-based: there are more skill trees for active and passive bonuses, more classes with slightly varied combat styles, and, most importantly, a highly detailed cosmetics system for painting your marine, with a good portion of its options available for free simply by progressing through the game.
On the class front, I opted for the Vanguard, which offered a close-range specialization with a rumbling meltagun and a special grappling hook with a short cooldown that pulls you toward enemies like Doom Eternal’s Meat Hook. The result was a cycle of scalpel-like precision, picking out the heaviest threats, lunging at them, mowing them down, and launching you toward the next, while teammates focused on the larger hordes. The moment-to-moment divide between classes doesn’t feel as stark as it was in Darktide, which isn’t a deeply tactical shooter per se, but one where a giant shield-wielding Ogryn and a fragile, head-bursting Psyker at least offer the most variance, but there’s some hope it could get there. The Sniper class here, for example, can use camouflage to turn invisible and pick off heavies from a distance, while the Assault is a purely melee-and-pistol build with a jetpack. As for Bulwark, they could potentially fill the role of the big guy with the big shield. I would need a lot more time with each, obviously, to really see how they evolve.
In a way, though, that’s not so much a problem 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 horrific places it can take you, but that’s far from its primary purpose. Rather, the joy of Space Marine 2 is in jumping abruptly 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 hitting the emote button to scream a feverish cry of glory to the Emperor, and tickling that part of the brain that simply loves shooting a rushing wave of squishy aliens across a long, narrow bridge. One of the best parts of the brain, I think. This is a double-A game in triple-A clothes, in many ways, simple pleasures and only the occasional snafu, with a layer of dark, gothic fidelity on top. Bliss.