You step onto the battlefield, an eight-foot-tall walking tank. In one hand, you hold a pistol that fires bullets the size of a human fist. In the other, you rev a chainsword that crackles and pops like a lawnmower – all sharp teeth and wiring hunger.
Ahead, humans half your size cower behind the blown out shell of a battle tank. From above, an alien shriek heralds the oncoming swarm, which crashes to the earth in a hail of tentacles, viscera, and endless hunger.
You raise your fist and charge into the seething throng of enemies.
“In the grim darkness of the far future, there is only war.” And in Warhammer 40,000 Space Marine 2, war never felt so good.
Stepping Into Some (Very Big) Shoes
For the uninitiated, Warhammer 40k is a tabletop war game where your army of miniature dudes take on objectives and fight against your opponent’s miniature dudes. The poster children of Warhammer 40k are the Space Marines, genetically engineered super soldiers who fight all manner of nasty aliens in the name of the Emperor of Mankind.
In the first game, Warhammer 40,000: Space Marine, we were introduced to Captain Titus of the Ultramarines. Titus led his squad against a marauding army of Orks and mostly came out on top. I say mostly because he also happened to touch an evil artifact, which caused all his friends to suddenly call him evil… I hate it when that happens!
Warhammer 40,000: Space Marine 2 picks up Titus’ story some 200 years later (yes, Space Marines live a long time). The now demoted Lieutenant Titus is finishing up a stint with the Deathwatch, a special forces Space Marine group, before rejoining the Ultramarines.
Your squad is here to stop a Tyranid assault, an endless swarm of hungry bugs that devour whole planets. Don’t want to get eaten? If you’re a Space Marine, you fight. If you’re an ordinary squishy human, you better run.
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Point and shoot, and shoot and shoot and shoot. Oh, and then stab and stomp.
Space Marine 2 is a third-person shooter at its core. In many ways, it feels older than it is, but that’s not a bad thing. Most of your time will be spent running through relatively linear levels, shooting from the hip at aliens, and attacking them with melee weapons. It harkens back to a time when not every game needed to be an open world, and that’s a great thing.
From the first mission, you’re equipped with a Chainsword, which sounds like the angriest petrol lawnmower in the universe, and tears through Tyranids with incredible ease. You also have a Bolter Pistol, that blows holes through enemies and sounds like God slamming a car door.
Space Marine 2 nails the feedback of the guns and the weightiness of melee combat. As the game went on, there wasn’t one melee or ranged weapon that didn’t just feel right, which made for a spectacular core gameplay loop.
As Titus, you have armour and health meters, which deplete one after the other when taking damage. Health can only be refilled with medkits or certain abilities, while armour is refilled by performing executions. When you knock an enemy down to a portion of their health they’ll enter a staggered state, and can then be executed. These are wildly flashy kills where Titus might tear off a Tyranid’s arm-blade and run them through with it, or flip the enemy onto its back and stomp it, spraying blood all over.
You can also parry or block incoming attacks, staggering or killing enemies outright. For the Haumagaunts (smaller Tyranids), a well timed parry will see Titus throw out a hand and catch the enemy mid-air by the tail, then swing it into the ground in front of him, clearing the space of other enemies and leaving a bloody mess.
When you get into a rhythm with your weapons, it can feel like you’re playing with cheats on – you’re killing enemies left and right, doing spectacular execution moves, and watching your health and armour stay topped up, which actively encourages you to stay in the fight. It’s wild.
The Emperor Protects
Titus is a walking tank, Space Marines are commonly eight feet tall, and covered head to toe in armour. Think Doom Guy plus Judge Dread plus the Power Loader from Alien. At certain points, when you’re fighting against ordinary humans, a simple dodge roll is enough to turn them into strawberry jam. As far as games go, this is the closest you’ll likely get to feeling like a Space Marine.
The game does a great job of making you feel heavy while you’re moving around, from the rumble of the sound design, to the little haptic feedback blips on the DualSense controller, in time with Titus’ shoes. When you first get your hands on an Assault Jump Pack, hooooo boy – you’ll shoot into the air like an angry firework and crash down on enemies in a hail of broken rock and viscera. It’s beautiful.
A common sight is piles of Tyranids clambering over one another to climb a wall or emplacement, in these moments you can shoot the pile or toss in a grenade to send them tumbling in a bloody heap. It’s no small wonder that the developers previously built the World War Z video game, those towering mounds of zombies definitely laid the groundwork for the Tyranids.
Some of the best encounters happen when Titus and his squad are sent in to help regular humans defend against overwhelming hordes of hungry aliens. Ordinary Imperial Guard troopers are barely waist-high on the hulking Marines, so seeing the immense might of the Tyranid force, compared to normal humans, is horrifying. You’ll be standing in a military emplacement, your gun firing non-stop, trying to thin out the overwhelming horde before they get to you, knowing that when they do you’ll only have your knife handy. I mean, really the knife is all you need, but it’s still exhilarating.
The Space Marines may be comparatively few in number, but a squad of these walking, scowling refrigerators can turn the tide of almost any war in the 41st millennium.
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I Need Guns, Lots Of Guns
Over the course of the campaign, your arsenal of weapons steadily grows, starting with a standard rifle, chainsword and pistol. Every level or so that expands to include plasma pistols, storm hammers and radiation-spewing Melta Guns.
Before starting a mission you’ll select your loadout, but you can also find weapons as you go. Often at restock points where you can refill ammunition, grenades and change weapons. It’s a great way to learn all the different guns, with the weapon supplied giving you an idea of what’s coming up, like a sniper rifle for an overwatch section.
At a glance, many of the rifles are hard to tell apart. I mean what’s the difference between a Marksman Bolt Carbine, a Stalker Pattern Carbine, a Heavy Bolt Rifle, and an Oculus Bolt Carbine!? You do get a popup when you hover over them, with information like ‘long range’, ‘short range’, etc. But more often than not, you’ll be happy with something that goes boom and makes enemies go splat.
Your melee weapon choices are a little slimmer than with guns. You have the chainsword, combat knife, power sword, and thunder hammer for the campaign. Power Fist is also an option for multiplayer progression but doesn’t show up in Titus’ story.
Each weapon has a unique feel and moveset, and you’ll often find alternate options as the levels go on, so you can try most of the weapons across your campaign.
Enemy hitboxes and weapon attacks feel great – in larger fights you’ll often be utterly surrounded, and you’ll see the tip of your chainsword, or the back swing of a power hammer, catch enemies to the side or behind you. It makes those huge crowd fights feel visceral, with every swing chipping away at the endless horde.
Welcome, Battle Brothers
Back when I played the original Warhammer 40,000: Space Marine, one of the most common requests that went around my friendship group was “Why can’t we play together?”.
So it’s been a strong selling point for the sequel that multiplayer has been built into the core of the game. The entire campaign can be played in co-op, with the host playing Titus and additional players taking over NPC marines Gadriel and Chairon. Playing through most of the campaign solo, I found the AI to be quite good, but it doesn’t hold a candle to having real human players backing you up.
As the story progresses, there are a number of set points where Titus requests the backup of more Space Marines to complete his objective. For example, when Titus and his crew need to save an Adeptus Mechanicus researcher, he wants another squad to detonate a flammable Prometheum field nearby (think space petrol). If you jump into the multiplayer operations mode at this point, you and two friends will take command of that additional squadron and support Titus’ main objective.
You’ll get to choose from one of six classes of Space Marine, with the classic Tactical Marine being closest to Titus. Then you have a stealthy Vanguard class, a Sniper, a Heavy gunner, the jump-pack-wearing Assault class, and a Bulwark who lends support with their huge shield.
Throughout these missions, you’ll get updates from Titus on how his mission is progressing, or when playing as Titus, you’ll hear the exploits of the second squad – it’s very cool to see multiplayer tied so directly into the main story.
There are six missions at launch, each taking around 40 minutes, with more promised post-launch.
Your class levels up as you complete missions across Operations and the PvP Eternal War mode. Earning you access to passive class perks, as well as unlocking more armour sets designed after famous Space Marine chapters (and some Chaos as well).
It feels like a standard live service model. You level up your class as well as your weapons and earn cosmetics as they increase. There is a Season Pass tied into this system as well, but we’ll need to see the live version to comment on its implementation. The team has said items in the Season Pass are purely cosmetic.
In the grim darkness of the far future
The universe of Warhammer 40,000 is wildly unique – it’s a galaxy-sized melodrama set in the 41st millennium, filled with gothic horror, space knights, and oozing existential dread. The thing that Space Marine 2 does incredibly well is make you feel a part of that universe. It’s something that countless games have tried, and only a few have succeeded at.
Every building you stalk through is a massive gothic cathedral, every computer you interact with is a part of the large Machine Spirit worshipped by techpriests who are more mechanic than ecclesiastical, and every human is one tiny speck awash in a galaxy of blood and war.
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Everything the Ultramarines do is done with such fervour and ferocity that it would seem ridiculous in our world. They are so impossibly black and white that straying a foot from outside the path of The Emperor of Mankind is punishable by death. It’s hilariously dark then to see over and over again characters accuse each other of heresy as if they are the sole arbiter of goodness, and threaten death to anyone who disagrees. Only in a world this grim could the savagely violent, but steadfast Ultramarines be the good guys.
Space Marine 2 is impossibly over the top and exaggerated, but for fans of the genre, it’s exactly what you’ve been waiting for.
Staring into The Warp [Spoilers ahead]
If you’re someone who is turned off by spoilers, and want to go into the game fresh, feel free to skip ahead here. Though if you’d like to know a bit more about how the story evolves, and some of the later enemies – read on.
Those who played Warhammer 40,000: Space Marine (two generations ago, now I feel older than The Emperor), will remember that the core campaign had you fighting Orks. The Greenskins were huge in number, though not as many as the Tyranids, but they weren’t the only foe. Towards the end of the game Titus found a Chaos artifact and fought against Chaos forces and Daemons of Korne, the dark god of slaughter.
This new game is no different. At around the halfway point we get whispers of chaos powers appearing on the battlefield, along with scrawlings in blood and the usual cult shenanigans. It’s then that we get the first glimpse of the true enemy – Chaos Space Marines in service to a Chaos Sorcerer of Tzeentch. He and his henchmen are a whole new affair when it comes to battle.
While the Tyranids rely on overwhelming numbers with a few more powerful bruiser and sniper units, the Chaos Space Marines are infinitely more organised and coordinated. They have units called Tzangors (basically demon bird men) who charge with sword and shield to tie you in melee combat. All the while the Chaos Marines stay back and pepper you with bolter fire, flame throwers, even missile launchers.
These Chaos Space Marines are the Thousand Sons, they boast very Egyptian-style armour and are the most magically adept of the Chaos Marine chapters. As such, you’ll see them teleporting around the battlefield, casting illusory duplicates of themselves, causing visual distortions and occasionally flying and hurling fireballs.
They’re a great contrast to the Tyranids for the second half of the game, because they often require more of a tactical approach, and give much more attention to ranged combat.
There are even some hints towards the end of Necron technology in the story. Since we’ve had one game with Orks and Korne, then one with Tyranids and Tzeentch, let’s all pray to the Dark Gods that it won’t be long before we see a Space Marine 3 with Necrons and Nurgle or Slaanesh. Noise Marines or Death Guard would be wild.
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Should I buy Warhammer 40,000: Space Marine 2?
I’m a big fan of story in games. I love RPGs, strategy, narrative games, and a great deal of indie titles. But at the end of the day, I also love a spectacular, blood-drenched walk through an alien landscape. I love a game that fills you with dread as you see an endless swarm of enemies charging towards you, where you feel the rumble of cannon fire through your teeth, and watch explosives tear through bunkers like paper.
Space Marine 2 does all this and more, and after a long day, sometimes you just want to feel like an 8-foot titan in power armour. This is the best Warhammer game I’ve ever played, and anyone who disagrees can pry my chainsword from my cold dead hands.
Warhammer 40,000: Space Marine 2 is coming to PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X|S and PC via Steam on September 10th and starts at around $90 AUD.
Quest Daily scores Warhammer 40,000: Space Marine 2:
9/10
A review copy of Warhammer 40,000: Space Marine 2 was supplied to Quest Daily for the purpose of this review.
