Warhammer 40,000: Space Marine 2 Review

Game Title: Warhammer 40,000: Space Marine 2
Platform: PC
Release Date: 9th September, 2024
Developer: Saber Interactive

What’s Warhammer 40,000: Space Marine 2 about?

Warhammer 40,000: Space Marine 2 starts off by introducing back Demetrian Titus, a soldier from the first title that has been injured and welcomed back to service and demoted where you must take on missions to fight a species called Tyranids. You then start going on missions to other planets to fight hordes of these creatures. These creatures are some sort of Xeno-type creatures that resembles the xenomorphs from Aliens to be honest. The game is set as a co-op based 3rd person shooter that has you and two others take on many Tyranids. I decided to play the game by myself however for this review.

Like the first game, it takes a lot from the gears of war games with similar weapons, movement and finish type moves even chainsaw cutting through bodies. Some differences do exist though like having a sword to perform melee attacks on the enemies and have a parry system that awards you for proper parry’s with extended rebounds and gun shot attacks that either weaken or kill enemies depending on level. As you start off with Titus, he has been disgraced and severely weakened and must go through surgery before he becomes a new class of marine to aid in the orders service.

You then start taking orders from the captain who makes it known he’s not happy with you returning to service but lets you take on missions regardless. Most of your dialogue you hear from the NPC other two characters in the campaign talk about your past exploits and question your return also but Titus asserts his command pretty quickly and they will follow you into combat.

While i was running about hacking and slashing in Warhammer 40,000: Space Marine 2 i couldn’t help but feel the repetitive nature of the game, repeating the same gameplay tropes with a different map but with the same outcome. The climbing Tyranids up the sides of walls that you must shoot down before they’re able to climb up the wall or you use the limited grenades on them to stint their climbing also. While there is other modes aside from single player like the operations mode or the Eternal war mode where you get to do more campaign type missions or player a 6x mode that lets you choose classes and play the game a little different than the normal single player. You can check out some of this action is the video below on our Youtube channel that showcase first 4-5 hours of gameplay.

What’s the combat and controls like?

The controls in Warhammer 40,000: Space Marine 2 are pretty standard for this type of game with RB/Mouse Right Click been the light attack button and RT/Mouse Left Button been the heavy attack and gun fire. You can also dodge or parry attacks with B/Space and while animation felt a little clunky, i think this was a desired effect by the developers to portray just how big the characters are and the weight of their armor. The shooting is okay, with recoil where it should be and the kill red hit marker is nice. I found myself just mashing the melee buttons a lot, specially when i was been over run by hordes as my NPC’s done what seemed to be not a lot but at least they did revive me had the need arisen which was great.

How does the game look graphically?

The PC Version of the game which i played has some great graphics and supports 3 AI upscale options from FSR1 , FSR2 and DLSS 3. The game looked great on mostly High settings and i used Nvidia’s DLSS 3 when i played it on my PC. The volumetrics and lightings is fantastic and the backdrops and level design is nice.

There is a lot of enemies on screen when you get to certain points in the game and kind of reminded me of the rats in a plagues tale fire could deter them in stages and they looked great. As for frame count, it was all over the place on my RTX 3080, getting 180 frames to 20 on occasions but for most of the game, it held up fine under mostly a high settings configuration.

There was no sign of any raytracing options in the settings and didn’t really notice any such features in the game and since the game happens mostly in a dark setting, there not much time for shadows or ray traced lighting and others. The lighting in the game and particles are spot on for what they are and the game does look great in many fronts.

Conclusion

Warhammer 40,000: Space Marine 2 is a great game in many aspects and while i know of the Warhammer franchise, i wouldn’t be someone who knows the lore or even played with the board games and my experience with Warhammer was mostly with videos games like Space Marine or Vermintide titles. This means you could play this title easily without knowing the lore and i have enjoyed my playthrough and it’s refreshing to play a game that is just plain fun back to basics. You could jump in and out of Space Marine 2 easily lone ranger or with friends and not get tired, specially if you enjoy the hack and slash genre. While there is room for improvement, i look forward to seeing what Saber Interactive have in store for the future with Warhammer 40,000: Space Marine 2.