As a lifelong Warhammer 40,000 fan, I have to confess to being a little underwhelmed by the playable Space Marine 2 demo that dropped this time last year. Saber Interactive's game looked the part—more so than any other 40k spinoff—but the combat felt too clunky, even bearing in mind the fact that I was playing a huge transhuman lad in power armor. So I was glad when a yearlong delay was announced last November in order to "properly polish the game".
Since then, the devs have had to deal with the fallout from a full build of the game leaking online, (at least it was long out of date), and more recently abandoned a planned public beta test in order to further focus on polish. Which brings us to this week, and a fresh round of playable impressions, the verdict from which is: Actually, this rips.
That's certainly the view of our own Robin Valentine's preview: "That feel, both of the weight and power of a space marine, and of the grim yet hilarious atmosphere of Warhammer 40,000, is the thing I worried Space Marine 2 would get wrong," he wrote. "This hands-on has put any such fears to rest." I consider Robin one of our hardest-to-please editors, so this is good news indeed.
Riding the wave of those good vibes, this morning publisher Focus Entertainment dropped seven minutes of official multiplayer footage. The video includes action from the co-operative PvE Operations mode, as well as some marine-on-marine action from the capture and control PvP modes (embedded above). Playing against real people isn't really what I'm personally looking for from Space Marine 2, but I did love seeing how faithfully Saber has modelled the heretics of the Death Guard, World Eater and Alpha Legion chapters.
My excitement levels for Space Marine 2 have been fully restored. This feels like the inflection point after which, if it's a success, we could see more big budget 40k titles, eventually leading to my dream of Respawn creating an FPS set during the Horus Heresy. For now, if you're feeling thirsty to watch more purging, there is 30 minutes of 4K gameplay on the Punish channel, complete with zero commentary, so you can just enjoy the surprisingly well-written dialogue of Lieutenant Titus and his squadmates as they carve through xenos scum. I've embedded it below, as The Emperor wills.
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