Warhammer 40000: Space Marine Review
Score: 7 out of 10.
Warhammer 40k: Space Marine is the newest game of the Warhammer family. You play as Captain Titus, a Space Marine of the Ultramarines chapter and a seasoned veteran. The guy is quite charismatic, powerful and fairly polite with the ladies too. Just check out how he speaks to Lt Mira, one of the characters you meet.
This review is about the singleplayer part of the game, which is about 8 hours long. While the first impression of the demo leaves you with your jaw open, it doesn't take long for the game to become repetitive. But let's start with the good things.
The Good
Space Marine does justice to the Warhammer 40k world. The atmosphere very much conveys the 40k feel, the graphics are great and so are the animations. The game runs smoothly, and I found just two bugs, one might have to do with my own computer's set up, where the sound every so often "echoed" for no reason.
Another small problem had to do with a combat animation, which bugged for me once in the whole game. Quite minor. I found the voice acting to be good as well, as it brought the characters to life. In other words, immersion wise, Space Marine does an excellent job. Being a big fan of RPG games such as Dragon Age and Mass Effect, immersion is a big factor for me.
The combat in Space Marine feels very good. It's much more dynamic than other games I have played. When you shoot a gun it really feels like you are shooting some really heavy, destructive weapon. The sounds and the feel of the weapons are generally really "satisfying." Combine that with a really fast-paced hack-and-slash melee combat, and you will find yourself wanting to go from one fight to the next, weeding through waves and waves of orks... That, however, can soon become a downside. You get to also use a Jump Pack a couple of times, which makes you, guess what, jump all over the place and land on crowds of orks for some destructive AOE damage. That's probably some of the most fun combat I have experienced, and I wish you get to do that a lot more than you do in the game.
Every so often there was a level where the pace of the combat was totally different, like shooting flying orks from a Valkyrie or sniping away automated turrets. Those were refreshing changes.
The story is quite linear, you go in, fight an Ork invasion, try to make sure they don't get ahold of a powerful weapon developed by an Inquisitor, but "bump" into Chaos forces and that's when it all goes awry. I can't really get into much more detail without spoiling the plot. The more action oriented players will like this — not having to "endure" long conversations with NPCs. The cut scenes exist and they are nice, but they are quite short and to the point, and often you have conversations at the start of missions or when you reach a checkpoint while you are still walking, so you don't get slowed down too much. For other players who like to get more into a story... well, this is not an RPG game, although collecting Servo Skulls which are all over the place allows you to unlock audio logs that will shed more light on what's going on. For the kind of game this is, I find they balanced story telling and action well.
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