There are few ways to make me feel old as effective as telling me that Warhammer 40,000: Space Marine came out (quite a bit) more than a decade ago. Yet Steam delivered the grim tidings of my advancing decrepitude in September 2021 (now itself kind of a while ago) with a cheery update to the game, which gave me all the downloadable content and magically transformed it into a ‘10th Anniversary Edition’. This game was released back when Dawn of War was still the golden child of the 40K gaming universe, and despite how skeptical I was that developer Relic could pivot from base-builder strategy to third-person hack-slash-shooter, they carried it off well.
Space Marine has since stuck itself in the collective consciousness of anyone into both 40K and videogames, spoken of in increasingly reverent tones over time even as the estimations of its sister RTS has declined (particularly after Dawn of War III). Surprising everyone, the big Games Workshop machine announced Space Marine II, following up on the plot of the first combined with the new gubbins they’ve been advancing inside the 40K lore-verse, though it’s no longer developed by Relic.
The central features of Space Marine’s combat are the melee whacking and the health-restoring executions. The game, of course, is a third-person shooter, so there’s a lot of shooting too, which is punchy and all the weapons feel like they serve a purpose throughout the campaign. I have vague memories of 2011, and the increasing prevalence of canned kills was becoming a bit of a gripe at the time, and for some this game changed their minds. This direction of travel continued, of course, and I think that Space Marine did serve as inspiration for games like 2016’s Doom, which really improved on the executions-for-health formula.
It’s not as polished, fast, or refined as Doom, and the lack of invincibility means you can’t use them in a panic to regain health, but once you get into the swing of it there’s a good rhythm to shooting, whacking, stunning and executing. They’re quite enjoyable in Space Marine, with a good sense of heft and brutality, though they can be quite temperamental when foes are near geometry. Oftentimes you’ll be chainsawing an Ork that’s a little further away than the game thinks it is, or stomping someone literally into a wall.
Something that you don’t notice so much ten years on, but I remember remarking on at the time, is the total absence of a cover system. The cultural landscape of the third-person shooter circa 2011 was still dominated by the cover-shooter at the zenith of games like Gears of War. The choice not to use the in-vogue regenerating health and magnetised chest-high walls was almost brave. In fact, there’s a lot of stuff that’s notable by its absence in Space Marine – even though half the game has you hanging out with your squad, the game has no way to meaningfully interact with them, and you can’t give them orders. This is a game entirely focused on you, as Big Boy Captain Titus, running around the level shooting and chopping the foes of the Imperium, and it does a great job at that; just don’t expect anything else.
I chose to play Space Marine on Hard this time, having completed the game on Normal the first time I played it (I usually like to try out a game’s ‘medium’ difficulty first, as this is usually where the designers have given the most attention). I was a little worried going into this that it would irreparably damage the central power fantasy that makes Space Marine’s combat enjoyable; slashing through hordes of enemies as a nigh-invulnerable hulk in 8 feet of power armour. Surprisingly, it held up pretty well and, if anything, added to the experience. My fuzzy, decade-old memories of playing this game when it came out tell me that I didn’t make much use of some of the game’s core mechanics, like the Fury activation, or throw too many grenades, or consider enemy types when choosing weapons before an encounter. There’s just a little added layer of tactical depth when it comes to playing the game through as a slightly more delicate 8ft hulk.
You have to select targets with increased precision. While the most deserving of instant death are the Orkish rocket launcher Boyz and Nobz, any ranged unit slides a few tiers up on the murderisation matrix, as their piddling damage individually starts to stack up if not eliminated. The Chaos enemies are a bit of another bag, and my biggest complaint about the game’s combat balancing. The enemy Space Marines are pretty tanky, which is fine, but they’re also designed specifically to be killed by canned execution and will otherwise survive quite a long time. The renegade guardsmen also do quite a lot of damage, and alongside really high-damaging foes like the floating Psykers it adds up to a lot more time pretending Space Marine is a cover shooter and cowering behind metal boxes. The game also commits one cardinal sin, one borderline unforgivable crime – cutscenes are unskippable, and the checkpoint for the last boss places you right before one of the game’s longest. Absolutely heinous.
Non-shooty bits are virtually nonexistent. There are a few quiet moments of downtime where you are forced to walk and talk, but the pacing reminds me mostly of something like Gears of War, another game where you play gruff spacedudes. The ‘downtime’, such as it is, mostly consists of walk-and-talk sections where you’re forced down to normal speed while you wander through an area with guardsmen or chat on the radio past some scenery after a set-piece moment. In a classic blast-from-the-past, collectibles are solely audio logs, hidden variously in random bits of levels.
What’s most bizarre is that there are clearly tons of other bits of the levels that could have stuff in them, but don’t – if you waste time poking around every hallway or open door, you might be left scratching your head. I attribute this to the fact that levels from singleplayer are recycled either in part or whole in the multiplayer modes, including the co-op Exterminatus. Interestingly, I thought that something about the way I play games had fundamentally changed; in many new games I find myself looking around for collectibles and secrets way more than before. On reflection, playing a game with design sensibilities so staunchly 7th-gen as this, I’m pretty sure it’s just that collectibles used to be much more sparse and level design used to waste your time more.
There aren’t really a lot of games coming out anymore like Warhammer 40,000: Space Marine. That isn’t to say that there are no more third-person shooters, but rather that the market aim of this game has disappeared in the intervening decade. This is a relatively-polished, singleplayer-focused game with a campaign mode that lasts about 5 hours, give or take. It’s clearly not got a gigantic budget, even for the time, but it’s impossible to imagine something like Space Marine getting greenlit today. Players would almost certainly throw a fit over the lack of content, there’s no live-service elements, not even an upgrade tree. Of course, in that inexplicable way of things, despite being a mid-budget or AA title, Space Marine still somehow finds scope to hire a celebrity voice actor (Mark Strong) to play Captain Titus – not returning for the new game, but he’s been replaced by another actor, though a lower-profile one.
You just play the game and shoot dudes, and that’s fine. The multiplayer modes are also fine, though not outstanding – better than could be said for a few other games like this, where they were tacked-on. I wish the co-op mode had got a bit more love, given how much people liked the vaguely-similar Last Stand mode/standalone thing for Dawn of War II: Retribution, though since these games existed at around the same time I can understand Relic maybe not wanting to step on their own toes. Maybe I’ll eat my own words here and Space Marine 2 will follow the same formula as the first game, but I doubt it. The original is the sort of game that would average just under 80 on Metacritic, and appeared right as this sort of game was fading quietly from existence, which makes its revival in a sequel all the more surprising.
So, what of the plot, the atmosphere, and the general 40K-ness – that particular metric by which so many of the franchise’s games live or die? While it’s not quite got the exact scale and quality I remember from 2011, having aged, much of the atmosphere is still there, especially when it comes to the enormous factories, huge trains and mega-architecture of the Forge World on which the game is set. Some of the texture-work is a bit muddy and there’s some low-res stuff on close inspection (and a couple still-image skyboxes) but the general impression is there. Many of the outdoor environments are where the game’s age really shows, and while you can argue that the bombed-out grey hab-blocks and brownish trenches are authentically part of the setting, they’re not executed with huge success, feeling a bit low-detail. Don’t let this detract too much though, as many of the good bits really do kick ass. I remember being stunned by how cool the Marines themselves look, and they still look excellent now. The lighting is a particular strength, and as Titus’s big ol’ power-boots thud down the hallway of a ransacked factory-cathedral, purity seals streaming from his hyper-detailed armour, the game feels really alive.
Speaking of Titus himself, people really love this guy. I think he’s sort of the classic ‘protagonist Space Marine’ of the sort you see in a lot of 40K material. By that I mean he doesn’t hew too closely to the Imperium’s bureaucratic rules (plot-relevant), has a distinct human side, and lacks that sort of helmeted transhuman inscrutability that other stuff will often lean into. In this way, he reminds me of other centre-stage Space Marines who get given a more empathetic view for the benefit of the audience, like the Horus Heresy’s Garviel Loken. He’s flanked by a limited secondary cast, mostly just grizzled-veteran Sidonus and rulebound rookie Leandros, who’s always there to bother Titus when he strays from the official policies of Space Marinery. The voice cast is still notably solid, with Mark Strong’s turn as the very-shiny cool-dude Titus sounding about as heroic as ever a Space Marine has.
The plot of the game is quite basic, but feels correctly immersed in that Warhammer 40,000 juice that everyone likes. Orks are threatening to completely overtake a vital Forge World, the products of which are too essential to lose for the sprawling Imperium. Of course, like many 40K stories it uses the Imperium of Man as a protagonist faction. It also stars a Space Marine chapter as upstanding and regular as the Ultramarines. As a result, it’s not exactly the most nuanced material in the 40K setting. There are bits of it, here and there; blaring announcements reminding the factories’ workers that they must fulfil their quotas, even as the invasion causes thousands of absences, and many voice logs that shine a bit of light into the cold-hearted bureaucracy that really isn’t too fussed about all the people as long as the Manufactorum stays intact. If you’re used to the bloody and complex plotlines that are present in the best of the setting’s stories, Space Marine might not live up to it, but it has its own tensions that play out, especially as the forces of Chaos become a problem and Leandros gets upset. The game ends on a cliffhanger, which up until recently we all assumed would never be resolved.
Space Marine isn’t perfect, but it is solid. It’s a sparse game in many ways, one that feels tied to an earlier age of short, cinematic shooter campaigns. If new games feel unnecessarily padded and drawn-out to you, that might be sweet relief. That really is more than you can say about many games released for the 40K franchise in the last few years. While there have been a few diamonds and a few games that showed promise (Necromunda: Hired Gun and Mechanicus come to mind), there’s also been an awful lot of dross. Since the license’s release from the rigor mortis grip of THQ, the approach has been much more scattergun, for better or for worse.
I have a bit of a habit of revisiting things with a critical eye, so I worry I’ve been a bit unfair on Space Marine, a game I genuinely like, here. In fact, it’s an interesting artifact of this game’s form-factor, I think. These games, about the length of two movies and running entirely on big-explosion set-pieces, have a habit of just enjoyably sliding past the eyes. The gameplay is genuinely solid – and scales well with difficulty, which is nice – with a good mixture of target-selecting ranged shootygunsand melee combat. The setting of the game is mostly still impressive and it’s graphically not aged too badly, as long as you don’t look too close. Like many things in 40K, it feels like a relic of a bygone age, but not really in a bad way. Though I wish that this wasn’t the case, that the last decade had been kinder to 40K games, Space Marine remains steadfast as one of the most memorable games in the setting.
I recently wrote on another good game featuring old gods hungry for murder (a bit of a tenuous link) in Paradise Killer. Nevi and George are forever painting little 40K fellas, like in their Hobby Roundup for this January. And this one’s not related at all but George also wrote about Rounds, a great wee game.
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Bits & Pieces 
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