Warhammer 40K: Space Marine 2 review in progress — Absolutely GOREgeous!

It is the 42nd Millennium, during the Era Indomitus, and the Age of the Dark Imperium. Eternal War rages across the universe as myriad forces crossing species innumerable unleash terror on mankind. Thankfully, the God Emperor protects and he gave us the Space Marine. Born of advanced sciences, technology, and genetic manipulation, these eight foot tall Adeptus Astartes warriors are the bulwark holding back the Warp and all the heretic forces that would otherwise consume mankind. Welcome to our review in progress for Warhammer 40K: Space Marine 2.

While it’s not stated directly, we can infer from two new service studs drilled into his head that we’ve joined Captain Titus 200 years after the events of the first game. I could tell you about how things kick off, but wow do you just need to watch the first 30 minutes of this game. If this doesn’t a.) blow your mind and b.) make you excited for what lies ahead, you might want to check your pulse.

Struck down and remade with a gene seed, Captain Titus receives an honor that almost no Space Marine has survived – being made Primaris. He’s also been accused of the worst possible heresy, corruption, and has been demoted to Lieutenant. Now serving in the Deathwatch Ultramarines (a Black Shield, specifically), he is to serve under the watchful eye of his chapter’s Chaplain. A new threat has descended upon mankind – the Tyranids. Tyranids are predatory insect-like organisms driven by a central Hive Mind aiming to sweep across with the sole purpose of the total destruction of all life. Joining the Astra Militarum (the Imperial Guard – the primary human defense force of the 41st Millennium), Titus is assigned to a small contingent aboard the Battle Barge Resilient in the desperate hope to stem the tide of this coming invasion.

At its core, Warhammer 40K: Space Marine 2 is a blend of the best melee parts of Gears of War and the close combat of a game like Halo or similar frenetic shooters. A third-person action game, it is fantastically brutal, and frankly that word “brutal” just isn’t sufficient to describe what it’s like to play. The team at Saber Interactive have utilized their Swarm Engine that they previously employed for their well-populated zombie shooter World War Z, and it shows. Where the previous game would have dozens of orcs on screen, the Tyranid invasion consists of thousands of xenos at any given time. During multiple parts of the game you’ll encounter dozens of highly-detailed marines fighting against hundreds of creatures, showcasing the power of this engine, all while Chaos literally rips through the seams of the Warp in the background. It’s a gorgeous game from top to bottom.

Another area where Space Marine 2 shines is in its blood. Whether it be with a powersword, chainsword, combat knife, powerfist, or overwhelmingly-powerful Thunderhammer, everything you hit splashes blood absolutely everywhere. It sprays across your armor, on the enemy, on walls, and absolutely drowns the ground in slick ichor. Every strike has weight to it, and with the fantastic Swarm Engine, the brutality is conveyed visually. It’s also one of the first changes, arguably an improvement, you’ll find from the first game. In the first Space Marine game, when you engaged a foe up close and executed them, it refilled your health bar. That system is gone, replaced by a multi-pip armor meter. Each class has some amount of armor pips for the enemy to grind through before their health starts taking a hit, and it’s recharged by getting up and close with the enemy and executing them.

Every enemy in the game can and will attempt to swarm you. A small blue circle will appear when you can intercept that attack with a counterattack. Smaller foes might be snatched out of the air, slammed to the ground, and stomped into the dirt. If you’re wielding a chainsword, you might just catch them and cut them in half. Larger foes will be cut from bottom to top or visa versa, and it just gets more brutal from there. If you block an incoming attack, it might put a small target on your foe, allowing you to also counter them with a quick pistol blast. Combinations are there to learn, making combat deeper than it appears on the surface. While you might get away with simply hacking and slashing in earlier parts of the game, later levels will overwhelm you with foes. Enemies can also unleash devastating unblockable attacks (reddish orange circle to indicate), obliterating your armor and large chunks of your health. There are five difficulty levels and the normal tier is challenging enough – check your ego if you attempt to climb that ladder.

To help you combat the forces of Chaos, Space Marine 2 can be played either solo, or with up to two additional players. The AI has improved some since the earlier hands-on time with the game, and it’s more than possible to beat the game with them without feeling like they’re dead weight. They’ll never replace a person, of course, and the fun factor is multiplied dramatically by battling with your brothers and sisters.

Each character has an ultimate ability. Lieutenant Titus has a Fury ability that has him dropping a battle standard, multiplying damage output dramatically for the entire team, for a short period of time. Other skills have you scanning the environment, again multiplying damage, but also highlighting foes, be they visible or otherwise. Another class might greatly increase the armor or ability to deflect incoming damage. In the campaign, these are locked as you’re playing specific characters, but Operations and Eternal War are a whole different thing.

The campaign is split across five missions to three different planets – Kadaku, Avarax, and Demerium. Each of these missions are rather lengthy, and often multi-part, taking roughly an hour or up to double that to complete. The final mission is absolutely massive, and easily one of the best closing fights I’ve faced in a very long time. Games always aim to make you feel like a total badass in service of something larger than yourself. This is FAR larger. I’ll not spoil it, but it has some serious cheer-out-loud moments.

Operations are an awesome piece of the story that you can easily miss if you don’t frequently check the Battle Barge map. In it you’ll see one of the six Operations lit up when they’re no longer going to spoil the storyline. These represent essentially “side missions” for your brothers that are in direct support of your main campaign, and each one is almost as long as one of those campaign missions. For example, the second Operation is called Decapitation and it involves engaging a very important target that is threatening the Astropathic Relay on Avarax. Stopping this foe will free up the path for Titus and his crew, but they are otherwise engaged. You’ll step off the campaign and play as one of the six classes of Ultramarine (complete with ALL the customizations, weapons, and perks you’ve earned) to tackle this mission. It is also here where you can earn progression across all of your various weapons, skills, pick various perks to drastically change your playstyle, earn Mastery Points, unlock new versions of gear, earn new appearances for your gear, and most importantly, select your Heraldry.

Anyone who has engaged with the world of Warhammer 40K knows that the Heraldry of its various Astartes, Heretic or otherwise, is a huge part of that unit’s uniqueness. Colors, various armor pieces and decorations, markings, weapons, decals, pauldrons, mask patterns, and much more will differentiate between a Blood Raven, Minotaurs, Omega Marine, Black Templar, or Space Wolves. By completing missions you’ll earn the Requisition (currency) needed to unlock these pieces, requiring anywhere from three to five pieces to finally unlock their armor set. You can equip them piecemeal until you do, but let’s face it, you’ll want to earn them all to really look the part. The same goes for Heretic Astartes, who have the Alpha Legion, Night Lords, World Eaters, Death Guard, Iron Warriors, Alpha Legion, and Black Legion at launch. There are plenty here I’ve not mentioned, and the already-announced roadmap already promises more, so I’m eager to see who else will join the fray. Maybe we can get the Corvus “beaky boy” helmets for our Space Marines?

The Perk system is fairly extensive, and it’s bespoke to each class. There are nine core perks, three team perks, nine gear, and three more signature perks. None are unlocked when you start, so you’ve got a long road ahead of you, marine. All of these require the same Requisition currency you use to unlock armor, so you’ll have to choose between being more effective and looking cool. Many also have a level requirement, so there’s an XP element on top. These have a variety of effects such as expanding the perfect parry window, earning a small bit of health for the whole squad when you score an execution, additional damage for you or the whole team, cooldown reductions, and more.

The perks for weapons are unlocked through earning experience. You earn experience by using said weapon – it makes sense. These lead to you picking either active or passive perk nodes by spending Mastery points. These can greatly alter the weapon’s characteristics, making a standard plasma pistol cool faster or overheat less (those are two separate perks), expand the radius of a charged shot, increase damage against Terminus enemies, expand the pool of available energy for the gun, or even increase the damage of the weapon if you can pull off a perfectly timed dodge, just to name a few. Like the skill perks, these are unlocked on a per weapon basis, and you’ve got dozens of weapons to unlock and upgrade, so expect to be running a few missions to earn enough XP and credits to do that.

My only complaint with the Perk system is that it can sometimes be unclear. For example, when I’ve earned enough XP (1300/1300) and I’ve collected a Mastery Point to spend, it seems like I’d be able to unlock the next Mastery level for my Chainsword. Trying to do so tells me I need a “Master Crafted” tier token, but it’s unclear how to do that until you’ve stumbled on it. Hovering over it says “Buy” but that’s to buy the token, again without instructions on how to obtain one. You can obtain these in Trials (one moment and we’ll come back to these), but a little bit of guidance would help demystify it up front.

Each of the six classes has three trials that are only available to earn during single-player mode. Clicking on these will give you skill-based challenges that will push you to accomplish combat challenges within a time limit, earning you Requisition or possibly Mastery points you can spend on unlocks. You can repeat these trials until you nail them, though you only earn the reward once. These are cumulative, so you can unlock a point using a trial for the Bulwark and then spend it on the Sniper if you want to push that class ahead before you can close out a trial you’re otherwise struggling to complete.

Our Lead Tabletop Editor, Mark Julian expressed a concern we all shared, but we won’t really know until Eternal War is in full swing – the grind. Will there be enough level variety to alleviate the grind a bit with only the six levels and four difficulty levels? Time will tell, and we’ll update this review accordingly.

There was an unexpected test of some multiplayer systems that provided some amazing data during our multiplayer session. It seems like I’ve been affected by the Intel issue, and as such I’ve had more BSODs than I’d like. I was the host during our game, and sure enough I BSOD’d, rebooting my system entirely. Amazingly, and without a single hitch, the game transferred the leader and host position to David, allowing the team to continue and backfilling my spot with a bot. When I got back from my reboot, I was able to simply rejoin the game in progress. David was then able to transfer leadership back to me. So many games fail at this complex process, and Space Marine 2 navigated it seamlessly.

The way the multiplayer easily handled a disconnect only served to highlight how poorly the game handles it during the campaign. Even though I was playing solo with bots, when the game lost access to the servers (not uncommon during pre-launch as maintenance is required frequently – this shouldn’t be as frequent post-launch) I got a black loading screen, then eventually a prompt that warned me that my online progress wouldn’t be saved, then asking if I’d like to continue offline. Selecting offline progress would then dump any progress, loading my most recent autosave spot. This immersion-breaking approach is a painful way to deal with disconnects, so I hope this can be patched out once the game is live.

During the campaign I did encounter a single issue, and frankly it feels almost ridiculous to even point it out amid all the great work on display here. When I approached a door my team had to drop down into a small trench so I could hit a button to let me inside. My team, no matter how many times I commanded them to do so, would not enter the trench, blocking my progress. Reloading my previous checkpoint put me back roughly 2 minutes of game time and they happily jumped down, ready to slay Xenos scum. This minor hiccup with the game’s logic is really the only technical hiccup we’ve encountered with the game. It’s a very clean execution.

In terms of performance, the Swarm Engine is clearly as well-oiled machine. On an RTX 4070 I was able to turn everything up to the max, running the game at 4K and over 100 frames per second. On a 4090 I saw that number hit much closer, with framerates between 150 and 200. Space Marine 2 is also quite impressive on PS5. Not only is it incredibly detailed, but it stays that way even in performance mode. Performance mode is also amazingly smooth, a technical achievement for the hardware. Even though the game isn’t yet optimized for the Steamdeck, I had to check anyway. In it’s current pre-launch and unoptimized state, it’ll run above 30fps at Medium settings. I look forward to Eternal War in the waiting room and on the go.

Eternal War is the reason we’re writing this as a review-in-progress. While it’s accessible, there just aren’t enough people to fill out a 6v6 team to test it. When it does launch with the game, there will be three match types – Annihilation, Capture and Control, and Seize Ground. Annihilation is 6 on 6 team deathmatch. Capture and Control is essentially a King of the Hill mode where players or teams compete to control an area for a set amount of time, and the other side looks to break that lock. Seize Ground is very similar to Capture and Control, but the control points are split into three areas, and you’ll have to control the bulk of them for an extended amount of time to win. This Eternal War mode is where we’ll encounter the Heretic Astartes, and I personally can’t wait.

I was disheartened, with the many, many customization options, to see that the Heretic Astartes don’t have any customization beyond color. Granted, they do look menacing and terrifying as is, but it could be fun to play around with their spikey armor. You can’t blame a guy for wanting to jam a big old Khorne helmet on the a Night Lord, but what can ya do? As it stands, each class corresponds to a designated legion, with a bit of color customization. Beyond this are the emblems, armor parts, and colors for the Adeptus Astartes, Unknown Foundings, First Founding, Second Founding and Successor Chapters.

The thing I appreciate the most about Warhammer 40K: Space Marine 2 is that it’s full to bursting with Warhammer lore and visuals, and it uses the lore PROPERLY. So many games just throw fan service at their target audience and hope everyone else “gets it”. Here, the game tries to bring even non-fans along for the ride. Data slates found in the world help to expand the player’s lore. Quiet moments before the storm has your contingent walking through encampments where you can practically hear the Cadian Commanders of the Astra Militarum yelling to drive their tank closer so they might stab a Tyranid with their sword. That said, there’s no explanation for non-fans why in the world there’s a mechanical cherub baby flying in a cage with tiny little Servitor servo-arms and other replaced parts. (Note: These critters are called “Sanctified Servitors” and are breathed to life in vats by tech-priests who granted them more independent thinking than a normal servitor – hence the cage, until they’re needed for more complex tasks) There’s nothing that’ll fully prepare you for the lore-heavy Warhammer 40K universe, but Space Marine 2 does a great job of bringing the player along for the ride. This game is made by people who know and love Warhammer, and it shows, deeply.

While we aren’t prepared to give the game a formal score without having experienced the ongoing Eternal War portion, if we were to score it just on the single player and cooperative gameplay, it’d easily fall in the 90 to 95% range. I suspect the multiplayer-focused expansion of what is already here will only make it better.

We’ll update this as we get to check out the Eternal War portion of the game — stay tuned, Battle Brothers, but know that this is easy to recommend and should find a home in your library.

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