Warhammer 40K Space Marine Master Crafted Edition review — Hold, brothers.

Releasing remastered versions of well loved games is all the rage recently. I seem to be at just the right age for all the games I loved as a kid to be coming back around again. The Master Crafted Edition of Space Marine has arrived fresh off the coat tails of the success of Space Marine 2, and if you are a fan of the series, you may be wondering if it’s worth dawning your armor one more time to slaughter Orks and Chaos for the glory of the Imperium. 

When it comes to remastered games, the question of why is always top of mind. Is a graphical update enough to make it worth buying the game twice? What about new mechanics and DLC? Maybe bug fixes and wider platform availability? There’s no correct answer, and your answer is probably different from mine. The recent remaster of Age of Mythology is a complete rebuild of the game with a total graphical overhaul and balance update as well as new content. After over 20 years it breathed new life into the game. Crash Bandicoot brought new graphics and the game to platforms it couldn’t previously be experienced on. Space Marine Anniversary Edition released the game with all DLC and extra content in one collection. Wait a second… Anniversary Edition? When was that? Just four years ago?

Alright, I’m being a little unfair. The Anniversary Edition released the game and extra content in one convenient package, but it didn’t overhaul the graphics or gameplay. The Master Crafted edition rebuilds the game with updated graphics that do look pretty good, but not 2025 good. I’m sure my memory is blurred, but if you told me the Master Crafted edition was the 2011 original, I wouldn’t bat an eye. It looks good, yes, but it’s still full of sprawling environments that lack detail, are empty of things to interact with, and lighting that makes most things appear flat and blended. Player and enemy models have received the most love and look pretty great but feel out of place in the otherwise bland looking environments. 

The main upgrade for me though is the on screen UI. Player health and shields have been moved and changed to match the Space Marine 2 layout. Gun selection is on an easy to navigate rotary wheel, and ammo indicators are clean and easy to quickly parse numbers. With all this changing and moving of on screen elements, you’d think they’d show the same love to the menus and controls. 

Keyboard controls for this game are usable but absolutely not how I would choose my keybinds. Oh, just remap them you say? Heresy! The Machine God has designed the controls with divine intent. How dare you challenge His authority You’ll aim down sights with L.Ctrl and you’ll like it. Seriously, you can’t change the keybinds. You can’t even see what the keybinds are. I wasn’t paying attention and missed what the button was to make the Vengence Launcher bombs explode and had to stop the game and google it. I’m not a game developer, so maybe it’s harder than I think to make keybinds changeable, but then again, I can’t think of a single game I’ve played in years that didn’t have that option. 

Graphics and keybinds are important, but the game really just needs to be fun. Here is where the lack of updates to the actual gameplay shows its age. There is undoubtedly fun to be had in Space Marine. I don’t care who you are, plowing through hordes of Orks with your Chain Sword is just fun. But for every bloody battle, there are 5 empty hallways to traverse as your Space Marine does his best running simulator impression, heavy boots clomping along on the floor for sometimes several rooms in a row. After killing the 17th identical group of Orks in a large room full of crates, the repetitiveness of the experience wears thin as well. Change ups to the formula are brief and cut artificially cut short. We get an air battle that quickly ends with a crash that puts you right back into the Ork grinder. You board a Titan only for it to be immediately broken without you getting to interact with it in any way. Any break from the most basic hack and slash gameplay is purely to break up the monotony of the experience. Unfortunately, those breaks are few and far between. 

Melee is a big part of Space Marine. While the game doesn’t really restrict ammo in any meaningful way, smashing your way through Orks with a Thunder Hammer is the most fun thing you can do. As important as melee is, being able to dodge the enemy melee attacks is equally as important. Unfortunately there seems to be a good 2-3 feet of space between the visual end of an enemies weapon and where it can actually hit you. On top of that, all you can do is dodge roll, which is pretty slow. Getting swamped by enemies, especially ones with armor or shields is hard to overcome. Once you take some hits, you’ll need to perform an execution to recover health. The execution animations are glorious. Getting killed anyway while you are in the middle of an uncancelable animation is less glorious. I’m not sure if this is a bug, and oversight, or as intended. Regardless, it sucks. 

Ultimately, Space Marine’s biggest crime is that it crafted the most fun you can have, and then doesn’t let you have it. I’m talking about jet pack levels. Space Marine (and its older brother for that matter) is at its best when you’re leaping through the air, crashing down in an explosion of blood and glory. Thunder Hammer crashing into swarms of enemies. Then it asks you to forget you just did that. Jet packs arbitrarily running out of fuel or not being appropriate for the terrain or some such nonsense. Just let me have fun man. Forget everything else and make the whole game jet pack levels. Please. I need it. 

At the end of the day, while there is fun to be had and the graphical updates are mostly nice to look at, the gameplay feels like it’s 14 years old. It doesn’t offer a good enough reason to revisit the game for original fans, and newcomers will surely be disappointed with the lack of depth compared to modern titles. With the Anniversary Edition only 4 years in the rear view mirror, Relic needed to do more with the Master Crafted Edition to justify its existence.