This review is going to have spoilers, and I’m sorry about that. Sorry because I have a lot I want to say about Space Marine II that can’t be said without spoiling things from about 40% of the way into the game. Sorry that the definition of a spoiler is so subjective that I don’t know if “things shown in a few trailers” count as spoilers any more. And sorry that a spoiler warning is the introduction to this review that I went with because I couldn’t think of anything better. But trust me, this was the best one.
Space Marine II‘s campaign is the least interesting part about it, so we’ll talk about the story first. You play as Titus again, the returning main character from the first Space Marine back from his long penance of being accused of heresy and ready to field all new accusations about why he’s so good at his job. Instead of fighting Orks we’re fighting Tyranids this time, a hivemind swarm akin to the Zerg from Starcraft but of course the Tyranids predate the Zerg by about ten years, and Titus must go on the offensive in either single-player or three-player co-op to save this particular sector of space from the xenos invasion. The story is short (on average about eight to ten hours) and has very few setpieces that you might expect from a third-person shooter campaign to break up the monotony of “there’s a group of enemies and you need to kill them to progress,” but as long as you enjoy the visuals and the core gameplay loop you it’s not a boring or frustrating experience. It’s just not one that you’ll be excitedly telling your friends about in a few months from now, since it literally is just killing one group of enemies after another for eight to ten hours.
Said gameplay loop is essentially the same as it was in the first Space Marine: you have a gun or two and a melee weapon and you can freely swap between either standard third-person shooting (no cover system) or bloody melee combat. Third-person shooting is the standard fare but the melee combat has been expanded to include counter attacks with damage-negating parries, instant kills, and free shots with your sidearm that make the melee combat feel much more engaging than the first game’s button mashing “jump into the horde and hope it works out” system. Thanks to the game’s swarm technology your Space Marines will be fighting scores of enemies at once and wading into the middle of them, blade in hand and just cleaving, firing, and executing is an experience that you can only really find in something like the rebooted DOOM games. There are limitations of course, the “gun strike” counter attacks lack i-frames so it’s a heavy risk/reward that many players aren’t a fan of and unlike the first Space Marine you don’t heal with every kill, but once you get the rhythm down fighting the Tyranids is mostly a great experience.
Notice I specifically said that fighting the Tyranids is a great experience. The spoilers in this review is that Tyranids aren’t all that you fight, with the “surprise” enemies of the game being “evil Space Marines,” demons, and the armed cultists that follow them. This new faction essentially equates to six or so new enemies to fight but they just aren’t very interesting or fun to engage with. The campaign itself seems to think so too, as the Chaos Space Marines show up with almost no fanfare and the demons first show up without even mention, and suddenly you’re in a fight with smaller swarms than the Tyranids that are more frustrating to fight as the little ones block more of your attacks and almost everyone has a gun and will shoot you while you’re up to your neck in the chaff.
Lots of the fun gameplay strategy of fighting the Tyranids goes out the window too, as the Tyranids’ hivemind means that if you kill the larger Tyranids the smaller ones die as well. This leads to strategic choices in combat of whether you kill the small guys nipping at your heels or go for the big guys in the hopes of bursting them down and killing everyone around you in the process. No such choices fighting Chaos, instead it’s just deciding how much you want to get shot before you go after your traitorous cousins and see one of two execution animations as you finish them off because the devs clearly didn’t invest as much time in Chaos as they did in the Tyranids (this is a trend we’ll discuss later). As such the back half of the game just feels much less engaging in terms of enemy encounters, but the environments and teleportation effects are pretty enough that they’ll sufficiently distract you until the game is over.
However once the game is over it isn’t actually over, as you have the co-op PvE missions and the PvP modes to play. The PvE modes are essentially their own mini campaign where you play as a group of three other Space Marines that get to go on their own little adventures at Titus’ behest. At time of writing there are six missions, three against the Tyranids and three primarily against Chaos and if you read the last paragraph you won’t be surprised to learn that the Chaos missions are worse than the Tyranid ones. To the credit of the missions themselves they mix up the gameplay a little bit with a few puzzles that never get more complex than picture matching games and environmental hazards, but you can also take that through a cynical lens: since the PvE mode is where you’re expected to invest a lot of time so of course they were going to make it a little more engaging than the campaign.
The PvE system has a grind/unlock system that’s somewhat similar to something like Helldivers 2, where you play missions to get experience points and unlocking currency that are used to unlock character bonuses. Unlike Helldivers 2 though all the rewards are class-based (there are six classes) and you can only have a maximum of one class on a team, so if you only like one or two classes and your random teammates are those classes then you’re going to waste time investing in classes you don’t care about due to unlock currency being universal while class experience points are not. There’s also a perk system that is used to power up your characters, and unlike Helldivers 2 the difficulty scale of Space Marine II‘s four difficulty levels are balanced around you having a certain amount of perks and certain level of gear before you proceed. That’s because the difficulty uptick in SMII increases enemy health pools compared to something like Helldivers 2 where they just increase the total number of enemies you face at a time, which seems like it would have been a more obvious path for Space Marine II to take given its swarm technology. But instead you’re stuck facing spongey, tanky enemies that refuse to die if you move up the difficulty tiers too quickly, which can be easy to do because once you gain access a perk you have to use the unlock currency to actually equip it. Imagine if any other game did this. Imagine if you were playing Call of Duty but once you unlock access to a perk you have to pay an additional fee to use it. Why have a leveling system that “gives you access” to these perks at all if you’re just going to charge of cover fee afterwards?
The most frustrating part about it is that the unlock currency is also how you unlock customization for your Space Marines. The game offers a wide swath of Space Marine “chapters” from the Warhammer 40k universe and has an even wider amount of customization options to make your own faction if you so choose. The armor pieces are limited to the Primaris designs (the new wave of Space Marines that were made for Warhammer 40k to sell all new models in the war game) but if you know little about the universe you won’t notice and if you care a lot about the universe it may not bother you just for the chance to play as a Blood Raven, Space Shark, or Imperial Fist in a 2024 Warhammer video game. But if you like more than one faction then you’re going to be behind the curve in leveling up your classes, Emperor forbid you want to make your own with multiple colors! Emperor doubly forbid that you re-open the game after quitting and then discover that your character’s skin has reset to the co-op campaign default Ultramarine blue for whatever glitchy reason so you have to drag yourself back to the character creation screen to re-equip all your armor and paints.
This glitch, the currency needed to unlock perks after you already got them, and other factors are probably the biggest blemish on enjoying Space Marine II, assuming you’re okay with it having a gameplay rhythm and campaign structure from something out of 2008. Outside of the combat almost every other feature of the game has some obvious blemish that I threw under a category in my notes called “unoptimized” and that section was longer than the rest of my notes for the review. I don’t know where to begin on this since I already complained about the unlock currency in PvE but we could also talk about (deep breath now): how PvP modes don’t actually tell you what the mode is until you play them. Every mode being online so starting anything requiring long loading screens as you connect to the servers. PvP having almost no matchmaking to speak of so low level players frequently get stomped by higher level ones. Massive delays in QUITTING the damn game as you disconnect from severs. Having to use your analog stick on your controller like a mouse. Weapon stats being arbitrary and not truly representative of damage output. The game suddenly having a glut of pre-rendered cinematics at the end of the game that implies they ran out of time/resources to include them throughout the game. Crossplay intentionally not enabled in PvP. And PvE missions all giving you the same level of currency rewards so min-maxing players only play the easiest ones to rank up faster.
All of those issues are before we even jump into the PvP mode, which we’ll do right now. PvP is your regular Space Marines vs Chaos Space Marines in 6v6 games of King of the Hill, Domination, or Deathmatches, once again based around the game’s six character classes. The time to kill feels reasonable and there’s some interesting mechanical choices in PvP (such as melee attacks bypassing armor which is only a thing in PvP) to help try to balance out the various classes. Unlike the PvE you can have up to two of each class on a team so there’s more variety in options, and also unlike the PvE there are several changes to how the classes operate and how unlocks are obtained that can lead to some confusion. Some of this is for balance but it just makes the whole thing feel, as I said, unoptimized, as rather than trying to make a universal experience so players can easily jump between modes you instead have to remember essentially three different types of gameplay styles per class (in campaign, PvE, and PvP) all with different unlock systems throughout.
PvP’s unlock system of choice is a straight Call of Duty conversion where you level up your personal player level universally and each level unlocks and new weapon… which of course are class locked. So if you like the Assault class good luck waiting for that sweet sweet thunder hammer while everyone else gets a turn in unlocking all their special weapons first. At least in Call of Duty everything is universal so even if you aren’t a huge fan of, say, shotguns you can at least try it out without damaging your playstyle too much, but in a class-based system like Space Marine II each class plays completely differently and you can’t just stick to your Assault playstyle if you want to try out a Heavy weapon, for example.
Depending how you feel about the various Chaos factions you might gravitate towards a particular class pretty quickly, because in yet another under baked move the Chaos Space Marine factions are all locked to a particular class. If you want to be in Night Lord armor you have to play as an Assault character, if you want to be a member of the Alpha Legion you have to be a Sniper, and while each Chaos faction has color customization options you cannot change their armor pieces at all. Why? We’ve seen the art book, we know they came up with cosmetic tiers for the Chaos factions as well. Tying each faction to a specific class is bad enough (as a Night Lords enjoyer the fact that I’m stuck as the worst PvP class in the game is infuriating) but then you can’t even improve their appearance with unlocks? Why? The developers have mostly dodged these questions, saying they want to give Chaos more options but also that there’s “lore” and “visual identifiers” to consider. Both of these are undermined by how thoroughly customizable the regular Space Marines are, and smacks of Games Workshop putting their foot down to make Chaos less interesting. And again, why? But this is a personal grievance from someone who only really got invested in the 40k universe after reading Chaos books and everyone who isn’t like me probably just wants to get their match on the “bad guys team” done as quickly as possible.
If you can put aside all the minute, blatantly obvious design flaws in the minutia of the game and the gameplay clicks with you, then Space Marine II should be a fun casual game for you and your friends to pick up and play if you feel like a gory good time. It’s not really live service (there’s a season pass for an insanely priced $40 but it’s all cosmetics) and in my limited multiplayer experience no one is sweating out of their mind, so outside of just gear unlocking there really isn’t much pressure to play Space Marine II ALL THE TIME, which is rather refreshing for a multiplayer title in 2024.
The one caveat to all of this is that the game currently has frustrating and inconsistent server errors that can trap you in loading screens or prevent you from playing PvP or co-op at all (PvE can be done with AI but they’re barely any help), which honestly really pissed me off. Part of it was that it took two weeks for them to acknowledge these server errors and call it their “highest priority to fix them,” but mostly it’s because it’s a game that is so inundated with under baked components that these server connection issues just feel like watery icing on a cake that’s thirty percent dry flour. Make no mistake: I will be playing more Space Marine II and I’ll probably have a good time doing it; diving headfirst into a swarm of bug monsters and coming out the other side covered in blood never gets old. But with the server issues alongside new Helldivers 2 updates, Frostpunk 2, and Metaphor: ReFantazio on the horizon it will probably be a while before I play it consistently again. Hopefully the technical issues are fixed by the time I go back.
