As our resident neckbeard and the only man on the games.on.net staff with an actual Warhammer 40,000 collection it falls to me to review Space Marine, Relic's attempt to bring the 40K universe to life in glorious third-person shooting action. Does it work out, or is this a strictly "fans only" affair? Read on for the full story.



Space Marine began its development life at THQ in Brisbane of all places, but was removed from the company early in its creation and handed over to the de facto masters of Warhammer 40,000 video games: Relic Entertainment. If nothing else it’s the biggest release in the Games Workshop-licensed franchise for some time, and it’s certainly an epic and bombastic game that drips with flavour and Relic’s signature tender love for the source material. Unfortunately, it’s also thoroughly riddled with a huge number of frustrating bugs and design decisions that will make people who aren’t fans of the setting want to punch themselves in the throat.

You’ll play through the campaign of Space Marine as Captain Titus of the Ultramarines, voiced admirably by Mark Strong. The story is somewhat forgettable, and even as a fan of the setting I found it hard to become too interested in exactly why I was moving down this ork-infested corridor, but it’s certainly head and shoulders above some official Black Library publications in which Space Marines Shoot and Stab Things (TM). The campaign does a great job for the most part in creating a supremely well-realised world, and it’s great to see the setting rendered in such loving detail. Unfortunately, every so often you’ll have to stop looking around and actually play the game, which is where it begins to get a bit weak.

I jumped into Space Marine on the PC, and it took me all of five minutes to realise that the game would be vastly better played on a console with a gamepad, if only because the tiny amount of buttons on a controller means you’ll have less chance of being horribly confused by what the keys are. The game unfortunately reeks of being a console port, and anybody who has access to a gamepad is well advised to use it when they play.

Who thought this was a good idea?

Mira, a surprisingly strong female lead

Chief among the bizarre design decisions that reduce Space Marine from a fun button-masher to a frustrating "for the fans" exercise is the core mechanic of the stun-and-execute system. Your armour regenerates but your health does not, and the only way to gain health back is to stun an enemy in melee and then execute them, triggering an execution animation sequence at the end of which you get a health boost. The rationale behind this is simple: the designers wanted to encourage players to get into the thick of combat rather than skulking behind cover. That’s fine in theory, but even the smallest amount of gameplay testing reveals that this actually encourages players to stay as far away from everything as possible. If you’re low on health, why on earth would you run towards the enemy - especially when the execute animations take 1-3 seconds, during which you are completely vulnerable and will often be killed?

As a matter of fact most of my deaths occurred during such animations, and watching your health be knocked down as you wait for the animation to finish so it can come back up again is just face-palmingly annoying - especially when the damage you incurred while executing means that if you don’t immediately do another stun-and-execute you’ll be dead. At best, the mechanic encourages a hit-and-run playstyle where players sprint in, do a radial stun move, grab and execute one enemy and then flee again. At worst, it encourages you to act as cowardly as you possibly can.

The difficulty ranges the gamut from “lol, orks” to “what the hell just happened”, and often you will find yourself dying with next to no visible explanation - most of the time, again, if you charge headlong into battle. It can be an intensely frustrating experience, and it’s only through repeated use of combos (the heavy damage/radial stun in particular) and constantly executing enemies that you’ll survive some of the harder fights. Mechanically nearly every fight is the same, and the lack of variety in how you can approach each situation tarnishes the excitement from what are actual quite visceral combat experiences, and which - thematically at least - are delicious accurate to the fluff. For a bonus ball-kick, you can’t even change the difficulty once you’ve started the campaign either, which is intensely infuriating.

Space Marines are supposed to be surprisingly agile for their size, and certainly moving and stomping around the ruined landscape and rolling to avoid thundering ork nobs gives you a fitting sense of speed and flexibility, but when it comes to the level designs you may as well be welded onto a mindless conveyor belt. Not only can you literally not go the wrong way as there’s only one path through any given level, but your NPC companions will walk over to the correct path and just stand there waiting for you to come along. Even if the level is cleverly designed to trick you into thinking there might be the tiniest piece of non-linearity (and some of them certainly are), all you have to do is look at what your NPC companions are doing and the illusion falls apart. Add to this the fact that they never die or take any damage whatsoever, and you’re left with the strong feeling that they’re just added in to babysit you and make sure you don’t take too long.

Take the fight online (or don't)

Assault Marines only work on low-ping servers

The campaign only lasts about six or seven hours (not counting time spent trying the same stupidly difficult sections over and over again) so you’ll quickly want to jump into the multiplayer which is actually a surprisingly fantastic experience - most of the time. I say “most of the time” because the game is of course peer-to-peer hosted and the matchmaking system, like the difficulty level, ranges the gamut from clever (people on the same continent as you) to stupid (hello, Bulgaria). If you manage to get a low-ping Australian host you’ll be treated to a compelling and meaty class-based deathmatch experience, with some really neat features like loadout-cloning of your killer and sprawling, vertical gameplay, with an excellent customisation system to boot.

On the other hand, if you get a high-ping Bulgarian host you end up with a laggy slideshow of a game in which you die over and over again and wonder why you're even wasting your time. If you find being killed over and over again infuriating then you’re actually better off ragequitting on the spot: if you wait until the round ends to leave the game then you’ll quickly realise the game has an irritating bug where sometimes the "back" button stops working and you have no way to leave the game without bringing up the task manager and killing the process.

As a massive fan of the Warhammer 40,000 setting and one who has poured far too much of his income into tiny plastic space-men, I was looking forward to a game which non-fans could sink their teeth into, and would enable fans like me to say things such as “Why yes, I can tell you more about the grim darkness of the far future...”. Instead, we have a game that almost requires you to be a dedicated fan in order to put up with the rambling, inconsistent and often completely infuriating gameplay that makes up Space Marine. Fans of the setting should probably bump the score up by a full star just to account for how well-realised and delightful the game world is, but anybody (and PC gamers in particular) just looking for a mindless button-mashing good time would be well advised to look elsewhere - at least until the price drops considerably.

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EDITOR'S NOTE

When reviewing this game, the initial score of 5/10 was given due, in part, to the mistaken belief that there was an inability to completely customise campaign weapon loadout (a belief created by broken tooltips) and an inability to find a control list (turns out it's only accessible via the main menu, not while you are in game). As a result of these confusions being clarified, we have revised and increased the score accordingly and would like to thank community members for sharing their experiences with the same problems.