If the full version of Space Marine 2 sustains the quality in the latest preview build, it could be both a landmark third person shooter, and the best Warhammer 40k game ever made. This Warhammer 40k Space Marine 2 preview is based on time with a prerelease build of the game, consisting of the ‘Voidsong’ campaign mission, and two of the PVE multiplayer ‘Operations’ missions.
To give you an idea of the perspective for this preview: both I, and site editor Alex Evans, played through the Space Marine 2 single-player section separately, then met up for PVE multiplayer.
We’ve got form on the topic: I’m the site’s Warhammer 40k specialist, with hundreds of hours logged in various Warhammer 40k games on PC and console over the years; Alex is another 40k obsessive who’s written hundreds of thousands of Wargamer words on the subject, and has more play-hours than he cares to admit in various multiplayer shooters.
And we’re both favorably impressed by the game so far – so let’s get into the ceramite of it.
The preview section takes place around halfway into the campaign, with the protagonist Lieutenant Titus leading his small squad of Space Marines towards an Astropathic choir (a psychic telephone exchange) besieged by alien Tyranids.
The forces of the sorcerous Thousand Sons traitor marines are up to something, too, and there’s dissent in the ranks – Titus has been absent from his Chapter for over a century, and a pall of suspicion is hanging over him.
Visually, it’s a feast. It’s an incredibly assured recreation of the macro-scale architecture of the Imperium of Man, a mixture of high-tech and medieval grandeur. Saber Interactive’s impressive swarm rendering technology, which displays a nigh-incomprehensible number of enemies on screen at once, is mind boggling, and draw distances behind the swarms seem further and more stable than the last preview. In action, it looks even better – but we’ll get to the fights later.
The story in the segment is solidly told, if not revolutionary, but the diegetic world building is excellent. The demo opens with a buffet of scene-setting pieces: human soldiers kneeling in supplication when they see you descend from your Thunderhawk dropship; a Cadian Astra Militarum officer rallying troops from the cupola of a house-sized Baneblade super heavy tank; a commissar executing troopers for cowardice.
The Astropathic relay building you’ll fight your way through is grand, gothic, and gruesome: a great demonstration of how thin the line is between sci-fi and the supernatural in Warhammer 40k.
There are a few small signs that the game’s scope has been consciously limited. This isn’t a single continuous game world like Dad – sorry, God – of War, so scene transitions sometimes involve a fade to black. Cutscenes don’t always lead out of and into a map area that you’re playing in, but mask a transition. The only time the Tyranid Gargoyles flocking the skies throughout the demo tussle with the Space Marines is in a cutscene.
I’m running on a middle-weight gaming PC, and the single-player campaign ran like hot butter. Last year’s preview had one section which caused terrible stuttering: that wasn’t in this build, but many equally impressive sections ran just fine. The recommended PC specs haven’t been released yet – you’ll find my rig specs in this article if you want to benchmark yours against it (our sister site PC Game Benchmark may come in useful for the Space Marine 2 system requirements, too).
Multiplayer was less smooth, with some bad slowdown in some matches. I don’t know if this reflects on the press servers, the net code, or simply my internet connection: I’m doing a multi-stage house move and my gaming PC is currently in an office at the far reach of the WiFi. Mission loading times are also long.
The campaign has an approachable difficulty level. Editor Alex muddled through the two campaign missions on Normal difficulty, by his own admission not really figuring out the full control scheme. Veteran is the recommended difficulty, and it killed me a couple of times while I found my rhythm. There’s one difficulty level above that.
If I didn’t need to get information about multiplayer that’s only available at the end of the demo, I’d wipe my progress and start again on that highest difficulty, because the combat system is really, really fun, and I want more challenge.
I often joke that I’m terrible at videogames, but I completed Sekiro (including the optional Daemon of Wrath boss) so that’s plainly a lie: it’s more accurate to say that I’d rather use my limited time being bad at lots of interesting new games. But I want to wring the juice out of the Space Marine 2 system, because, while it isn’t as deep as a FromSoft game, it feels incredible.
After playing the short 2023 preview build several times over, I wrote a guide to the Space Marine 2 combat system. The fundamentals have not changed at all, but new enemy types and extra weapons do much to make it even mor interesting.
Enemies are split between hordes of fragile underlings – melee Hormagaunts, ranged Termagants, Heretic Astartes of the Thousand Sons, or the Chaos-mutated Tzaangors – and larger leaders, most commonly the Tyranid Warriors. You’re outnumbered to a staggering degree.
Gunplay is standard third person shooter fare – fire from the hip without aiming, aim down the sights for greater accuracy, with a dedicated button for your grenades. There’s no cover, and enemies close into melee range so quickly that every fight will inevitably come down to blades.
That’s fine – unless you’re wielding one of the game’s heaviest guns, you can instantly whip out your chainsword (or power fist, or thunder hammer, or any of the other delightful Space Marine 2 weapons) and start threshing enemies into bloody gibs.
Melee combat is gory. While there’s only one button for attacks, there are still unique timing-based combos for each weapon, and they all have a balance of reach, power, speed, and knockback that gives them different strengths and different vibes. I’ve found the power sword – which can switch dynamically between a swifter fighting style, and a powered-up mode with slower, high-damage attacks – very effective.
With so many enemies, your shields are constantly being worn away. Stun an enemy badly enough and you’ll have the option to deliver a melee execution, which comes with an utterly brutal custom animation, and recharges one shield segment. There’s also a Bloodborne-style health regain mechanic that lets you recover lost health by quickly counter-attacking.
The fluid switching between ranged and melee, and the total absence of cover, encourages non-stop aggression, fitting for an Angel of Death. Your rechargeable ultimate power may give older gamers flashbacks to the PS2 and PS3 versions of God of War: it turns you into a veritable meat blender, with every melee attack refilling your health.
At Veteran difficulty and above, button mashing isn’t enough to get you through. Enemy melee attacks can be parried with a timely block, potentially stunning the attacker. Some attacks are telegraphed with a blue aura – which can be parried – or an orange aura – which can only be dodged. Time your response perfectly and you’ll have an opening to retaliate.
In some cases this will just murder an enemy outright, yanking a leaping hormagaunt out of the air by its tail and slamming it into the concrete or slicing it in two with your chainsword. Other times, an execution reticle will appear hovering over the unlucky baddy’s head. Press the ranged attack button and you’ll whip out your pistol and blast it directly in the cranium. It’s a canned animation that comes with a dramatic camera swoop and it always, without fail, looks as rad as hell.
When the fighting is intense, this is pretty challenging: you can only keep up with the volume of enemies by delivering the Emperor’s vengeance relentlessly, but letting your discipline slip and overextending yourself is a quick way to die. Whichever difficulty you’re on, it feels great. This is a game that gives you invulnerability frames during executions so that you can spend a few seconds looking like a total badass.
The Space Marine 2 bosses are something else. There are three in the demo, a massive Tyranid Carnifex like an organic killdozer, a wounded Hive Tyrant which appears at the end of one of the PVE operations, and my personal favorite, a reality warping Thousand Sons sorcerer who whips around the arena on a hovering disc, chewing the scenery with his megalomaniacal dialogue.
We’re not into FromSoftware territory in terms of complexity or challenge, but bosses are dynamic, with multiple attack modes and phases, and delivered with visual panache – I literally hooted in delight.
The single-player campaign references the actions of strike team Talassar, a small group of marines running their own errands offscreen. In the PVE Operations Mode, you’ll put on the ceramite boots of a custom Space Marine and play through that strike team’s missions.
Winning missions gives you cosmetic and stat rewards that will carry across to the (as yet unplayable) Space Marine 2 PVP multiplayer mode, and missions can be replayed at higher and higher difficulty levels.
While this mode has attracted comparisons to Helldivers 2, that’s comprehensively not what’s on offer here. That isn’t a criticism per se, but if you go in expecting a game where procedural generation creates an infinite supply of unique missions, you’ll be disappointed. These missions are heavily authored, each one fitting alongside a specific moment in the main campaign.
The two playable Operations in the demo are Infernus, which sees you racing to blow up a Prometheum reservoir under the claws of a Tyranid horde; and Decapitation, where you must plant bombs on a bridge to bring it down and slay a Hive Tyrant, then finish off the wounded beast in a bone-crunching boss battle.
Unlike Helldivers 2’s procedurally generated maps, or the Left 4 Dead style PVE multiplayer – where maps have a degree of modular randomisation – here the only difference between playthroughs is when enemies spawn. There are multiple difficulty levels, and the enemies you face seem to be tied to the average player level in a group.
A few new foes show up we didn’t see in the single-player campaign. Sentry enemies must be killed before they can summon reinforcements, while some ranged weapons create areas of toxic slime which will poison any marine who lingers too long. Perhaps these make an appearance later in the main campaign; maybe there are more waiting on higher difficulty Operations.
The different classes each have a unique playstyle, with access to just part of the main campaign’s expansive arsenal, and a unique rechargeable power. To pick out a cool one, the Assault marine’s jump pack and high powered melee arsenal makes it a devastating line breaker, but one that needs a real breather after unleashing that alpha strike.
The superficially similar Vanguard has emerged as my personal favorite: its zip line lets it rapidly redeploy to assassinate priority targets or rescue allies from a pack of ‘gaunts, and its versatile Instigator Bolt Carbine is light but effective at all ranges.
Editor Alex is enthusiastic about the mode’s potential, assuming it receives sustained investment and expansion: he spent a lot of time playing Strikes in both Destiny games, which (though set in an open world) are basically the same premise.
I’d be down for that, but it’s going to need a lot more than the six missions that seem to be coming in the base game before I’m convinced of the premise. Still, my pessimism is hardly dire: from what I’ve seen, it seems quite reasonable to assume that Operations will at least offer a solid B-campaign, and a good on-ramp to PVP multiplayer. A lot will come down to post-launch support.
Progression – which will continue over from Operations to PVP multiplayer – seems solid. You get class XP for completing missions, and new levels with that a class grant you new cosmetic pieces and an upgrade currency. That can be spent on cosmetics from a pretty sizable library, or mechanical class perks. Weapons gain XP independently of your classes, since some of them are cross compatible, and these also have upgrade paths and their own perk trees.
Cosmetic options for the most famous Space Marine Chapters can all be unlocked with basic progression XP, and halved and quartered schemes are a further unlock (Brazen Claws, anyone?) but it all takes work.
Painting your dude like your favorite custom Chapter is going to be a labor of love requiring many hours of play – which is fine, just so long as those Operations missions stay as fresh on the 35th play as they were in the third. Time will tell.
The first DLC pack comes out on day one, a set of cosmetics for multiple Ultramarines successor chapters, and there’s going to be a multiplayer season pass as well… Space Marines are certainly not short on bling.
In case you can’t tell, I’m hyped up for this release. How much of an event the launch week is may depend on the strength of PVP multiplayer, which we still haven’t tested. The co-op campaign is shaping up to be excellent, if possibly a bit short, and Operations mode looks like, at the bare minimum, it will be more of the same with some RPG elements for the gear grinders out there.
And if Alex gets his wish for Operations, and it sees loads of expansions with new missions, new narratives, against extra Warhammer 40k factions…
Frankly, the Space Marine 2 release date can’t come soon enough. In the meantime, we’ll be updating all the guides collected in our Space Marine 2 walkthrough with everything we’ve learnt from the preview build.
Source: Wargamer
