A post-launch roadmap video for Warhammer 40k Space Marine 2, released on Tuesday, reveals that the boss monster for the first new co-op Operation mission will be a colossal Tyranid Hierophant bio-titan. It’s the biggest Xenos enemy in the game to date – here’s what you can expect from this massive, mission-ending monster.
Saber Interactive revealed the general set-up for the new Operation in an earlier Space Marine 2 news update: the Imperium is abandoning the planet Kadaku to the Tyranids, which have begun to liquidise the planet’s biomass to be consumed by the hive fleet vessels in orbit. Your strike team of three Space Marines will join the remaining Cadian forces as they attempt to destroy the Tyranids’ ‘capillary towers’, the giant drinking straws the space bugs are using to slurp up the planet’s delicious goo.
Facing a Hierophant at this stage of a Tyranid invasion shows that things have really not gone the way the Hive Fleet would like. Hierophants are colossal biomorphs evolved to break armies and trample fortresses, and would ordinarily appear in the vanguard of an attack.
While the real reason this beast didn’t appear in the main campaign is probably the development schedule and production budget, we like to imagine that the hive fleet under-estimated the resistance it would face on Kadaku, and has been forced to deploy an apex monster it had planned to keep in reserve.
It really is a monster of a monster. The Hierophant’s massive bio-cannons can melt tanks, and it is capable of projecting a torrent of bio-plasma from its maw like Godzilla’s energy beam. As well as the massive talons it walks around on, its soft underbelly is protected by thrashing lashwhip pods. It’s even capable of releasing smaller biomorphs from an internal incubation chamber, giving birth to more ravenous beasts mid-battle.
Given that all the Space Marine 2 enemies larger than a Hive Tyrant are gimmick fights, we don’t expect this beast to be a wandering block of hit points that you fight in an arena – it’s going to be a presence you face off against for the whole mission.
Both its bio-plasma breath attack or bio cannons could function like the Heldrake’s baleflamer in Operation: Reliquary, covering areas of the map in bio acid and forcing you to take cover. And as it’s about as big as the Greater Daemon of Tzeentch near the end of the story Campaign, it’s likely that you’ll kill it by activating a series of powerful environmental weapons rather than with the basic Space Marine 2 weapons.
You can actually buy a Hierophant model for Warhammer 40k, though it will cost $515 / £338.50, and the model is so big that it’s utterly impractical to use in anything except novelty exhibition games. The monster was originally invented for the game Space Marine in the 1990s, which used smaller scale miniatures and gave all of the Warhammer 40k factions massive apex monsters or robots to go toe to toe with the Imperial Warhammer Titans.
While GW makes two small-scale games called Legions Imperialis and Adeptus Titanicus at the moment, they’re both set during the ‘historical’ Horus Heresy era and don’t feature any of the Warhammer 40k Xenos factions – the Tyranids weren’t even present in the Milky Way galaxy at that point.
The Hierophant may be big, but it won’t be the single biggest model in the game. One data-miner has already discovered that the ruined Emperor Titan in the background of one mission on Demerium is absurdly large – check out how big in this article!
Source: Wargamer
