- Published on
Space Marine 2
- Author
-
- Name
- owls
- Mastodon
- @owls@yshi.org
I wasn't planning on picking it up, but after watching Luetin09's Titus deep dive, I was a little interested. I wasn't feeling GW2 this weekend, so I grabbed it on Friday night and ran through the campaign.
⚠️ This post will contain spoilers! ⚠️
The Executive Summary
To avoid burying the lede: the gameplay is mid, but the game is visually spectacular. The story is interesting, if you like 40k stories.
The different weapons just felt very same-y. And as fun as sawing through hordes of minions is, it does get repetitive. There's not a ton of variety with the enemies either -- it transitions from tyranids to chaos at one point, and that's really exciting because you're not doing the exact same finisher animations 5x a minute. But, that too wares out its welcome.
I have not tried the co-op PvE or PvP modes. It looks like there's some kind of progression system in there that we didn't have in the campaign? But I dunno!
Visuals
The art and environments carry this game. It's really, really good-looking, and there's plenty of "oh shit that's cool" moments. Also: lots of gore and hyperviolence.
The battle barge serves as your mission hub. I loved seeing the thunderhawks coming and going, and being up-close with them. There's plenty of cherubs, servo-skulls, servitors, and imperial equipment scattered about. Most of the NPCs have some kind of flavour dialogue too. It feels very alive and appropriate.
They had a dreadnought on the flight deck that moved around between missions. It was rad to see it up-close as they awakened the ancient and did different maintenence tasks with it. Now that I'm thinking about it -- that may have be the same dreadnought that smashes through the wall at the end and helps you push an objective? If so, that's a cool detail.
I don't know much about tyranid bioforms1, but they sure looked cool. And they got blood and gore everywhere when you chainsword'd them.
Eventually, the tyranids give way to a Thousand Sons sorcerer and his minions. The rubric marines looked so good. They died correctly too: finishers just rip off their helmet or a limb, causing sand to blast out of the gap, and then their armour falls apart. The empty pieces of armour scatter all over the ground.
-
The Thunderhawks look great up close
-
Look at all the detail on this fellow's augmentations
-
Dreadnought being maintained by servants of the Omnissiah
-
The freight elevator looks pretty nice.
-
This hive ship was instagibbed
-
There's no OSHA equivalent in the Administratum, so the Mechanicus is allowed to have open-air nuclear reactors
-
The astropath in charge of the relay's choir
-
We bury battle barges on cemetery worlds, so we had this spare barge on hand to ram into this warp bullshit.
-
Here come dat boi
-
Finishing the Thousand Sons dreadnoughts involves ripping a Thousand Son ancient out with your bare hands.
-
Remember to calibrate your Scranton Reality Anchors correctly before powering them up!
-
The ships could look better, IMO.
-
The armour just looks cool
Story
This picks up the story of the previous game. Thanks to YouTube, I know what that story is, because despite owning the original game, I also found its gameplay to be meh and barely even started it. But, Titus is back with his chapter after being detained by an inquisitor.
His squad has questions about this, which he really doesn't want to answer. There's a lot of interpersonal conflict between the marines because they don't trust Titus, or Titus is mad about them asking questions. Space Marines don't have therapists, so they just get mad and punch heretics instead of talking to each other. Eventually, they punch enough things together and it's all OK.
But, the conflict-conflict in the game focuses on a system being invaded by the tyranids. You slaughter swarm upon swarm of lil bioforms, occasionally punctuated with a boss fight. Some times a zoanthrope shows up, which is really annoying if you've got a short-range loadout.
They're doing their usual "eat the planet" thing. The imperials are trying to evacuate key Mechanicus assets, the big thing being "Project Aurora". This is very mysterious and classified, but it ends up being the warp relic from SM1 hooked up to some blackstone pylons. The project lead dies in a suspicious crash after you run all his errands and toss him on a thunderhawk.
A Thousand Sons marine has been manipulating things behind the scenes. The archmagos' apprentice finishes the device and activates it, but set to "amplify warp bullshit" instead of "banish warp bullshit", and the sorcerer begins powering up as the planet destabilizes. This part of the game includes a number of Very Cool Moments, like:
- Fixing up an entombed battle barge so we can slam it into a weird warp pylon
- Ripping the hats off Thousand Sons terminators
- Fighting a Lord of Change (gigantic)
- Unloading melta guns into chaos dreadnoughts
- Being in an armoured column led by the chapter master, pushing into the Thousand Sons forces
The most interesting tidbit here: this Project Aurora thing has been commissioned by Guilliman. He presumably knows it involves a potentially-chaos-tained "power source" relic and all that necron blackstone stuff. He's been comfortable using necron relics in the past, so I guess that's not too surprising?
It's unclear if the device is salvagable after the planet is saved. In typical imperial fashion, "saved" means "we killed everything, sorry about the wreckage covering 98% of the surface, btws don't forget to pay your tithe next month, teehee :-)".
The mechanicus magos does specifically say the device has the potential to seal the cicatrix maledictum. If it's salvagable, I expect we'll be seeing more of Titus and the Project Aurora device.
I played the 40k tabletop game in my youth, but I don't think I ever saw a tyranid army. It was always more space marines; the LGS owner was the only player with any xenos forces, and he played eldar. ↩