Title: Warhammer 40,000: Space Marine
Release Date: September 6, 2011
Price: $29.99 (via Steam)
Following on the heels of their incredibly successful “Dawn of War” series of real-time strategy games, Relic Entertainment decided on another foray into the universe of “Warhammer 40,000.” Instead of their typical RTS fare, however, Relic decided to try something new: a third-person shooter. They wanted to bring the experience of being a Space Marine to players. To do so, they recruited people who worked on several other, similar games, such as “God Of War” and “Far Cry”. I feel that this largely paid off, as “Space Marine” has been very well received by fans of “Warhammer 40,000,” myself included.
One of the things I like so much about “Space Marine” is how big it feels. What I mean by this is that everything you do looks, feels and sounds like it has the appropriate weight for an eight foot tall superhuman in armor that’s the equivalent of tank plate.
The ground reverberates with each step you take. The chainsword in your hand revs as it slices through your howling foes. Every shot from your bolter is the deafening door-slam bang of a high-explosive shell. At the same time, though, combat can get very intimate and very brutal. Blood is everywhere in this game: on the floor, on your chainsword and yes, even spattered across your armor.
The executions take it up to eleven, though: Unlike other third-person shooters “Space Marine” has no cover system and no med-packs/health-packs of any kind. Instead, health is regained by performing “executions,” quick-time events that result in your character ending his Ork enemy in any number of violently gory ways, from a simple combat knife to the skull all the way up to a chainsword-assisted vivisection.
(I’d originally planned to have a video showing every single execution the game has to offer, but my video-recording software is still a bit of a mystery to me, so watch this space.)
The executions also serve to illustrate another thing that drew me to “Space Marine”: its fluidity. It’s entirely possible to be blazing away with your bolter, switch to your chainsword for a quick execution kill, then go right back to merrily blazing away, all in the span of seconds. While using the d-pad to do this isn’t new at all, one way “Space Marine” innovates is by assigning melee attacks to the face buttons and preserving those while you’re in ranged combat mode. So you can be mashing the trigger to fire your bolter, then a tap of the ‘X’ or ‘Y’ buttons (I use an Xbox 360 controller for most of my PC gaming) will immediately bring out your chainsword. Your character won’t even break stride.
All of these things, in my opinion, make “Space Marine” a great game. Still, it does have its flaws. Some of them are purely mechanical, like clipping issues or the wonky camera that sometimes means you can’t line up that desperately-needed execution. Others, not so much. Like the intro video I linked above shows, “Space Marine” throws a lot of questions at people who may not be familiar with the “Warhammer 40,000” universe. While a lot of it is explained as you go along, it can still be very daunting and confusing to new players who just assumed they were going to be able to take the eight foot tall warrior monk and his chainsaw sword out for spin and didn’t necessarily sign up for a whole, huge, involved backstory.
Still, I feel like the story of “Space Marine” itself is broad-strokes enough that it’ll get the player through the game and then, if they feel like it, they can do so more research on their own. The video linked above explains most of the game’s basics (i.e. who, what, and how, with where and why kind of explained in the first video at the top of the post), giving the player enough of a story and mission to cary them through the rest of the game.
All told, if I had to rate “Space Marine,” I’d give it a solid four stars out of five. It needs some mechanical work, and maybe some dumbing down in the fluff department, but it stands solidly on its own.
The Review Shack 