Space Marines 2 short review

So, I finally circled back to Space Marine 2. I tried it for an hour at launch, wasn't impressed at all, and threw it on the back burner hoping a few updates might fix things. Well, I've now finished the campaign on Angel of Death and slogged through a few Operations on Ruthless, and my initial feeling was dead on: this game is thoroughly 'mid', despite its AAA price tag.

All that hype and positivity at release felt designed to drown out legitimate criticism. It's clear now that the game got a pass because it was the poster child for the anti-MTX (despite the game itself also has low effort shitty DLCs), anti-DEI backlash happening at the time. It was never judged purely on its own merits, because if it were, people would have seen it for what it is.

Let's get the one positive out of the way. The only thing I genuinely enjoyed was how faithfully it adapted the 40k grimdank universe. Visually, the game is a masterpiece for the setting. Everything looks fantastic, the locales are grandiose and detailed, and the background cinematics are a feast for the eyes. Astartes, the Mechanicus, the Tyranids etc. it's all correctly and lovingly detailed. My praise for the game ends there. Seriously.

The combat? It's arse. The entire gameplay loop boils down to shooting something until you can press a button for a flashy, unskippable execution just to get your health/armour back. It's a repetitive chore that constantly breaks the flow of battle. Having also currently playing a good amount of Darktide, going from its deep and satisfying combat to this really exposes how simplistic and shallow it is. The whole dodge and parry system was clearly designed for smaller battles, but the moment you crank the difficulty and the screen floods with mini-bosses and visual clutter, any nuance is gone. It just becomes a chaotic spam-fest where you're either mindlessly cycling executions or getting stun-locked.

Then there are the guns. They look great, but they have absolutely zero visual or sound impact. The feedback is genuinely underwhelming, again, look at Darktide's bolter. The sound, the kick, the feeling of impact there is chef's kiss. Here? The eight or more different bolter variations just feel like the same generic machine gun, with firing modes being the only real difference. There's nothing 'bolter' about them. The sound design in general is just forgettable, and the background music is completely uninspired.

The story is shit. Unless you're a dedicated 40k fan, you will have no clue what is going on. What's a Primarch? Who's Girlyman? Who's Cadia and why don't they just take a seat? The game doesn't care to explain, you're expected to know. The "Operations" co-op mode is just a tacked-on grind with scraps of the main story attached. The core problem is that the gameplay itself is so monotonous and frankly bad that I couldn't be bothered to play more than three maps. Even if the classes get some fun skills later, the early progression is just generic % increases. Wow.