This review has light thematic and structural spoilers for the campaign and multiplayer modes of Warhammer 40,000: Space Marine 2.
Is Space Marine 2 the best Warhammer 40K video game of all time?
Well, the Warhammer 40,000: Dawn of War franchise rules, and I enjoyed Warhammer 40,000: Chaos Gate – Daemonhunters a lot, and Warhammer 40,000: Boltgun is maybe the best single iterative appreciation of a single concept (the bolter) in the franchise’s history, and I’ve sunk like 200 hours into Warhammer 40,000: Inquisitor – Prophecy/Martyr. Warhammer 40,000: Rogue Trader has more texture and more hard edges than anything else that’s been licensed, and Warhammer 40,000: Space Marine 2011 has an incredible purity of form. A lot of people like Warhammer 40,000: Darktide. So there’s a conversation to be had here, but Warhammer 40,000: Space Marine 2 from developer Saber Interactive and publisher Focus Entertainment does push itself to the top of the list in a number of ways.
The reasoning behind the game is the same as it was back in 2011: You get to play as one of the true-blue real protagonist Space Marines in an eight hour long “single player” campaign, but in the robust multiplayer modes — both PvE and PvP — you get to play as much dress-up as you want with your big boys. Every single color you can mix paints to make has some kind of lore backstory, and you will eventually have access to all of them in the Operations and Eternal War modes after all the season pass nonsense rolls itself out. At launch, you get a bunch of core chapters for both the Imperium and Chaos, a bunch of interesting chapters from miscellaneous side material — the Blood Ravens of Dawn of War fame, for instance, show up here — and a deep dive on the Ultramarines themselves.
The main campaign is big and loud and very, very paint-by-numbers, in both good and bad ways. You can play through it by yourself, but it’s best experienced in a three-player party; the game adjusts for how many real players there are in the party and how many of you are bots. My suggestion for the best experience as three forty-year old dad gamers is to play it on Normal difficulty; if you’ve got more time to sink into it, Hard will give you — as a singleton gamer with two bots or as three dedicated badasses — the right amount of challenge and progression. And you’ll get to experience a Space Marine story!
It is, ultimately — Ultramarinely — a Space Marine story. Mark Strong isn’t back as Captain Titus, and Titus himself is no longer a captain; as a mere Lieutenant, Titus is more prone to shouting and less interesting voice acting choices. Titus in Space Marine 2011 was the Captain of 2nd Company — he was, essentially, the closest to Superman you’d see depicted on your screen. He had seen so much death and violence that by the time he reached Graia as part of a desperate special project advance force, everything that came out of his mouth was calm, measured, and staid. It’s why Leandros was such a dick in comparison despite (or perhaps because of) doing everything by the Codex Astartes, as he constantly reminded you. But! Mark Strong is much more expensive in 2024, and the new voice actor is…fine. If we’re being honest, they’ve traded some nuance on Captain-now-Lieutenant Titus for actual characterization of the Ultramarines. In the first game, there was nothing to say about them except that they were, in fact, the most Space Marine-y Space Marines you might ever encounter. They sent a Captain to do all this video game stuff! In this campaign, you get a whole Battle Barge to experience 2nd Company, which is now led by an insecure and overworked Scot, Captain Acharon. You learn that the Ultramarine flagship for this sector is basically a gigantic high school locker room, full of nine foot tall gossips who express their anxiety through violence. You meet a couple guys in Gadriel and Chairon who frankly have a lot of stuff they need to work through, but who can back up their shit — if they have help from a certain 200 year old legend of the company.
It’s a beautiful campaign, and it’s a compelling campaign if you like your meat-and-potatoes Xenos-and-Chaos storytelling, but it probably won’t last you more than nine hours at the absolute outside range. It’s worth risking overstating how pretty it is: They’ve made intentional attempts to provide you with vistas that you’re not entirely shooting bugs through, and they’ve purchased the relevant technologies to make the Tyranid swarms actually look like swarms. There are a lot of cutscenes, and in fact the reaving of the Tyranids is anchored by an extremely long jetpack-focused cutscene that maybe was a level before they decided they couldn’t actually do that stuff in gameplay and just turned it into an extremely badass beatdown of every flying enemy in the zone. Eventually things start getting twisted, weird, and purple, but as long as an environment is wet and has light shining on it, it looks really good.
But how does it play? I think it plays real well, but if you’re coming to it directly from Space Marine 2011 (because maybe you decided to play it first to refresh yourself, like an idiot) then there will be some fundamental changes. This game wants to be played with a controller, and it wants to be played with the main action on the right and left bumpers — melee attack and melee parry, respectively. Hold the former for heavy attack, and hold the latter for block. Reload is blessedly on X or Square, where it should have been all along, but you’re going to have to adjust hard to the melee controls if you want to play this game at anything approaching an interesting level. And you should! The game has some real complexity. Near the end, you’ll even run into some guys who will stagger their attacks to bait your parry. From Software truly rules the world.
The single player campaign is split into missions, and they can get real long in the tooth because the framing device of the entire game is the Battle Barge. So — and this is a slight spoiler, but I feel like you should hear it — when you’re in the shit at the end of the story, you’re not heading back to base on a regular basis. You should feel empowered to simply quit out, because when you go back to the Battle Barge you can simply load into your last checkpoint in the Campaign by selecting the option at the bottom of the screen when you’re in the mode select. Maybe this should have been signposted better, but if you’re going to keep to the conceit that you’re on an Ultramarine Battle Barge, this is probably the best you can do.
The real meat of this game is the PvE and PvP component, which was also true of the first game in its own way. The game in this IP family that Space Marine 2 most resembles is probably Fatshark’s Darktide, as both take a lot of inspiration from the Left 4 Dead approach to PvE objective and map-traversal based gameplay. Which of the titles you prefer will ultimately be a matter of taste; I am not a huge fan of Darktide because I don’t enjoy first-person melee gameplay, and even the shooty-est of shooty builds in that game will have to deal with enemies getting up in their face and responding with some kind of melee attack or ability eventually. I also simply prefer Space Marines to the generic Imperial military, which ties into the next point.
A big part of the draw here is getting to play incredible levels of dress-up with the Adeptus Astartes. That’s what you’re here for, and you should admit it; you even get to do it with the servants of the Archenemy to an extent on launch and you’ll probably get even more options there. Me, personally, I love the Blood Ravens. I’ve never played WH40K as a tabletop game so Captain Davian Thule was more or less my entry point to the entire franchise, and dark red with cream shoulders is a fantastic colorway for the Emperor’s stupidest fuckboys with the most suspicious heritage. Gabriel Angelos rules, and he’s right that humanity should talk to the Aeldari more. But if you don’t have my heretical love of the space elves and the guys who buy them dinner, you can also unlock: Black Templars, Blood Angels, Dark Angels, Imperial Fists, Iron Hands, Raven Guard, Salamanders, Space Wolves, White Scars, Carcharodons, Exorcists, Minotaurs, Omega Marines, Red Scorpions, Storm Giants, Taurans, and the Ultramarine successor chapters Brazen Consuls, Castellans of the Rift, Doom Eagles, Genesis Chapter, Hawk Lords, Iron Hounds, Libators, Novamarines, Praetors of Orpheus, Scythes of the Emperor, Tome Keepers, and Void Tridents. And you get the Traitor Legions Alpha Legion, Black Legion, Death Guard, Iron Warriors, Night Lords, and World Eaters because it’d be hard to run PvP otherwise.
It’s a good initial dress-up roster, and you’ll be getting more of them. The real question, though, is: How fun is multiplayer, exactly? And the answer to that’s a little bit mixed!
This review is going live the day the servers open up to everyone. I think PvP will be real interesting then. My experience a couple days before release is that I either got my ass kicked or I got carried to glory depending on whether I got matchmade into the side with the level 19 guys in it or whether I got matchmade into the side with the level 4 guys. That basically is what it is — you’re gonna have to learn how to swim and how to mitigate sinking if you want to play the PvP multiplayer in this game, just like basically any other game of its type. Anyone reading this who has had to play in any leveraged pool with Call of Duty streamers is chuckling and doing the James Franco “First time?” meme from The Ballad of Buster Scruggs. There will be murderhawks and they will get sorted into your games, and it’ll feel like they’re sorted against you more than they’re sorted towards you. That’s just how live service games go, especially when they get fundamentally leaked to all the weird guys on the internet some four months before release. The good news is that while your ranks in PvE and PvP are separate, your cosmetics are shared, so you can carry the Blood Raven standard everywhere.
The PvE mode, however, I’ve had nothing but good experiences with. It’s a three person mode; while you can play offline with bots, the game informs you that it will reset any progress you make while doing so, and clearly wants you on the servers engaging with other players while serving the supporting elements of 2nd Company not under Titus’s direct purview. As that suggests, the missions are story missions — if you decide to just jump into PvE roulette, you’ll get mild spoilers about how bad 2nd Company is at not fucking the entire pooch. There’s a computer regulator — a very simplistic dungeon master, basically — that looks at what you’re doing, how you’re doing it, what your level is, and it fucks with you based on that. If you’re really good, they’ll send more. If you’re really bad, they’ll wait until you heal up, and then they’ll send more. You’re facing Tyranids and a Chaos-corrupted Hive World, you’re not going to ever be facing less. But the encounters are regulated, which is very interesting; you can see this mechanic talking to you in the ticker across the top of the screen during Operations. The PvE missions are all plot-relevant for the campaign, too, which is a lot of fun. But you can play them out of order if you don’t care about the plot, which is how a multiplayer mode should work at the end of the day.
At the end of the day the question is: Do you want a game that’ll give you eight hours by yourself and an ongoing play experience with friends or strangers that is kind of obsessively fixated on the Warhammer 40K look and feel down to all the transports being modeled after the tabletop figures instead of what would actually fit the number of Space Marines the lore claims they would? Yes? Then this is the game for you. Do you want to hear about Chapter Master Marneus Calgar a lot? Yes? Then this is the game for you. Do you want to dress your boys up in the finest colors the Emperor has to offer, and for there to be six of them because that’s how many classes there are in multiplayer, and indeed for there to be TWELVE of them because most of you will serve Chaos gladly? Yes? Then this is the game for you. It’s the game for me, and I don’t even like Chaos.
So is Space Marine 2 the best Warhammer 40,000 game there is? Well, that depends on you. For me, it’s a conversation with a couple other games, and none of the other ones look like this or have this much budget put into them. None of them play like this. None of them let me put a sword through you in multiplayer like quite like this. And I think on the whole many of you will feel the same way, once you get down to murdering all your foes in the grimdark future of the 41st Millennium.
Final Thoughts: It retails for $60 on Steam; there were “Advanced Access” $90 and $100 versions that I would not have touched if I wasn’t buying the game for work (and probably won’t have much relevance by the time you read this). It runs like a dream on PC for me but I’m running an AMD Ryzen 7 7800 and a GeForce RTX 4070 Ti Super, so it better; I’ve heard mixed reviews about how well it plays with older generation hardware even at the recommended hardware level. Load times can be brutal on older CPUs. The system requirements are not kidding about a 1060 being a minimum requirement now, even though that card is still able to handle a lot of current releases that also go to console. If you’re a typical reader of this site I doubt I have to sell you super-hard on buying Space Marine 2 if it’s at all in your wheelhouse, but if you’re not a huge 40K head and don’t have much interest in online play, you’re looking at probably a little under 10 hours of content in single player campaign, and might want to wait for a sale in a few months.
A previous version of this article incorrectly stated that Operations mode was multiplayer only. This has been corrected.
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