Review | Warhammer 40,000: Space Marine

“In the grim darkness of the future there is only war.”

Or, at least, that is what Warhammer 40,000: Space Marine would have you believe. Contrary to the connotations of  “dark” and “grim” and the rough monotone that delivers that opening line, the Warhammer universe savors the unbroken skirmishes. After all, this amounts to everything that the table-top miniature game was built on. Space Marine is bright, flashy, and simplistic. It loves carving through hordes of orks, and it is not ashamed about that one bit.

How do you make a world compelling, when all of its real-world artifacts are inch high models and a collection of dice to roll and tables to interpret? When it comes to 40K, the answer is two fold. Space Marine takes advantage of one technique, and kind of forsakes the other.

Those little miniatures are, and always have been, darn cool looking. Hand painted statues balance immaculate detail with the simple visual statements required to stand out on the mini-battlefield. Space Marine translates the primary coloured, stylised look of the miniatures to the screen perfectly. It has become a cliché to say that all modern shooters are oppressively grey, but it is genuinely great to see the bright blue and yellows of the Marines’ cranium-dwarfing blue armour and the deep, uniform green of the orks. Whatever happened to dark green? Captain Titus, the player character, sometimes gets to jet around by strapping a rocket-pack to his medi-futuristic plate suit. The backpack is huge, and chunkily geometric.

While the character designs are all quite surreal and cartoony (in a good way – a simple easily digestible way)  the environments are less consistent. Opening the game, your several tonne protagonist crashes down onto a space ship (By ship I mean a literal flying boat, the Orks are rather piratey, which is great) and destroys it singlehandedly – with its own turret no less. It is a shame that later levels will often take place in slightly uninspired brown rubbly lands or bland metallic factories.

Take a look at the Wikipedia article for Warhammer Space Marines (Not a brand specific wiki, nor the article for the whole 40K universe. No, merely the wikipedia article concerning that one civilisation.

Don’t read it though, it’s far too long, and that is the other great strength of the tabletop game: The absurdly rich lore and backstory of the universe. No, Space Marine doesn’t sink below mediocre in the gauntlet of today’s action shooters, the story contains plenty of twists, turns and (better) strong female characters, but the story did not manage to instill much of a sense of scale in me. I did not feel the context of history, politics, religion and philosophy that is so densely developed in the source material.

The philosophy of the a Warhammer Space Marine is a very simple one. Effectively walking tanks, they do not concern themselves with blocking attacks, nor with cover and certainly not with subtle methods of dispatching their enemies. Every death grants that player a patriotic phrase as a consolation prize, something to persuade you that death for one’s commander is greater than living for one’s self. The combat reflects the philosophy and is darn simple. Maybe a little too simple.

Hordes (and I do mean hordes, it feels like hundreds of orks can be on screen at any one time) of enemies are dealt with through a mixture of chainsword-on-face melee and exploding bullet ranged combat. In other words, an incredibly unsubtle armory. The fusion is handled well. Since ranged combat is controlled by the triggers and melee by the face buttons the two can be switched to seamlessly. It feels good to thin out the ranks of an advancing horde with a weighty handgun and then take to the visceral melee combat with gusto, even if that is really the single strategic option that the switching system ultimately lends itself to. A sniper rifle is fun, but not handy since single enemies are rarely a threat, but the meltagun is certainly cool.

As the wave of enemies hits you, the response (One that becomes reflexive) is to pummel the X-button and confidently push the movement analog stick vaguely towards the greatest density of foes. For the most part that is all you can do. Sure, technically the Y and B buttons do something, Y stuns enemies and B executes them to regain health (only after they have been stunned i’m afraid), but that is their singular function. It’s not as though ‘heavy’ and ‘fast’ attacks can be chained in different combinations to create effective combos that are suited to different situations, let alone blending swordplay with the gun in your other hand for fluid take-downs. You can chain the x button and cap it off with a y for a couple of stunning combos, but they are of little strategic value outside of the bosses that require them, and don’t look any cooler than the standard x mashing sequences. The issue is that the combat, which makes up the meat of your play-time ends up feeling very repetitive and one-buttony.

On the other space-gauntlet, the executions do look good. The game seems to pick randomly from a group of possible animations, all of which are incredibly brutal and satisfying. Titus might lift an entire enemy from the ground and cut through it horizontally, accompanied by the screaming of the chainsword. The occasional addition of a new weapon, all of which have their own set of kill possibilities, attempts to keep things fresh. Even then their only practical difference tends to be the speed/damage ratio.

It would not be so bad if it weren’t for the game’s checkpoint distribution. Often, the save points are planted before a slog – either an easy repetitive combat section with a spawning river of weak foes, or a quick jog down an utterly eventless corridor. You will meet a big-bad-boss and he will stomp on your face, or a group of tough enemies will kill you, and you will be sent back to be frustrated by the chore of the section you had completed moments before. If this were a different kind of action game, one with a set of mechanics it is my job to master, then this would be fine. It would be an appropriate punishment for my inability to wrap my mind around the strategies or my fingers around the combos. In Warhammer though, I kind of felt like I died because of a little too much random chance. The game is at its best when you are threshing through foes like so much wheat, and the game is a little to hard (Even on normal) to illicit that feeling as much as it could.

Multiplayer is decent, supplanting the combat of the single player into a context that borrows from the formulae of every other contemporary shooter. Expect an evolution of your abilities as you unlock your way to the top. The melee combat, unfortunately was designed to take on groups of enemies and does not lend itself to a the multiplayer context. Online skirmishes will, for the most part, involve the slightly less interesting ranged weapons.

In the end though, Warhammer’s combat is nearly as good as the simplistic straight-jacket the game’s faithfulness to its Marine protagonists wraps it up in. It is a refreshingly bright shooter, and in that sense it absolutely does justice to the source material. I, personally, could not abide by the simplistic combat that still managed to be quite difficult, but I have no problem believing that other people won’t have a problem with it.  [6]