Warhammer 40k: Space Marine

Title: Warhammer 40k: Space Marine
Platform Played On: Xbox 360
Release Date: September 6, 2011
Date Played: February 2012
Time Played: 10 hours
Completed (Y/N): Yes
Score: 3/5




Opinion:
I love the Warhammer universe. Its Gothic architecture, its "space British" (aka Space Marines), and its latin based naming conventions all create an epic war-machine atmosphere. However I am not a huge fan of some of the mechanics chosen for this game.

First of, Space Marine is a hard ass game. Even on easy there were several spots that I had to retry half a dozen times, either hard is not much harder, or hard is impossible.  I found myself yelling at the TV "wtf, this is easy?How hard is Hard?". Before I go deeper into that, let me set the scene.

Space Marine uses the Unreal Engine 3, which was used by the genre defining Gears of War. Bulky armor, crazy guns, enemy with "horde" mentality.  Hey that sounds familiar, re-skin it and we got ourselves a Warhammer game.  Unfortunately, that is basically what happened with Space Marine. The character movement, and interactions resemble Gears of War to the tee.  The weapons feel exactly like Gears of War, with most of the enemies soaking up hundreds of bullets and behaving just like Locust in Gears of War. In fact it seems like there was only one $#tty attempt to differentiate Space Marine from Gears, and that was to limit ammo, and force you to melee in order to regain health. Fine, sounds great on paper. Space Marines are known for their melee, and it would seem natural for them to engage in hand to hand combat more so than ranged; however it ends up being a terrible game mechanic that causes more frustration than fun.  I found myself in situations where I had a sliver of health left and was forced to run head first into a hail of bullets in order to get to an Ork whom I can melee to regain health. Which just caused me to die, but because of the game's central design, that is what I am supposed to do and there is no way around it (I was out of ammo).  In other games, at least you can jump into cover and regen some health, but here you basically have to kamikaze and hope that you live. Not fun at all.

I would have liked it if Relic, being a world class developer to be more original with its game design. There is almost nothing that differentiates it from Gears of War, even the melee emphasis is thrown by the wayside as you still end up spraying thousands of rounds from your Bolter into enemies that soak up bullets just like Locust.

The only thing that kept me going was the Warhammer universe. I could care less for the game's mechanics, which is a shame.  There have been plenty of developers who took Unreal Engine 3 and charted new territory, Mass Effect, BioShock, Mirror's Edge just to name a few.  There is absolutely no need for a talented developer to copy and re-skin a 5 year old game.  Even some of the levels are simply reskinned assets from Gears.  All of us remember the final level in the original Gears of War, the train level.  Space Marine literally takes that level and throws a new skin on top.  It is literally the same level.  Shameful.

Now that I am done expressing my dissatisfaction with Relic's lack of creativity, I will say that Space Marine looks and sounds great. The blood splashes, the armor detail, voices, weapon sounds all create a great atmosphere. And even though I was frustrated with some sections of the game, I still enjoyed most of it, largely due to the aforementioned atmosphere.  The story is not bad either.

Overall I would say that if you are a Warhammer fan, or like the Gears of War gameplay then you will most likely enjoy Warhammer 40k: Space Marine. Otherwise you are better off playing something else. If you do end up picking it up though, heed my word and play it on Easy. There is plenty of challenge there. Playing it on Hard is simply masochistic.