Warhammer 40,000: Space Marine 2 review: grim, glorious, and bloody brilliant

Loud, boisterous, and gleefully violent, Warhammer 40,000: Space Marine 2 delivers a thrilling power fantasy. Saber Interactive’s third-person slaughter-fest invites you to step into the power-armored boots of a 10-foot-tall superhuman Space Marine as you carve your way through hordes of alien Tyranids and Chaos cultists. Crunchy, bloody, and immensely satisfying, Space Marine 2’s core gameplay loop distinguishes the title, ensuring that occasional moments of ambitious overreach or old-school jankiness are easily forgotten.

Warhammer 40,000: Space Marine 2 is a lovingly maintained relic of a bygone era. To stomp through its gorgeous, detailed levels is to bask in the third-person glory days of the late 2000s. The pressures of 2024’s open-world-saturated design environment are nowhere to be seen here. Space Marine 2’s punchy single-player campaign and generous co-op missions are linear, well-structured affairs. This allows for an attention to detail when it comes to encounters and level design alike and, while this may be off-putting to some, those wishing to nestle into the comforting embrace of a traditional action game will find their desires met.

However, this is not to say that Space Marine 2 rejects the advantages of modern design approaches either. When it comes to realizing the immense scale of Games Workshop’s beloved Warhammer 40,000 dystopian sci-fi universe, Space Marine 2 makes generous use of modern hardware. Awe-inspiring vistas come almost every minute in Space Marine 2. Looming gothic structures loom across busy battlefields populated by swarms of enemies. The Space Marines themselves tower over human and alien foot soldiers alike, a sense echoed by weighty animations which capture the sheer bulk and presence of these immense killing machines.

That said the game occasionally bites off more than it can chew. The scale of its ambitions cause some sections of the campaign to feel rushed. For instance, while they look great at a distance, many of your mortal human allies during the campaign use canned and dull animations - a stark contrast to the gorgeous and deliberate movements on show from the Space Marines themselves. Allied tanks stay quiet, their massed machine guns pointing at the enemy seemingly never to fire. Additionally, though chocked full of unlockables, Space Marine 2’s co-op mode asks for a serious amount of grinding from players, leading to a stolid progression system that lets down the otherwise joyful co-op missions.

Party like it's 2011

Missteps aside, the combat loop at the core of Space Marine 2 reaches lofty heights. At its best, it induced in me a Doom-like flow state of action and re-action, with controls shifting seamlessly between ranged attacks and melee cut and thrust. This alone is an exceptional achievement. 

Space Marine 2 boasts a panoply of over-the-top weapons, each of which feels like a violent, adolescent fever dream brought to life. Brutal automatic rifles stand alongside deadly plasma weapons and precision laser snipers. While the selection in melee is a little more limited, it is no less captivating. Warhammer 40,000’s iconic chainsword (that’s a sword that’s also a literal, actual chainsaw) is captured lusciously. Its blades roar with each attack as the weapon’s side radiators billow with excess heat. On the other end of the spectrum, we have the Thunder Hammer, a heavy, deliberate weapon specialized in crowd control through massive swings crowned with explosive detonations. 

In contrast to what you might expect from a third-person action game, Space Marine 2 does not use a cover system. Instead, Space Marines recover health by slaying enemies in dramatic executions. These brutal over-the-top animations elicited excited shouts of “bruh!” from myself and anyone else who chanced into the living room at the time. Smaller targets can be executed with a well-timed parry, while larger foes must be beaten into submission with crunchy melee attacks or ruthless barrages of gunfire. This fluid process does a great deal to feed into the power fantasy at the heart of Space Marine 2, refining the system as it was first introduced in Warhammer 40,000: Space Marine (2011). 

Bruh? Bruh.

Space Marine 2 builds on its predecessor in every conceivable respect. The battles are louder, the setpieces more dramatic and the central campaign more audacious - with the notable exception of its lackluster finale. 

Throughout the roughly 12-hour-long main campaign, you play as Demetrian Titus - the star of the first game. A roller coaster rather than a sandbox, Space Marine 2’s campaign takes advantage of a linear mission structure to dole out gorgeous cutscenes and satisfying setpieces at an impressive, if occasionally overwhelming, pace. You’ll fight through alien-infested jungles, ancient facilities, forgotten tombs, and towering megacities to defend humanity from a sinister conspiracy and an alien menace. 

Despite this breadth, the campaign rarely loses its grounding, thanks, in part, to the supporting cast. For most of the campaign, you’ll be followed by two subordinates who’ll back you up and even revive you should you fall. Their constant presence adds a sense of camaraderie, reinforcing the sense of siblinghood at the heart of Space Marine culture. 

Co-op mode doubles down on this sense of camaraderie, offering six exciting missions which each slot into the story of the single-player campaign, adding plenty of extra context and worldbuilding. However, though these missions fully capture the well-paced ebb and flow of the campaign missions, the fact that there are only six available at launch makes the co-op feel like an ancillary feature, subordinate to the main story. 

You want it darker?

What is never subordinate, however, is the rich Warhammer 40,000 setting which is lovingly and impressively presented throughout. Die-hard fans will notice references to significant events throughout the canon which help to place Space Marine 2 in a wider context. That said, the title remains remarkably accessible for a newcomer. The first few hours of the campaign gently dole out key concepts, ensuring that the exposition never gets bogged down in unnecessary minutia. Space Marine 2 also boasts the most dramatic and impressive opening crawl and prologue mission that I’ve ever seen for a Warhammer 40,000 game.

What’s more, the writers take the opportunity to deliberately crack the image of the stoic, Space Marine killing machine through occasional glimmers of human dialogue. While you shouldn’t expect hyper-developed characters, these Space Marines feel well-rounded. This is especially true in softer moments of conversation. Some of the dialogue between the supporting cast (whom you control in co-op mode) is so earnest and wholesome that it veers towards the homoromantic.

This sort of hidden depth is a hallmark of Space Marine 2. While its characters, storylines, and set pieces lack the depth of more story-heavy action-adventure titles like The Last of Us, they absolutely contain more than meets the eye. Coupled with an exceptionally satisfying combat system and a heartfelt dedication to the source material, this quality helps lift Space Marine 2 comfortably out of forgettability and easily into the realm of the genuinely entertaining. While elements of Space Marine 2 may feel rushed or overstretched, the title stands on its own two feet, distinctive, bombastic, and proud.  

Accessibility

Space Marine 2 offers bare-bones accessibility features, sporting a colorblind mode and adjustable subtitles. Players can also toggle off-screen markers allowing for clearer gameplay - useful for those with visual impairments. There are also a range of difficulty modes. 

Unfortunately, the title offers little else when it comes to accessibility. An adjustable parry window or an option for automatic parries would have been most welcome. An option for colour cues to distinguish between heavy and light melee attacks is also conspicuously absent. 

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How I reviewed Warhammer 40,000: Space Marine 2

I played Warhammer 40,000 Space Marine 2 for roughly 16 hours, taking time to complete the campaign, replay some of my favorite missions, and play through almost every co-op mission with both AI allies and other players. Since the game was in a pre-release state, there was an insufficient pool of players to evaluate the PvP mode. 

I reviewed the game in performance mode on PS5 using a Dualsense Wireless Controller on a 48-inch LG C2 OLED 4K TV. The game ran smoothly and, while there were some frame rate drops, these were few and far between, amounting to less than half a dozen over my 16-hour playtime.