Warhammer 40,000: Space Marine is a third person action shooter / brawler which does exactly what you would expect in that you play a Space Marine in the Warhammer 40,000 universe.  This is a very simple premise the bellies a much more complicated background.

You take control of Captain Titus of the Ultramarines as you attempt to liberate a forge world from an Ork invasion with the help of two of your battle-brothers by murdering as many invading aliens as possible.  The plot then opens up into the investigation of a doomsday-like device that the Inquisition have been working on in secret that harbours powers of the warp.

There will be parts of that last paragraph that you will not understand unless you are familiar with the Warhammer 40,000 setting, something that I think THQ are going to have a hard time with because there’s a problem here.  The Warhammer 40,000 setting is weird.  Brilliantly weird, but still weird none the less.  There will also be more than one person giggling that the big blue space marines are called Ultramarines.

To roughly translate that second paragraph then, you control an elite super-soldier well versed in ranged and melee combat and garbed in gigantic powerful armour as you and two other elite super soldiers try to save a planet that specialises in the manufacturing of weapons for the universe spanning human empire from an invasion of ferocious green skinned barbarian like aliens.  You then investigate a powerful weapon that has been developed by a special research division of the human empire that uses energy drawn from a parallel dimension where demons live.

You see, even with the translation, those last three words of the paragraph above show that the weirdness is inherent to the setting and difficult to work around.  Relic Entertainment, also behind the excellent Dawn of War series, have had their work cut out for them to make a gripping third person action title, a genre that is currently very popular, that will appeal to a mass audience and not just existing fans of the Warhammer 40,000 franchise.

There are two different ways that they could have gone about crafting Space Marine.  The first would be to change anything that was complicated and tone all the darker elements of the setting down and to produce something that will appeal to focus groups.  The second would be to revel in the weirdness, consult with Games Workshop wherever possible and make something that will fly right by die hard fans.  I feel they’ve gone for the second route whilst managing to not lose focus on the goal of creating something for a mass audience, which is no mean feat.

The game itself is beautiful.  The mechanics are well grounded and solid, there’s no cover based shooting where you stick to chest high walls as a space marine is basically wearing the cover, the switch between melee and ranged is seamless and the overall design of all the characters, enemies and levels is so faithful to the source material it seems unreal.  The way the game feels when you fly into the enemy or hold back to pick of strategic targets is a perfect balance and they way in which the levels are designed to give peaks and troughs to the action is a fantastic example of how to pace a game properly, with possibly a caveat that the last boss was a bit of a let down, heavily featuring the action-game-malaise of the quick-time-event.

Environments are appropriately grim and murky for the setting, the story is well written with likable characters that don’t just rely on macho grunting for communication with a fantastic voice acting performance from Mark Strong (Sherlock Holmes, Stardust) which perfectly nails the grim gravitas of a veteran Space Marine.  Almost everything about the game is perfect.

Following that word ‘almost’, there were a couple of things that I found started to irritate me about three quarters of the way through Space Marine.  First of all, you spend an awful lot of your time fighting the green skinned barbarian Orks.  This in itself is not a problem, but the over exposure to the hordes of green skins sparked another niggling problem.  All of the Orks or any one type look exactly the same.  This is a truly nit-picking argument, but in the Warhammer 40,000 setting, the Orks are a rag-tag disorganised mob of madness that cobble together weaponry in a very individualistic way.  In Space Marine, I’ve killed the same five or six Orks copy and pasted across the whole game world.  This only really registered because I was fighting against the same enemy for so long and it is so much less noticeable once a secondary aggressor turns up at the start of the third act, but parts of the game do feel more than a little repetitive.

The second problem I had was in one particular part of the mechanics.  Something that I absolutely love about Space Marine is the fact that when you are low on health, instead of running and hiding behind a rock for it to recharge like most modern games, you are encouraged to wade into the thick of things as performing certain close combat moves on you foes will replenish your health.  This means that getting your health knocked down will more likely propel you forwards instead of hold you back, terrified to pop your head above you life preserving bit of cover.

There is just one issue with this that just occasionally becomes a deal breaker.  The moves that you use to regain health are ‘execution’ sequences that are a pre-rendered animation of the kind that jumps into slow motion, spins the camera around a bit and lets you get a closer look at the fancy speed-surgery Captain Titus appears to be performing with his chainsword (a chainsaw with a hilt).  Whilst the game is running through this pre-rendered animation which is often impressive, inventive and also occasionally rather long, you can still sustain damage.  This means that on more than one occasion I have been desperately trying to regain my health by trying to pull the arms off an Ork only to find a Bomb Squig (dog-like alien wearing a jacket of fizzing dynamite) charging in slow motion towards me, detonating a split second before the health replenishment actually occurs.  On the plus side, in the case of the Bomb Squig, at least it’s actually quite funny to see your two legged doom charging towards you in slow motion as it blurs the lines ever so slightly between Warhammer 40,000 and Wile E Coyote.

The title as a whole is beautifully polished.  The love, effort and talent that has gone into Space Marine is visible wherever you look.  There are a couple of sections where I couldn’t help feeling that the level had been cut short slightly, for example a turret section on a flying transport ship where you shoot down Stormboyz (Orks with crude rockets attached to their back letting them fly) that ended abruptly and dumps you into a last stand-like mission that ended equally abruptly before the plot could resume, but these parts are in the minority.

There’s definitely a lot of fun to be had with the multiplayer too, although it’s frustrating that the insane levels of customisation that you can exact on your marine is only unlocked at level four, I’m a little sniffy about the locked levels past level six that you need a special code given in new copies of the game to unlock and with only two game modes and a limited map pool, there’s only so much you can get out of it.

The best thing I can really credit Relic with in this project is one of the first things I mentioned:  The weirdness.  They have embraced the setting instead of trying to skirt round it and as a result have produced a story that is firmly grounded in the recurring themes of the universe with a suitably bittersweet ending to the single player campaign.

If you are a fan of Warhammer 40,000, you’ve probably already bought this.  If you are a long recovering fan of Warhammer 40,000 like myself, you should probably take a look at this but be aware that it might make you want to dig out your paints again.  If you have never heard of Warhammer 40,000 before, then this is not a bad introduction to a rich and complex universe as well as a fantastically balanced and well crafted brawler/shooter.

 

Warhammer 40,000: Space Marine, developed by Relic Entertainment and published by THQ, was played to completion on the Playstation 3.  It is also available on Xbox 360 and PC.