Warhammer 40,000: Space Marine 2 review – A bloodlust-inducing spectacle

Space Marine 2 is a worthy sequel and a feast for 40K fans

Saber Interactive / Focus Entertainment

There’s something oddly addictive about splattering Tyranid guts with a chainsword and seeing how they explode into red mist when a bullet from a heavy bolter hits them – perhaps causing a massacre like that activates something primal in our brains. Wherever this satisfaction may be coming from, Warhammer 40,000: Space Marine 2 has it in buckets. Big, sloppy buckets.

Disclaimer: Please be aware that this review will contain story spoilers for the campaign of the game, so read on at your own discretion.

In Saber Interactive’s third-person shooter, which is a sequel to the iconic 2011 game developed by Relic Entertainment, we once again put on the armor of Titus, an Astartes of the Ultramarines, though he’ll be wearing different colors when we first meet him in the tutorial mission as a result of what happened to him in the past.

Titus is a Space Marine – a genetically engineered super soldier – and serves the Imperium of Man, humanity’s government in the grimdark universe of Warhammer 40,000. I won’t explain it too much, but basically, there are no good guys in this setting. It goes from terribly awful to less awful and the fascist, theocratic, xenophobic, and anti-scientific Imperium is among the least terrible entities – as you’ll be quick to find out. I will say that you’ll enjoy playing Space Marine 2 more if you know the lore or you’ve played the original because events from the first game will be referenced, but it’s not crucial.

Here’s the key thing: Slicing up swarms of Tyranids with ridiculously powerful sci-fi weaponry is great fun even if you don’t know what the hell a Tyranid is or why they want to eat you.

You don't need to know what a Carnifex is to enjoy ripping it apart. / Saber Interactive / Focus Entertainment

Space Marine 2 is a fairly classic shooter with a linear campaign: You get an assignment, spend some time on your unit’s Battle Barge for briefings, storytelling, and gear customization, and then get planetside to blast the enemies of the Imperium.

Levels are pretty linear as well, though as in any good shooter, you’ll be able to explore the nooks and crannies of the battlefields for some hidden collectibles (dataslates that provide you with some additional background information) and – most importantly – different weapons, more ammo, and medicine. The little exploration you can do generally feels pretty rewarding, because you will need those supplies, especially on the higher difficulties.

What I appreciate most about the level design in Space Marine 2 is that it incentivizes you to get experimental with your weapons. Sometimes you start off in a relatively open area with foes attacking from long distances, so it’s great to have a sniper rifle, a las fusil, or a scoped bolter, but then you’ll enter some old ruins in which you’ll want a melta rifle for some close-range carnage – and no matter what, your bread-and-butter combination of melee weapon plus pistol is always going to come in clutch when hordes of Tyranids and other enemies try to swarm you. What’s important is that the game keeps things fresh and mixed up in this way. You can find some weapons with limited ammunition that can’t be replaced in hidden corners, such as a heavy bolter or multi melta – getting your hands on one of these feels good.

Putting the 'space' in Space Marine. / Saber Interactive / Focus Entertainment

I must also mention how gorgeous the maps – and the game in general – are. From lush jungles in which you get stalked by Tyranids over an intense urban battle on a massive Hive World to a spooky Tomb World drenched in Chaos sorcery, Space Marine 2 offers a good variety when it comes to biomes – and all of them look amazing. I sometimes felt like a war tourist, taking in the sights with immense battles playing out before them. It helps that Warhammer 40,000’s scale is just ridiculously out of bounds: Everything is built by megalomaniacs and your own size is a lot bigger than an average human, which you’ll be reminded of any time you see some of the brave members of the Imperial Guard, the regular humans fighting at your side.

Speaking of which: Space Marine 2 gets across how special the Astartes are to the Guard. In areas like bases, the guardsmen will kneel and mutter prayers of thanks to the Emperor for sending you as you march by them. Saber Interactive spent a lot of time and effort on smaller details like that, which make the world feel appropriately ‘40K’ – in one sequence you walk through an army base and can witness a commander giving a fiery speech to his soldiers, while you can observe a commissar nearby sentencing some soldiers accused of cowardice to death, which is promptly executed by other soldiers standing at the ready with their lasguns. Right next to the execution site, other would-be deserters beg to be spared. The atmosphere of this game is impeccable – it’s an unabashed celebration of 40K.

Showing fear when facing a swarm of monsters that wants to eat you? That'll get you the firing squad. / Saber Interactive / Focus Entertainment

It’s not like our Space Marines are perfect either – and that’s another aspect I really like: Saber made them actual characters with distinct personalities, strengths and weaknesses. We know Titus’ integrity, cunning, and courage, but the man is too secretive and grumpy for his own good. His two squad members, Chairon and Gadriel, aren’t any better: Chairon is loyal and brave, but his hatred for Chaos can blind him, while Gadriel is almost obsessed with upholding the honor of the Chapter and its history, leading him to be too paranoid to think clearly sometimes. All of these personality traits will come into play at pivotal moments in the story and are the hinges for some actual character development.

We see the insidiousness of Tzeentch’s Thousand Sons, the brutal struggle and attrition of war against the endless mass of Tyranids, and the toll this takes from even the most battle-hardened soldiers from their own eyes. But we also experience the unbreakable bonds of brotherhood and faith that keep them going. Sure, Space Marine 2 won’t win any awards for its writing, but it provides more than enough hooks to get invested into – and a pretty good payoff for doing so.

The overall story is fairly typical for Warhammer: We begin by desperately trying to fend off a Tyranid invasion, but naturally one of the Chaos Gods is using this opportunity to advance their own machinations. Oh, and of course the Adeptus Mechanicus plays around with some ancient xenotech and creates a doomsday weapon that falls into enemy hands. You know, the usual.

The Thousand Sons have impeccable fashion sense with their ancient Egypt-inspired designs, but treason is treason. / Saber Interactive / Focus Entertainment

Aside from cutscenes, a lot of the story is presented by the characters chatting on elevators – and I get why Saber has done this: It’s difficult to talk over the turmoil of battle. It does feel a bit repetitive and formulaic at times though. Whenever you see an elevator, you pretty much know that it’s time for some lore dumps and character development, and there’s quite a lot of them in the game. It’s not the most elegant solution, but it’s alright.

Obviously, though, most of your time spent in the game is in the thick of combat and that time feels amazing. You carry a primary, secondary, and melee weapon with you, giving you lots of options on how to deal with enemies – and both weapons and enemies are pretty varied. The guns generally feel different enough, though those differences are small for a few of the rifles. Melee combat will vary greatly depending on your tool of choice, though, as all four of the available weapons come with different combos – and it makes sense: A chainsword is not the same thing as a thunderhammer by any means. As mentioned above, the level design as well as the variety of enemies will make you creative in your use of the arsenal pretty quickly and the maps generally offer you plenty of opportunities to switch up your gear along the way.

Again, the scale of combat is one of the most impressive things about this game: You’ll see a horde of hundreds of Tyranids coming at you and think, ‘Oh, surely those are just background flavor,’ but no – each of those entities can be killed. So yeah, battle gets pretty hectic, but that’s part of the fun: You slice with your chainsword to get some room, fire a few bullets with the bolt pistol in your off-hand, and then parry the attack of a larger enemy, staggering them to allow for a well-placed shot that restores your armor value and gives you some i-frames to breathe. This drops them into critical health, allowing you to close in for an execution move with a gloriously gory animation: The next wave is coming – but oh, look, there's a barrel filled with fuel right next to their entry point…

Now that's a hunting trophy you can proudly present on your wall. / Saber Interactive / Focus Entertainment

In Space Marine 2, just like in the predecessor, you keep yourself healthy by dealing damage. Your armor, which protects your health bar, can be restored by certain actions such as execution moves, and in a short time frame after losing actual health, you can heal yourself by damaging enemies. You’re steered to be bold and aggressive, but not foolhardy.

Fighting waves and adapting to different enemy types on the fly is fun, but so are the various boss fights against the likes of a Tyranid Carnifex or a Chaos Helbrute – you dodge, parry, slice, shoot, all the while observing their attack patterns. It’s not quite Dark Souls, but close enough.

I don’t play a lot of shooters, but I would if they were like Space Marine 2 – I had an absolute blast. It’s too bad that it was over pretty quickly (around ten hours), at least as far as the pure single-player content is concerned.

There are co-op missions, called Operations, that neatly fit into the single-player campaign’s storyline, showing the actions of other Space Marine squads referenced in the story, which you can at least start by yourself (other players can drop in and out, replacing and being replaced by AI Space Marines), but it’s quite annoying to have to switch between co-op and campaign mode on the Battle Barge, since it prompts a loading screen.

This issue is exacerbated by the fact that the game isn’t really great about saving your progress on the Battle Barge: After I first switched to co-op mode and then returned to campaign mode, I had to replay the entire dialog section I had done previously because it didn’t save my progress. It’s similar in missions: You can’t save manually and only reload certain checkpoints, but the game doesn’t actually tell you where these are – you can only guess and pray to the Emperor that you don’t accidentally kill all of your progress.

Given that the co-op missions are so cleverly intertwined with the main story anyway, I honestly don’t understand why they aren’t simply available as regular single-player missions as well.

You can also find solemn scenes like this: Space Marines holding a funeral ceremony for a fallen brother. / Saber Interactive / Focus Entertainment

One of the biggest questions going into Space Marine 2 was performance and, for me at least, it runs smoothly – but given my high-end system, I’d have been shocked if things were different. I had a single crash I couldn’t replicate and the worst bugs I encountered were clipping issues and Tyranid corpses ragdolling on the ground like a nightmarish perpetuum mobile. The optimization work done after the game was delayed really paid off – it’s a night-and-day difference to the build I played at Gamescom 2023.

Obviously, there wasn’t much of an opportunity to fool around in multiplayer on the review build, but the class and progression system it shares with co-op looks pretty solid. One of the grand highlights in this regard is the deep customization system for your character when it comes to his armor – I can’t wait to see what designs everyone comes up with.

Warhammer 40,000: Space Marine 2 is a bombastic celebration of the setting, a must-play for its fans, and a bloodlust-inducing third-person shooter experience for everyone, though anyone looking to engage with single-player content only will find themselves chewing on bone a little too soon.

Score: 8/10

Version tested: PC (Steam)