Review by: William Abner

Space Marine is a game that lives and breathes off of its licensing. As a straight up action game it certainly has its high points and low points, but it’s the Warhammer 40,000 license and the first rate way in which developer Relic puts it to use that makes the game stand out.

As a 20 year fan of Games Workshop’s grim sci-fi setting, Space Marine fulfills some lifelong videogame fantasies. Standing resolutely as an Ultramarine captain, a heavy bolter at my side and mowing down countless charging orks in spectacular fashion is something that I will never forget – and admittedly Space Marine is filled with those types of fan boy moments: crashing down on enemies via a jump pack, knocking an ork back ten yards with the smash of a Thunder Hammer or violently gutting him with a chainsword, blasting a Chaos Marine with a Las Cannon, and frying multiple greenskins with a melta gun – this is the type of stuff that 40K fanatics have dreamed of doing one day in videogame form, and here it is. Finally.

But what if you’re not a die hard 40K fan? What if all of this talk of Inquisitors, Chaos, Forge Worlds and Storm Boyz doesn’t do anything for you and all you want is a first rate action game? In that case it’s a slightly tougher sell.

The action itself is at times exhilarating. The free flowing combat animations, the ease of switching from melee to ranged combat, and the wonderful way the bolt gun “feels” when you fire it – it’s all expertly done. When you are surrounded by 20 insane orks and start hacking away with a Power Axe, cutting them to ribbons, it’s hard to not do it with a goofy smile on your face, 40K fan or not. But there are also many cases of developer miscues. Relic is known as a real time strategy developer and not an action game developer and at times this shows in the way Space Marine works.

This is a terribly linear game. It’s basically a corridor 3rd person shooter – even if a lot of it is set outdoors, it’s still a corridor game that leads you down a set path. The only way your experience is going to be any different from mine is the weapons we choose to use. You are on a rail the entire game; there’s no choices forced on you or on how you accomplish each task. You’re there to kill the bad guys. Period – and there’s no way around a set piece to flank the enemy or to try something crafty. This game is absolutely primal in how it leads you to just slaughter enemies. Each encounter is a set piece design to show off how awesome it looks; there’s nothing wrong with that but after a while the repetitive nature of the design begins to take hold because after several hours of this it starts to dawn on you that you’ve seen pretty much all there is to see despite a few wrinkles with a jump pack and a few boss battles tossed in. Even the final battle in the game is a disappointment.

The save checkpoint system is also a headache. When you die you are tossed back to the last auto save and sometimes this transition is seamless and throws you right back into the action. Other times you are forced to ride a lift, again, or walk down a long corridor, again, or watch a cut scene, again (some of them are skippable). This frustration is enhanced by the sudden difficulty spikes in the game. Even on the Hard setting you can get through much of the campaign easily enough but then the design throws a monstrously difficult set piece at you and the difficulty goes from zero to 11.