Warhammer 40K Space Marine is a third person action adventure game based upon the popular Warhammer 40K board games and real time strategy games. From what I have been told, the board game is one of the most fun, and most expensive, hobbies one could ever hope to indulge. But I don't have the money nor the artistic skill to play the actual game, so instead I get this abortion of a video game. At the request of my friend, who holds a certain nostalgic place in his heart for the 40K universe and games, I took time out of my life to play this, and after a disappointing 8 hour romp filled with lots of Cockney accents and heavy drinking, I have this to say. DON'T EVER WASTE MONEY ON THIS GAME!
The game begins with our hero, Captain Titus, jumping off his ship onto a planet overrun by the Orks. Right away you'll be asking yourself "Who are these people? Where are they? Why does every space marine look like an 8 foot, blue version of Buzz Lightyear?!" These questions are only briefly glossed over in the games paltry single player campaign. Essentially, Titus and his two gym friends are part of a sort of interplanetary special forces unit, which is generally used as an applier of soothing cream every time humanity gets fucked in the ass too hard. They have a set of guidelines that they regularly don't follow, and they are very proud of the work that they do in serving the emperor. Honestly, both the Codex and the emperor are two subjects the Space Marines, or Ultramarines as the game will sometimes call them, will never shut up about. Normally this wouldn't be a problem, as putting up with annoying video game characters talking all the time *cough*Nathan Drake*cough cough* is pretty much par for the course in today's gaming market. But Nolan North Captain Titus isn't, and every line delivered by both him and pretty much every other member of the voice acting team is delivered with as much gusto as a third grader trying to recite Macbeth in Spanish. The enemies are honestly no better, as every single member of the Ork horde seems to have no greater pleasure in life than screaming "SPACE MARINES!" every single time they catch a glimpse of your chunky, blue, refrigerator ass. At times, my sole motivation for killing enemies in a timely manner was to keep them from repeating their two or three generic lines. So if you're keeping track, we have wooden delivery coming from our heroes, and annoyance coming from the enemies, so does anything sound good in this game? Hahahaha, NO! The music, and I use that term loosely, is barely ever there in gameplay, only popping in occasionally when things get particularly hairy, another term I use loosely, and when it is there it sounds like the people in charge of music were drunk every single day of the game's development and at the last second decided to rework some of the music from Halo and call it a day.
But if you think the worst part of this game is the music, then you obviously are blind and shouldn't be able to play games at all. The graphics in this game are about as bland as a bowl of Cream of Wheat. Titus and his muscular bffs look good, but the environments and enemies are all repetitive and look like they could have been pulled from a game on the original Xbox. Clipping was also an occasional issue for me, as enemies would be stuck through an object in the environment, or they would somehow be disappearing into other enemies or my teammates. Which leads me to another point, the AI in this game is slower than Lenny from Of Mice and Men.
At many times during combat, you will notice your teammates standing around, looking as if they don't exactly know what's going on around them. I forgive them though, as clearly by their monstrous size, they all had to have played football in high school. But what I will not forgive is shitty AI for the enemies. At several points in the game, the Orks would have their backs turned on me, completely ignoring the 800 pound dump truck of a man running toward them with a hammer the size of your mom's taint. Later in the game, after the forces of chaos invade, the Orks will be fighting the Daemons, but both sides will drop whatever they were doing and team up to try to kick your meaty ass. All this hate for the in game AI aside, it's not like your space marine friends are too smart anyway. About midway through the game, you get a distress call from one of the Inquisitors, some weird kind of cult like military group, and you go to help him. Immediately, warning lights are going off in my head when you see this guy. He has hair like Gary Oldman in The Fifth Element, and talks like he tried to cure his tonsillitis by swallowing gravel and smoking glass. He wants you to take him to his secret lab so he can recover some power source, and instead of questioning him (you know, like smart people) your brave hero just agrees. I get that the Inquisitors had some kind of power above the other groups, but the guy has a wound the size of the Grand Canyon on his chest, and provides the briefest of explanations as to why he isn't being chewed on by an Ork. So naturally, you get betrayed, and the forces of Chaos, hell, get released upon the planet. At this point, I can no longer ignore the many blatant similarities this game shares with several other games I've played.
The gameplay in Space Marine is sort of like if Gears of War and Darksiders were put in a room full of lead based paint and radiation and told they have to conceive a child, and Doom 3 got to sit in the room and jerk off. The main focus is on terribly clunky third person shooting with sword play thrown in for when enemies get close. Your main attack for close quarters is pounding the x button like it has skittles in its vagina, with a stun attack and finisher move thrown in to appease the people that love quick time event ridden gore fests. At times, the scenery attempts to be disturbing, but due to the poor graphics, it just comes off as silly. The shooting and hack and slash parts work alright, and to the games credit, the weapons are quite amazing. The sniper rifle deals head obliterating damage, and the energy based weapons are burning spectacles to behold, but this leads to another one of the game's many faults, it's too damn easy.
I maybe died about five times in my entire play through of Space Marine, and those were only because the game occasionally threw an unfair level of enemies at you. You have both an energy shield and a health bar, both of which deplete extremely slowly. Health can easily be regained by performing an execution on one of the hapless minions you'll be slaughtering by the thousands, and shields recover by sitting behind cover with your friends and talking about how you love lifting weights. There is also a fury mode, which recovers your health, gives you more powerful melee attacks, and allows you to enter a bullet time mode. This power is granted by doing damage to enemies, and in a game where the entire point is to kill the population of several small towns, you'll be getting this power a lot. Even the boss fights consist of nothing more than dodging a few slow attacks and shooting enough ammunition into the enemies to make the Vietnam war look like target practice.
To call this game the worst I've ever played would be a little too much of an insult. Parts of it are done competently, and at times, some fun can be had just beholding the amount of destruction that you are capable of wreaking. The worst part of Space Marine is that it just feels like a copy of several other games, and doesn't really excel at anything of its own. It's story telling is very simple, but if you don't know anything about Warhammer, you'll still be confused. If you are into Warhammer and you can find this game used somewhere, by all means pick it up, but if not, avoid this game like it's your crazy ex-girlfriend.
