Warhammer 40K: Space Marine 2 is serious heavy-metal shooting and slashing

If you had given me, at age 15 or so, a game in which you can fight seemingly hundreds of Tyranid bugs at once with two friends, alternately blasting them with bolt rifles or pulverizing them with a chainsword, then finishing the biggest of them by ripping off one of his claws and shoving it through his head, all of it happening to the sounds of action-movie orchestration and dialogue about stoic duty, would I have had any complaints?

No, I would not. But we're spoiled for choice now. How much you enjoy Warhammer 40K: Space Marine 2 (for PC, Xbox, and PlayStation and releasing on September 9) will depend on your ability to tap into the deep basement of your kill-'em-all mentality and fantasy lore engagement. You can enjoy it somewhat ironically, which I did at times, especially when playing co-op with friends who told me that they did not like the game's aesthetics at all. But strip away the grimdark trappings of zealotry, Chaos Marines, and skulls—so, so many skulls—and you have a competent, sometimes innovative third-person squad shooter. It feels like Gears of War, minus the cover, but with heavier characters, more melee combat, and somehow even fewer women.

Getting the most out of Space Marine 2 means suspending disbelief, feeling heavy metal, and wanting to kill a whole bunch of things with some very big dudes. In roughly a dozen hours of gameplay, I found the core gameplay loop relatively engaging, with enough mix-ups, upgrades, and challenges to keep it feeling more like the fun kind of endless war, not the real kind. It's pretty enjoyable to team up with friends, too, so long as they're cool with Warhammer 40K's vibes and some occasionally repetitive challenges.

Warhammer 40K: Space Marine 2 gameplay overview.

Constant lore, varied battles

I do not have deep Warhammer 40K lore knowledge (Boltgun was previously my deepest engagement), so please forgive everything I get wrong in sketching out the game's story. You, Demetrian Titus, are an Adeptus Astartes, a Space Marine, a bio-engineered huge guy with like three hearts and plugs in your head and an all-encompassing devotion to the Imperium of Man. In the prior Space Marine game, you did so well resisting the lure of Chaos that you were turned into the Inquisition and made to serve on the Deathwatch. Now you're back and demoted, and something bad happens to you in the training mission. You are saved by the Ultramarines, and you undergo the Rubicon Primaris surgery to make you an even bigger and stronger fundamentalist killing machine.

And then you're off, joined by Brother-Sergeant Gadriel and Brother Chairon, played by either your online friends or the game AI. You have a heavy primary weapon, a pistol-like sidearm, and a melee weapon, usually a chainsword, a big knife, or a huge hammer. Your armor is tough but gets worn down, and only time or pulling off a Doom 2016-style melee finisher on downed enemies will recharge it. You're not exactly agile, but you can lunge at remarkable speed, like Chris Farley in his SNL prime. And you call your teammates "brother" a lot.

What struck me most about Space Marine 2 is the mass of enemies the engine can throw at you. Described as "Swarm Tech" by the developers, it's the action movie moment where you first see what looks like a river of enemies (the Tyranid) flowing over a wall, then it's a wave of baddies at the middle distance, and then they're on top of you. The teammates with the most effective long-range weapons pick off as many as they can, then everybody scrambles to balance up-close melee with quick-aim shooting. They're not the most clever cannon fodder, but they're far more agile than you are, and they force you to change up your approach every other moment. If you like power fantasies and hard-won battles, this game delivers them.

There's a considerable mix-up in the combat arenas, weapon move-sets, and encounter designs, but not so much that fatigue won't set in. You'll see most of the melee finishers after a couple of hours, and if you get tired of the deadly jungle aesthetic of Kadaku, there is unfortunately a lot of it to trudge through. The same goes for the steel-and-skulls Imperium aesthetic and the stream of world-building dialogue ("Our greatest honor is in death to our righteous cause," etc.). I'm aware that Warhammer 40K's world predates and informs a lot of the fantasy and gaming culture that followed it (it is generally considered the origin of the phrase "grimdark"). That doesn't mean it can't be a lot to take in heavy doses. But if it doesn't bother you, there's a lot of fun killing to be had.

Good tech choices

Admirably, this game allows for cross-play across PC and consoles (and allows for not cross-playing if you like), and while it uses Easy Anti-Cheat, it has no Denuvo or other kinds of heavy DRM. There are preorder special editions and DLC, but they are cosmetic-only, adding skins and looks to armor and weapons.

There's a day-one patch coming to fix a bunch of multiplayer bugs; I would always suggest waiting a bit before rendering the technical verdict on a game this big. On a system with a Ryzen 9 5900X, RTX 3070 GPU and 16GB memory (and solid-state storage, a requirement for this game), I encountered no major problems. One friend with the same GPU and a similar system did not update their GPU drivers and was briefly paralyzed by frame rate issues. Update your drivers, folks. Load times can be a little long, especially for a game that would otherwise be great for quick "just one mission" sessions; hopefully those improve with time.

If you're keen on Warhammer 40K and online squad shooting with friends or need an alternative Gears fix between releases, Space Marine 2 is a lot of fun, however seriously you take it. The developer's attention to detail and affection for the over-the-top vibes shine through, like polished pauldrons caked in Tyranid gore.