For anyone with even the slightest interest in Warhammer 40,000, this game's arguably the best Warhammer 40,000 title to release after the bankruptcy of THQ, after 13 years of getting a bunch of ♥♥♥♥♥♥ games that between 2018 and Boltgun's release, the best way to enjoy the Grim Darkness of the 41st Millennium in video games was honestly to create Space Marines in SoulCalibur VI. I'll admit i've only played the first missions of the main story and the co-op campaign respectively, though my first impressions of the game have me confident that I'm gonna get a lot of enjoyment from the rest of it.

Being a continuation of Relic Entertainment's Space Marine, combat is meant to have you split your attention between melee and ranged combat, and I feel like Saber Interactive did a much better job at making melee more viable compared to SM1, and I think the dodging and parrying mechanics were the main things that buffed the game's melee, cuz I remember that using your chainsword in the first game was a very fast way to get got by the Ork Boyz and Nobs, often really only being used in the campaign's jump pack sections.

One thing which I can already tell that people miss is SM1's health system. While I personally don't have issues with how health is handled in SM2, I feel like they could've introduced a temporary health mechanic similar to L4D's pain pills for the executions, cuz the armor blips tend to not last very long in the face of your ankles being bitten by multiple hormagaunts, and fodder enemies can be equated to death by a thousand paper cuts. This is a minor nitpick on my end, though one thing I've found from the first half of the second mission is a harsher criticism.

While other games might enjoy putting the player in a forced turret section, Space Marine 2 has forced flamethrower sections, where the game leaves a Pyreblaster near a door to inform the player that they will have to fight against Rippers, small legless creatures that are about the size of a house cat, but swarm you in the hundreds of thousands. It's annoying enough that firing the weapon slows your walking speed significantly, though the fact that they deal pathetically low damage is needless frustration, especiallly since the smaller mortal-sized flamers have been proven to be effective against Hormagaunt and (former) human alike in other forms of Warhammer 40,000 media.

Moving onto the co-op Operations mode, this to me feels like the co-op experience that fans have been craving since the days of the first Space Marine game. Though I've only really played the Vanguard, I found it to be a pretty solid experience, though I personally wish they added a Firstborn class in the game. To those unaware, Games Workshop has been trying to redesign the Space Marine identity from the ground up, though certain weapons from the earlier days of Warhammer 40,000 are unavailable to the modern depictions of the Adeptus Astartes.

With Warhammer 40K being full of intricate gothic architecture you'd expect to find in a fantasy setting with the first antagonist you fight being a swarm of buglike creatures that hope to overwhelm you with their numbers, I think it's fair to expect a hardware-intense game. With the Playstation 5 and Xbox Series X targeting 1440p and 30FPS, it's fair to say that it's a pretty demanding game. I'm personally on a Ryzen 3800X and RTX 3070, and while i'm on 1080p myself, the game typically hovers around 50-81 FPS, though there are occasionally some dips down to 41 in moments of high activity. While demanding, I wouldn't call it unstable since in the 6 hours I've clocked in so far, I've actually only had one crash, which is a huge improvement from how frequently the leaked build would crash on the same machine. I don't think more modest machines can realistically target 60fps without utilizing the game's built-in upscaling options, though I think the Dynamic Resolution option isn't functional.

Those who have spent a lot of time personalizing their Space Marine in the first game are gonna be let down with the second one. With Games Workshop trying to push the Primaris Space Marines as the new face of Warhammer 40,000, the number of options available to customize your looks has been severely neutered, to such a degree they had to make colors and emblems unlockable. It's especially egregious in my personal opinion that the fully sealed Mk X Phobos helmet isn't in the game, since that at least is a callback to the old scowl helmets from the pre-9th Edition days of Warhammer 40K.

While we might never get a chance to beat up those holier-than-thou knife-ears that Guilliman seems so attracted to these days, Space Marine 2 is definitely one of those games where an admittedly painful wait turned out to actually be worth the delay it ate, which is a welcome surprise when you consider that game delays in current year are a sign of the dev team thinking that their game's an absolute dumpster fire, especially with 40K. Do i think that this game will be the standard that other devs will follow when handling the license? Unfortunately, no. With that said, I think the June 2024 leak has proven to be a blessing in disguise, and I hope that Saber would at least consider releasing the prologue and first mission for free as a post-release demo.