Warhammer 40000: Space Marine

85

A good mindless action shooter clone of the Gears of War series.

This game has no lack of blood, action, and shooting.

You get a super powerful hero that can cut through masses of enemies and blast them away to the next world from afar.

I felt the challenge was present, learning to manage your hits and abilities and use cover wisely made the difference between easily clearing a room or dying multiple times in anger.

Graphics are top notch for the game and sounds and soundtrack as well as voice acting were all also above average.

I say its weak points were that I saw no option to rebind my keyboard controls and mouse controls and this really irritated me since the default setup didnt make much sense giving you multiple keys that have the same function easy to reach but then a few of the needed keys out of reach. So your left with duplicates that serve no purpose and messing up your wsad orientation to hit that one important key to save your life.

Also there is not a lot of weapon variety in the game. But the game fills its role pretty proper and gives you something fun to play for a while.

It does offer a multiplayer mode to keep you in the game after single player is beaten, and its a pretty active community from what I can tell.

All in all while it was not the game of the year I dont feel that I wasted any money on this one and am glad its part of my game collection.

75

Enjoyable but short single player campaign

I bought this off GMG when it was recently on sale for $12.50. It was a very enjoyable game and definitely worth the money but I admit that I would feel a bit cheated paying $30-50 for this game. It is third-person action game so similar in that respect to many other games out there. Gears of War obviously comes to mind, but W40K:SM is definitely it's own world.

If you are a fan of the 40K universe you will probably enjoy this game quite a bit more. The environments are huge in scale and very interesting although that being said, your paths are fairly linear and scripted. In that respect, it is a little bit like the Call of Duty games. It is very exciting when you first play it, but all the events are scripted and you have to follow a pretty pre-determined path.

What sets the game apart is the combat though. There are lots of ranged weapons from the Imperial armoury that are fun to use but you can only carry four at a time: a pistol, a bolter, an assault weapon and a heavy weapon. There are four kinds of melee weapons and if you use a two-handed melee weapon, you can only use a pistol and bolter.

Melee combat is very exciting and harried as you will frequently be swarmed by Orks and other bad guys. Your attacks have a lot of weight to them and bad guys will be exploding and ripped to piece around you in a constant red mist. You gain health by stunning and then executing your opponents. It makes for a very satisfying and visceral experience but it can be frustrating because you will take lots of damage while you are doing the animated attack.

I briefly played the multiplayer and it seems like it could be fun but also somewhat repetitive. Much of the value will probably come from trying to level up and gain experience for unlocks (similar to COD).

I would rate this game a sold "good" to "very good" but definitely not excellent. It's fun but very short; single player campaign on normal took me about 5 hours. Some of that time is also in cutscenes and sometimes rather long walks between check points with no enemies around. That does give you a nice sense of the scale of the game environments but can be a bit dull.

As a final note, I highly recommend looking into the weapon mods available online. A few of them upgrade bolt weapons to give them way more punch, in line with the tabletop rule book. I found that it made the game much more enjoyable.

80

Surprisingly a lot of fun, lacking in multiplayer though.

Note: I'm not a Warhammer fan and haven't played any Warhammer game in the past, just a bit of DoW 1.

This game is all about you against hordes and hordes of orcs. The campaign is quite linear, mostly composed of section after section that are locked until you kill all the orcs in it or defend something and similar things, and for this kind of game that fits completely. The game is a blend of a third person shooter and a third person beat 'em up, with more combos you can do as you progress, and it gets extremely fun and even challenging on hard.

I like the hp system because instead of just having to run away for cover to regenerate (although the armor does regenerate), you need to execute enemies to recover hp, and the executions look fantastic for the most part, and are very satisfying to watch. The gunplay is decent but nothing special, although some of the guns sound quite awesome.

The multiplayer consists of two modes, PVP and PVE survival, the pvp section has a few different game modes although nothing out of the ordinary, and it's not exactly fun since the games melee system was meant to be you against hordes of enemies, and against single enemies it's quite boring and not particularly challenging in any way. You simply wack your sword in the general direction and whoever does it first wins the fight, and the same goes for the ranged weapons, considering the targets are relatively slow moving giant space marines, it's incredibly easy to hit.

Survival (You and 3 others against hordes of orcs, in waves, sort of like killing floor) however can be a lot of fun, and gets hard by the last waves, requiring good team play to pull off until the end.

A negative point for the multiplayer is the fact it's peer to peer, with no dedicated servers, often resulting in a laggy unplayable mess depending on who gets to host by the random system.

The game gets most of the points from me for the single player, where as I said it's incredibly fun and satisfying, although in not too large doses.