Okay, fine. Whatever. The game isn't new, and I don't care. Sometimes, I look back over my Steam Account and I look at a game I enjoyed somewhat, and then I just write about it. So, I'm writing about Space Marine.
In other news, expect explicit content, so watch your eyes.
Space Marine, as it says in the title, is a game about Space Marines. Power Armoured, fascist, bioengineered super soldiers wielding weaponry that would make the British Armed Forces soil themselves and turn French. Each and every single one of these Space Marines is hypno-indoctrinated into the service of the Emperor, a godlike immortal scientist who was able to create twenty Primarchs, beings that make Space Marines look weak, before then making the Space Marines themselves.
Fast forwards ten thousand years, the Emperor is now on the verge of death on a throne being fed the souls of a thousand people every single day, the Primarchs have all fallen to Chaos, a force of malevolence and mutation that corrupts all it touches, they've all disappeared, or they've all died. Take your pick. A couple of them are actually dead, and currently there are roughly one thousand Chapters of the Space Marines, each consisting of one thousand Battle Brothers, as dictated by the Codex Astartes, written by a tactical genius and Primarch of a Chapter called the Ultramarines, and the poster boys of the 40k universe.
As it is, you play as an Ultramarine by the name of Captain Titus, an Ultramarine who has been able to read past the written word of the Codex Astartes and actually apply it as to the intentions of his Primarch, and quite often goes against the Codex, such as at the very beginning jumping into unknown territory wearing a jump pack to get him from a low altitude orbit to the ground as fast as he can just so he can kill some Orks, a race of greenskinned monsters that thrive purely for war, which they term as a WAAAGH! led by the largest Ork, called the Warboss, or sometimes the Warlord. That is essentially what Space Marine sets out to do.
The single player is well worth playing. It may not have the most accurate descriptions of boltguns and lascannons and the other weapons of the Astartes, however for the most part they're rather satisfying weapons to use. Especially any of the melee weapons. For any ranged weapon you have a ranged function, and then the ability to just shoot it. That's about it. Boltguns fire non-canon, non-exploding bolt shells. Plasma guns fire superheated energy that if charged up explodes. Meltaguns fire rainbows.
And melee weapons allow you to lay into a horde of Orks with glee and a child like grin on your face as you kill every single Ork in the vicinity with cuts of either a chainsword, an axe with a power field that essentially allows it to instantly cook and cauterise the flesh of any wound it inflicts, and a thunder hammer, a weapon more usually reserved for cracking open tanks but in Space Marine allows Titus to suddenly because death incarnate as he explodes with genuine fury, and if you're in any section of the game where there's a jump pack, then the thunder hammer and jump pack go hand in hand and allow you to instantly kill most Orks simply by landing on them, and utterly smacking the seven colours of snot out of anything larger, such as Ork Nobs, Ork Shoota Nobs, and Ork Warbosses.
The game features two squad mates, one who serves as your Lancer, a hard bitten veteran sergeant who at some point lost an eye and hasn't bothered to replace it with a bionic yet, and supports your actions by actually using his super human mind and thinking, compared to Leandros, who is a much younger Astartes, who I judge to be no more than about two hundred. The fact that Leandros constantly cries about Titus' course of actions got on my nerves, to the point where I wanted to kill him myself for being everything I hate about the Ultramarines in general; their follow the rule book mentality, and even despite that he was still a reasonably well rounded character.
Other characters include a few cut scenes showing us the Ork Warlord, whose lines are pure spun gold covering a field the size of England and represents everything that I love about the Orks in the universe, and an Imperial Guard officer named Mira, a small woman who has kept her soldiers alive despite being without support for Emperor knows how long against a vastly superior and numeric force. There's a few touches of humanity whenever Titus and Mira are on screen together that feels awkward and out of place in the 40k universe, although I believe it may be well placed, however shoe horned in it actually is, and believe me, lieutenant Mira is shoe horned in. Her place could be taken by any man, but I suppose it's refreshing seeing a capable female in a role of command.
As it is, I played through the single player before I even touched the multiplayer, without any intention of even leaving the story unfinished. However, when I had finished the single player and jumped into the multiplayer, I even ignored the aggressive online play in favour of the horde mode that I played with friends, and it quickly became a favourite of mine, requiring a stage of tactics, thought and cohesion to play effectively towards the later levels of the game, and was mindless fun for the first arena.
By the way, these horde modes aren't set in one map. Every five levels you get sent to a new arena, as preset by whichever current selection of maps you want to play, and then finally at the end of the 20th wave of increasing more difficult enemies to fight, before giving you an impossibly hard boss wave full of the toughest opponents you can fight. It takes time, effort and even, dare I say it, practise to actually be able to succeed and defeat the boss wave. I certainly don't see people being able to do it in a group of random fuckers, since there's no coordination whatsoever in the online community. If you want to play horde mode, play with friends, have fun, have a laugh.
And for the sake of Chaos, buy the Chaos DLC pack! It adds another horde mode which features three-way horde combat between the forces of Chaos, the Orks and the forces of the Imperium, which includes Space Marines on a near level-by-level basis, that actually challenges the players and although they can hide behind a wall and wait for the two opposing forces to kill each other, their score, and thus the number of lives they can earn, will drop, which can make things increasingly difficult when you have five Space Marines running your ass down while they all wield thunder hammers.
Plus, the bonus level to that particular arena has a massive three way battle where you get to shoot at Killa Kans, massive mechanical suits of armour with buzz saws and machine guns that will turn an Astartes to paste as soon as it opens fire on them, and has an insta-kill close quarters movement that can catch anyone who specialises in ranged weaponry off guard and reduce your team's overall lives. Do I need to mention that even after three attempts with my friends we still failed this each and every time purely because it is so damned hard and deserves the praise I am giving it.
The rest of the multiplayer, however, not so much so. With bugs, a list of unbalanced maps and weapons, and a community that refuses to play anything other than the Assault Marine, a class able to get the ground stomping thunder hammer and the even more horribly broken chainsword. Yes. The basic melee weapon in the single player weapon is more powerful in online play. Because of the speed of your attacks, you can unlock a perk that allows you to life steal off of a target by punching them with your chainsword, and it's attack speed allows the wielder to stun lock pretty much any other melee wielder, and throw off the accuracy of anyone else so much it gets to the point where you may as well just keep your hands away from the mouse and keyboard for five seconds while he kills you and then you can respawn, and get ready to die again.
There are precisely two multiplayer maps I've played that I like. And only in one game mode, simply because of the objective based game play. Unfortunately, most of the fucking ignorant wank stain retards who play are more interested in being the lone ranger running around getting kills and more often than not dying or not actually contributing to getting the fucking domination points in order to win the game. The other half the time it's the enemy team doing the same thing, and while you're capturing a point you get attacked by a random Assault Marine out of no where, equipped with his chainsword and his life steal, and he completely annihilates you. Queue the respawn again.
This is made worse by the fact that there are no servers. PC, XBox and PS3 version are all peer-to-peer, and worse yet the PC version was ported, which offers a bloody annoying problem in that the online feels a lot more like I should be playing with a controller than my mouse and keyboard, and yet in the horde and single player modes I got along fine with my standard kit. Why the fuck? Just why?
It's an annoying, stupidly unbalanced system, and the only equaliser is that if you're a new player, you can choose to take the load out of the person who killed you.
Big. Fucking. Deal.
Fuck the multiplayer.
Thankfully, you can at least customise yourself. I mean, really customise yourself. You can have a pink and turquoise leg, an orange and violet leg, a purple and green body, a blue and red shoulder, a black and white arm, a pink and green arm and a purple and orange shoulder, with a large yellow and silver backpack and a pink and golden helmet.
Oh sweet lord my eyes.
As to the rest of the game, the sound is solid, although disappointing when it comes to a few parts such as BOLTGUNS firing .75 calibre explosive tipped shells. And some of the visuals are more than a little... frustrating? I can't really find the word I want to use to describe how annoying it is that the sound of the iconic boltgun, that was near enough correct in Dawn of War 2, a game made by the same company, doesn't sound right in a game where almost everything else about the bolter is correct.
Not to mention the meltagun rainbow shotgun. No. Seriously. It has the spread of about a meter and fires a multicolour beam of light outwards for about all of five meters. If you catch someone correctly, they die. If you don't, they don't. Nevertheless, it looks like a fucking rainbow. In the fluff, the weapon actually fires a superheated microwave beam at people. Why the fuck isn't this vaporising people? And why the hell is this, as well as the lascannon and the thunder hammer, weapons that are pretty much described all as ANTI-FUCKING-TANK WEAPONS IN THE FLUFF AT EVERY SINGLE FUCKING TURN, being used to en masse slaughter infantry?!
GRAHHH
And since ratings are oh so important to some people, I personally give Space Marine a 7/10, but only if you buy the Chaos DLC pack. That adds just enough to the game to make it worthwhile playing with friends once in a while, perhaps with a few beers or perhaps while having a laugh and just dicking around, and I felt it was a worthwhile investment. The other DLC packages on the other hand, I haven't considered putting money into. Despite there being anti armour weaponry available, the other expansion, which adds a game mode where someone gets to play a walking tank known only as a Dreadnought, seems just to shift the balance of fun for me too much in the favour of whoever becomes the god of war striding into the battle lines blowing apart everything on the other side without so much as a hiccup as they giggle about winning the game. As I said, a 7/10.
Without the Chaos DLC pack, I'd say the game is worth a 6-8 hour campaign, with a small amount of replayability for achievements and completion in the form of collectibles if you really must, but ultimately only a 6/10.
In other news, expect explicit content, so watch your eyes.
Space Marine, as it says in the title, is a game about Space Marines. Power Armoured, fascist, bioengineered super soldiers wielding weaponry that would make the British Armed Forces soil themselves and turn French. Each and every single one of these Space Marines is hypno-indoctrinated into the service of the Emperor, a godlike immortal scientist who was able to create twenty Primarchs, beings that make Space Marines look weak, before then making the Space Marines themselves.
Fast forwards ten thousand years, the Emperor is now on the verge of death on a throne being fed the souls of a thousand people every single day, the Primarchs have all fallen to Chaos, a force of malevolence and mutation that corrupts all it touches, they've all disappeared, or they've all died. Take your pick. A couple of them are actually dead, and currently there are roughly one thousand Chapters of the Space Marines, each consisting of one thousand Battle Brothers, as dictated by the Codex Astartes, written by a tactical genius and Primarch of a Chapter called the Ultramarines, and the poster boys of the 40k universe.
As it is, you play as an Ultramarine by the name of Captain Titus, an Ultramarine who has been able to read past the written word of the Codex Astartes and actually apply it as to the intentions of his Primarch, and quite often goes against the Codex, such as at the very beginning jumping into unknown territory wearing a jump pack to get him from a low altitude orbit to the ground as fast as he can just so he can kill some Orks, a race of greenskinned monsters that thrive purely for war, which they term as a WAAAGH! led by the largest Ork, called the Warboss, or sometimes the Warlord. That is essentially what Space Marine sets out to do.
The single player is well worth playing. It may not have the most accurate descriptions of boltguns and lascannons and the other weapons of the Astartes, however for the most part they're rather satisfying weapons to use. Especially any of the melee weapons. For any ranged weapon you have a ranged function, and then the ability to just shoot it. That's about it. Boltguns fire non-canon, non-exploding bolt shells. Plasma guns fire superheated energy that if charged up explodes. Meltaguns fire rainbows.
And melee weapons allow you to lay into a horde of Orks with glee and a child like grin on your face as you kill every single Ork in the vicinity with cuts of either a chainsword, an axe with a power field that essentially allows it to instantly cook and cauterise the flesh of any wound it inflicts, and a thunder hammer, a weapon more usually reserved for cracking open tanks but in Space Marine allows Titus to suddenly because death incarnate as he explodes with genuine fury, and if you're in any section of the game where there's a jump pack, then the thunder hammer and jump pack go hand in hand and allow you to instantly kill most Orks simply by landing on them, and utterly smacking the seven colours of snot out of anything larger, such as Ork Nobs, Ork Shoota Nobs, and Ork Warbosses.
The game features two squad mates, one who serves as your Lancer, a hard bitten veteran sergeant who at some point lost an eye and hasn't bothered to replace it with a bionic yet, and supports your actions by actually using his super human mind and thinking, compared to Leandros, who is a much younger Astartes, who I judge to be no more than about two hundred. The fact that Leandros constantly cries about Titus' course of actions got on my nerves, to the point where I wanted to kill him myself for being everything I hate about the Ultramarines in general; their follow the rule book mentality, and even despite that he was still a reasonably well rounded character.
Other characters include a few cut scenes showing us the Ork Warlord, whose lines are pure spun gold covering a field the size of England and represents everything that I love about the Orks in the universe, and an Imperial Guard officer named Mira, a small woman who has kept her soldiers alive despite being without support for Emperor knows how long against a vastly superior and numeric force. There's a few touches of humanity whenever Titus and Mira are on screen together that feels awkward and out of place in the 40k universe, although I believe it may be well placed, however shoe horned in it actually is, and believe me, lieutenant Mira is shoe horned in. Her place could be taken by any man, but I suppose it's refreshing seeing a capable female in a role of command.
As it is, I played through the single player before I even touched the multiplayer, without any intention of even leaving the story unfinished. However, when I had finished the single player and jumped into the multiplayer, I even ignored the aggressive online play in favour of the horde mode that I played with friends, and it quickly became a favourite of mine, requiring a stage of tactics, thought and cohesion to play effectively towards the later levels of the game, and was mindless fun for the first arena.
By the way, these horde modes aren't set in one map. Every five levels you get sent to a new arena, as preset by whichever current selection of maps you want to play, and then finally at the end of the 20th wave of increasing more difficult enemies to fight, before giving you an impossibly hard boss wave full of the toughest opponents you can fight. It takes time, effort and even, dare I say it, practise to actually be able to succeed and defeat the boss wave. I certainly don't see people being able to do it in a group of random fuckers, since there's no coordination whatsoever in the online community. If you want to play horde mode, play with friends, have fun, have a laugh.
And for the sake of Chaos, buy the Chaos DLC pack! It adds another horde mode which features three-way horde combat between the forces of Chaos, the Orks and the forces of the Imperium, which includes Space Marines on a near level-by-level basis, that actually challenges the players and although they can hide behind a wall and wait for the two opposing forces to kill each other, their score, and thus the number of lives they can earn, will drop, which can make things increasingly difficult when you have five Space Marines running your ass down while they all wield thunder hammers.
Plus, the bonus level to that particular arena has a massive three way battle where you get to shoot at Killa Kans, massive mechanical suits of armour with buzz saws and machine guns that will turn an Astartes to paste as soon as it opens fire on them, and has an insta-kill close quarters movement that can catch anyone who specialises in ranged weaponry off guard and reduce your team's overall lives. Do I need to mention that even after three attempts with my friends we still failed this each and every time purely because it is so damned hard and deserves the praise I am giving it.
The rest of the multiplayer, however, not so much so. With bugs, a list of unbalanced maps and weapons, and a community that refuses to play anything other than the Assault Marine, a class able to get the ground stomping thunder hammer and the even more horribly broken chainsword. Yes. The basic melee weapon in the single player weapon is more powerful in online play. Because of the speed of your attacks, you can unlock a perk that allows you to life steal off of a target by punching them with your chainsword, and it's attack speed allows the wielder to stun lock pretty much any other melee wielder, and throw off the accuracy of anyone else so much it gets to the point where you may as well just keep your hands away from the mouse and keyboard for five seconds while he kills you and then you can respawn, and get ready to die again.
There are precisely two multiplayer maps I've played that I like. And only in one game mode, simply because of the objective based game play. Unfortunately, most of the fucking ignorant wank stain retards who play are more interested in being the lone ranger running around getting kills and more often than not dying or not actually contributing to getting the fucking domination points in order to win the game. The other half the time it's the enemy team doing the same thing, and while you're capturing a point you get attacked by a random Assault Marine out of no where, equipped with his chainsword and his life steal, and he completely annihilates you. Queue the respawn again.
This is made worse by the fact that there are no servers. PC, XBox and PS3 version are all peer-to-peer, and worse yet the PC version was ported, which offers a bloody annoying problem in that the online feels a lot more like I should be playing with a controller than my mouse and keyboard, and yet in the horde and single player modes I got along fine with my standard kit. Why the fuck? Just why?
It's an annoying, stupidly unbalanced system, and the only equaliser is that if you're a new player, you can choose to take the load out of the person who killed you.
Big. Fucking. Deal.
Fuck the multiplayer.
Thankfully, you can at least customise yourself. I mean, really customise yourself. You can have a pink and turquoise leg, an orange and violet leg, a purple and green body, a blue and red shoulder, a black and white arm, a pink and green arm and a purple and orange shoulder, with a large yellow and silver backpack and a pink and golden helmet.
Oh sweet lord my eyes.
As to the rest of the game, the sound is solid, although disappointing when it comes to a few parts such as BOLTGUNS firing .75 calibre explosive tipped shells. And some of the visuals are more than a little... frustrating? I can't really find the word I want to use to describe how annoying it is that the sound of the iconic boltgun, that was near enough correct in Dawn of War 2, a game made by the same company, doesn't sound right in a game where almost everything else about the bolter is correct.
Not to mention the meltagun rainbow shotgun. No. Seriously. It has the spread of about a meter and fires a multicolour beam of light outwards for about all of five meters. If you catch someone correctly, they die. If you don't, they don't. Nevertheless, it looks like a fucking rainbow. In the fluff, the weapon actually fires a superheated microwave beam at people. Why the fuck isn't this vaporising people? And why the hell is this, as well as the lascannon and the thunder hammer, weapons that are pretty much described all as ANTI-FUCKING-TANK WEAPONS IN THE FLUFF AT EVERY SINGLE FUCKING TURN, being used to en masse slaughter infantry?!
GRAHHH
And since ratings are oh so important to some people, I personally give Space Marine a 7/10, but only if you buy the Chaos DLC pack. That adds just enough to the game to make it worthwhile playing with friends once in a while, perhaps with a few beers or perhaps while having a laugh and just dicking around, and I felt it was a worthwhile investment. The other DLC packages on the other hand, I haven't considered putting money into. Despite there being anti armour weaponry available, the other expansion, which adds a game mode where someone gets to play a walking tank known only as a Dreadnought, seems just to shift the balance of fun for me too much in the favour of whoever becomes the god of war striding into the battle lines blowing apart everything on the other side without so much as a hiccup as they giggle about winning the game. As I said, a 7/10.
Without the Chaos DLC pack, I'd say the game is worth a 6-8 hour campaign, with a small amount of replayability for achievements and completion in the form of collectibles if you really must, but ultimately only a 6/10.
