Space Marine 2 Review: Gorgeous Carnage, Bloated Missions

I put thirty-eight hours into Warhammer 40,000: Space Marine 2 across the six weeks after launch, finished the campaign, cleared all twelve Operations on Substantial or above, and had a genuinely great time doing it, better than I expected going in and better than this licence has strictly earned the right to by this point in its history. The one proper complaint I’ve got is that a good half of those missions run needlessly long for what they’re actually asking of you. Both of those things are true at once, and that’s most of what this review has to say.

The combat is the best this licence has ever managed

Saber Interactive built its reputation on the Swarm Engine, the same tech that let World War Z throw genuinely enormous zombie hordes at the player without the frame rate collapsing, and Space Marine 2 is the first time that tech has pointed at something worth looking at. Tyranid swarms come at you in the hundreds, not the usual videogame hundreds where the number is theoretical and you’re actually fighting six enemies dressed up as a crowd, but hundreds you can watch individually dying to individual attacks while more climb over the corpses behind them.

The parry-execute loop underneath all that spectacle is simple on paper (block, counter, execute) and it holds up because the timing window is tight enough to matter and forgiving enough that one bad read doesn’t usually kill you outright. Titus does some of the heavy lifting too. He’s introduced serving a century-long penance with the Deathwatch rather than commanding the Ultramarines (he’s a Lieutenant by the time he’s reinstated, not a Captain, whatever shorthand the marketing and half the Steam reviews use for him), and he gets dragged back into the war against the Tyranids anyway, because the setting has never had much patience for demoted heroes staying demoted.

Operations mode is the actual game, and playing it solo undersells that

The campaign is twelve missions. Operations mode is a further twelve, built specifically for three-player co-op and populated with a supporting cast the campaign only mentions in passing, and between the two of them, the co-op missions are the ones I’ve gone back to. Six classes are on offer (Tactical, Assault, Vanguard, Bulwark, Sniper and Heavy), each one limited to a single copy per squad in Operations, and the mission design is visibly built around that restriction: a Sniper marking targets from range with a Camo Cloak, a Bulwark holding a choke point behind a combat shield, an Assault dropping in on a jump pack to finish off whatever’s still standing.

Solo play with AI squadmates is entirely functional. It’s also missing the thing that actually makes the mode work, which is three real people making the same panicked decision, at the same time, about whether to hold the line or fall back, and getting it wrong together.

The missions are too long for what they’re asking of you

My actual complaint is a simple one: several Operations missions run past the hour mark, and one timed run of mine (Decapitation, on Ruthless) came in at one hour and forty-three minutes with no checkpoint I’d trust enough to walk away from mid-run. Plenty of games ask for more than that in one sitting without it being a problem, but Operations is paced and structured like something meant for a spare evening rather than a single unbroken commitment, and the mission design hasn’t caught up with that framing.

A fifteen to twenty minute operation (the length a few of the shorter Vanguard-focused missions nearly manage before the pacing sags again) would suit this mode far better than what most of them actually deliver.

Stability is mostly fine, which is worth saying plainly

I had one crash to desktop in thirty-eight hours, during a loading screen between Operations rather than mid-mission, and one separate bug that dropped my camera into first person during a cutscene until I restarted the mission. Neither cost me progress, and neither happened twice, which is a better record than plenty of live-service co-op shooters manage at launch, Swarm Engine or not.

The verdict

£54.99 is the standard asking price on PC, PS5 and Xbox Series X|S, which is steep for any game, and the overlong Operations missions mean you’ll notice that price more than you would if the pacing were tighter. It also goes on sale often enough that waiting a month or two costs nothing except patience, and either way the eighty-odd hours I’ve now watched myself and two mates put into Operations is more playtime per pound than most full-price releases manage.

Space Marine 2 earns its score for combat and co-op that are genuinely the best this licence has ever managed, loses some of it for pacing that still hasn’t been patched since launch, and is comfortably the best game to carry the Warhammer 40,000 licence so far.