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 went in remembering enough of this licence’s back catalogue to expect something serviceable rather than something good, which made it a genuine surprise when the combat turned out to be the best this franchise has ever had, undercut by nothing except how long a good half of the Operations missions insist on running for what they’re actually asking of you.

The combat

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, solo versus with a squad

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.

Mission length

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, and it’s far from the only Operations mission that runs past the hour mark, which is my one real complaint about the mode. 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

I had one crash to desktop in thirty-eight hours, during a loading screen between Operations rather than mid-mission, and one seperate 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 notice that price more than you would if the pacing were tighter, though it does go on sale often enough that waiting a month or two costs nothing except patience. I’ve taken to only starting an Operations run when I’ve got a clear ninety minutes blocked out rather than just an evening, which is a stupid amount of pre-planning to need before playing a video game, and I still don’t know if Saber’s ever going to trim these missions down, since nothing in the patch notes so far has touched pacing at all.