Warhammer 40,000: Space Marine review

In an era of skillshots and RPG cross-breeding, the boldest gimmick is to have no gimmick at all. Judged by these standards, Space Marine is a staggeringly brave project. A linear action game built from asset re-use and endless indistinguishable encounters, you switch between ranged weapons and a selection of melee axes, hammers and chainswords. You toss a few grenades, and then you do it all over again. In theory, it’s that looping 30 seconds of fun, but while Relic has nailed the repetition, it lacks the synergy between AI and level design that turns each skirmish into a laboratory for bone-splintering experimentation. Instead, the game’s Orks and Chaos Daemons either run straight for you or stay back and fire off rockets, while most missions play out in a series of trenches, corridors and poky arenas.

Visually, it’s not a bad piece of work: character models are charismatic and toy-like in all the right ways, while the weapons-producing Forge World that provides the setting is an interesting mix underneath all that brown texturing – part factory and part cathedral. It’s let down, though, by ceaseless shuffling trips between one elevator and the next, and a lacklustre itinerary. There’s a bit on a train, and a bit in a sewer. In the moments that lie in between, Mark Strong and a selection of other Brits are left to do their best with a deathly script filled with expositional redundancies and a plot twist with megawatt levels of obviousness. Space Marine’s single lunge at mechanical cleverness, meanwhile, comes in the form of your health meter, which can only be topped up through executions and through Fury, which is an overpowered attack mode you can trigger after dealing out a certain amount of damage. It’s simple but effective: your fate is in your hands, and you grow healthier through slaughter.

It’s all very on-message, as are the weapons which, given the game’s tabletop roots, will bring their own lore with them for the more committed Warhammer 40,000 fans. If you’re new to the series, though, you’ll likely find that the bolter makes for a decent, if undistinguished, assault rifle, that the plasma pistol is identical to Halo’s, right down to the charged shot, and that the real fun is left for the more exotic toys. The melta is a genuinely ingenious blend of flamethrower and shotgun, for example, while the chainsword revs and roars through the air like a tiny Spitfire coming in for a strafing run.

Since so much of Space Marine is spent blindly hacking away at crowds, Relic has at least brought a certain competence to the second-by-second butchery. Gunplay is aided by a generous auto-lock, and melee is enlivened with a tiny but well-judged slow-mo that kicks in on finishers. Meanwhile, as the game’s single palette cleanser, the jump-pack that boasts a targeted ground-pound is an excellent kind of fun during the rare sequences in which you’re allowed to use it. Those moments aside, Space Marine’s campaign quickly becomes pretty tedious – a problem that is only aggravated by an unfortunate sense of familiarity. Warhammer 40,000’s iconography has been so heavily raided over the years that genuine Space Marines just blend into the crowd. All Games Workshop really has of its own now are Latin names, a promising but undeveloped moral ambiguity (given your faction’s decidedly fascist overtones), and an embarrassing teenage vividness to the power fantasy.