In Space Marine 2, there is no greater joy than throwing yourself head-first into a seething mass of Tyranids. When you're fighting in melee range, the game does an incredible job at making you feel like you're surviving through sheer skill and power. Whether it's barely breaking your stride to catch a leaping Hormagaunt by the tail and slamming them into paste, or parrying a Tyranid Warrior's swords until an opening lets you plunge your own revving Chainsword into its midriff, there's a fluidity to combat unlike anything I've played before. It's a flow that's complemented by the fact there aren't too many opportunities to use your guns – a quick gap in might let you thin out the crowd with a spray of Bolter rounds, or take out some distant snipers, but it's typically more effective to fight up-close.
Unfortunately, when Space Marine 2 moves away from Tyranids in lieu of Chaos in the final act, this combat loses some of its appeal. Chaos takes a quality over quantity approach, reducing the amount of horde fodder in lieu of fielding elite units like Scarab Occult Terminators and Chaos Space Marines. These units tend to have more longer-ranged weapons, which means the balance of fighting skews toward having to use guns more.
Fair fight
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It's a shame, because by leaning into guns, Space Marine 2 loses a lot of the fluidity that makes fighting Tyranids so fun – and when I raise this with game director Dmitriy Grigorenko, I'm surprised to hear he feels the same way.
"Yeah, that's actually a valid criticism – I have exactly the same thoughts," says Grigorenko. "You know, at some point you cannot stop the train, you cannot change things. Eventually we saw that this problem was going to happen. And it's funny, because when we started the project, and I was talking to our designers, saying, 'Okay, so the first game is absolutely amazing when you fight Orcs, but when Chaos appears [laughing] it's not fun anymore. Let's not repeat their mistakes. Let's not do this.' And we kind of fell in the same trap. Even though we knew this was going to happen, we fell into this trap."
"But, yeah, I mean, in some cases, like I said, you cannot change things before it's too late," he continues. "We tried to fix this by introducing a lot of unique setpieces that break the repetitiveness, I would say, but overall, you don't know until you make this stuff. This may sound obvious, but it's not very obvious when you make stuff – killing Tyranids is fun because there's blood. You cannot fight this. I mean, no matter what you do, killing robots, killing Thousand Sons, you know, the sand, the ash, is not as good as blood. This is why killing zombies is fun, because they have blood. And while we tried to do our best, I don't think we did a good job in the end, but maybe next time."
If you've played through Space Marine 2's final levels on Demerium, you'll be able to follow Grigorenko's logic. The planet has some of the game's most cinematic moments – and while many will point to the space marines charging beneath a towering Lord of Change, my personal favorite is the frantic last stand you make with a pistol at the Chapter's heraldic banner. But the game director makes a good point that I hadn't considered – I'm hung up on the fighting side of things, but perhaps melee feels so good because of its goriness? I'm a big fan of the way Thousand Sons erupt in sparkling Warp-glitter when you rip their heads off, but it does feel less textured than tearing bloody chunks from Tyranids. Blood for the Blood God? Maybe Khorne's onto something after all.
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