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Space Marine franchise is a fan favorite game which comes with a lot of noise then gets quickly forgotten and when someone mentions it, everyone remembers how great it is out of nowhere. This is because both games are good, but they never reach more than a cult following. It's what an average, good game should be. It caters to an audience and is largely derivative of that era most popular mechanics and some improvements on previous formula. Space Marine 2 manages to be entertaining to its customer base, but lacks a lasting impact, quality and depth of gameplay to really stand out among the crowd as one of the greats.

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The good thing is that this game was great on launch and subsequent patches. Its campaign hit hard and it seemingly had plenty of content. It had much more content to come in a roadmap. However, what we started to receive wasn't nearly as good. PvP is a joke. Operations lackluster. The best part of this game is the campaign and its quality drops noticeably along in a second half. Together with player retention which then becomes absolutely horrible when it comes to post campaign, persistent content. Most of the game's value is in its relatively short campaign with no New Game + mode. Campaign which developers had cannibalize in order to make Operations game mode. Hence, realistic value proposition for an average player here is low. He is unlikely to even finish the campaign and only select few get hooked up on end game content.

A sale made for the future work becomes not an incentive, but an annoying obligation to the customer. Seller already has your money. It is in his desires not to do any work over money he already has. He spent it all already and it feels to him as free work which he begrudingly does. Hungry stomachs and uncertain futures are what drives a hungry developer into making a great game!

This is why all the post launch content for this game was done quickly and without much thought. Sieges are the best example of that. It is a game mode which has no balance, no thought, no originality. It feels like just a mod where developer just thrown assets which they already had into a wave defense mini-game. Quality of the siege mode is very low and it feels like a mod.

• Insane difficulty;
  
• Pitiful rewards;
  
• No player guidance;
  
• Boring maps;
  
• Uninspired boosters;

First, it is that most players struggle to even complete first 5 waves out of 30 waves! And that is on normal! Game has a lot harder hard difficulty! I had seen 1-5 level players just leave in frustration. Not to mention that players can jump right into the hard mode from the start when they can't even complete first 5 waves of normal! Then that game mode gives very little to new players and it is meant for hardcore audience with all the loot at the end and skin farming.

Game mode is very shoddily made. You earn points to get boosters during game, but nobody buys short timed stat boosts. You can buy NPC reinforcements who do nothing in late game. You could save up for a Dreadnought which absolutely murders whatever wave he is at and then runs off like a coward for no reason. Developers added animations to certain levels. Like bio-titan sieging an Imperial armory. However, for gameplay purposes they mix up assaulting faction. So you get Tyranids bio-titan helping out Thousands Sons for some reason...

Multiplayer is even worse. It is uninspired, asset dump of a map pool with no interesting qualities. In fact, maps are poorly designed. Some points absolutely choke point attackers while at other times, enemy can easily come from any side and wipe your team. And since these are 1 to 2 ton super warriors with best armor in the galaxy, of course they will die just as quickly as in Call of Duty! Enemy doesn't even need to hit you like seen in this clip. You dodge its hit, you lose half of your health and then it just taps you and kills you. No skill involved, weapon balance is broken in this game. The fact that I managed to get 3% rarity achievement just by...winning once with every class speaks volumes at how bad PvP experience is in this game.
https://youtu.be/sYbvbz6PfYo?si=_g0Gajw2oCGZY2gj
Operations are passable. They are cut content from main campaign and gives you insight of what other squad was doing. The issue with those is that you are incentivised to thoroughly search the map for meta progress items, but are punished heavily for doing so. It is Risk of Rain (1&2) design flaw all over again. Developers don't know what they are doing. They made that enemy can spawn a sizeable enemy wave the longer you linger. This pushes you to rush through the operation. Terrible design choice which serves only to encourage rushing and meta gaming for no benefit to the gameplay.

The metagame is another very disappointing aspect of this game. Like in Darktide, you have only select few items and skills to pick. Like in there, your skills are extremely boring. Like: "do 10% more pistol damage to heavy target when you headshot it, stacks for 5 seconds". These buffs are so minor and situational that you won't be able to customize anything. If there is some balance, it is done around arbitrary combat mechanics. Do you kill elite with 2 or 3 hits? These multipliers are designed solely around picking the right combo to lower hit count on hardest difficulties. Game is boring as all hell when it comes to progression and everything in it takes a very long time to grind. There are many levels, many gradual unlocks which supposedly builds up to a lot of power, but it is all just very mediocre content at best.

Writing is uninspired and lore-rape. It rehashes the same story from the first game and basically just repeats the entire premise. Story is just more developed here with higher production values, but it remains exactly the same. Why writers are even getting paid, really?

The key issue with this is how illogical and lazy the entire plot is. Mechanicus who is known to be ultra-conservative faction experiments with revolutionary and heretical technology all over again with no repercussions. With a tech which is going to change the game and is 'almost done', but it never bothers to do any actual guarding of it themselves. Secondly, lore doesn't work like that. Opening warp rifts requires emotion. Maintaining it stable requires constant work of psykers. While warp can generate insane amounts of energy, it is not something which can be harnessed technologically. For one, an open rift into warp means that all that energy keeps pouring out together with all the demons, their insidious whispering and outright manifestations in real space. Do you see a slight problem here?

Game has very detailed models, this is actually in game models. I managed to photograph them there placed by the developers and you would be forgiven if you thought that this is actually part of an in-game cinematic.
https://gtm.steamproxy.vip/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=3538935848
There are some technical issues too. Game is very GPU demanding and it will take some serious power to run this game. Despite it, game struggles with assets. Its engine will simply refuse to load textures even if there is free VRAM available. So, there is aggressive texture pop in all the time. It takes minimum 16 GB of VRAM to play this game comfortably on highest settings. Then even then it doesn't look good. Objects in a distance are very low fidelity and everything is just barren of details. If you have an eye for graphics, you are definitely going to notice a lot of graphical jank in this game.
https://gtm.steamproxy.vip/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=3495594413

The best part of this game is that it allows 3 player co-op. Not only this is the optimal amount of players for a game, but it also scales well and it is perfectly playable alone, duo or as a trio. Game is also well suited for this kind of gameplay. It is genuinely good experience to play the entire campaign through with your friends. Such co-op games are the rarity in today's market and I'm glad that I was able to do so.

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Space Marine 2 is great for the specific audience. It caters to them and it delivers an entertaining, short lasting product. Most of its value was at launch and is concentrated in a first part of the campaign. It has great Co-op mode, very detailed graphics and cutting edge swarm simulation. It scores in all the right places to justify the asking price for a launch day buyer. Sadly, game's quality afterthat is underwhelming and it feels just as an afterthought. It is great, short distraction with short legs and plenty of flaws if you dig just a little deeper.

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