What’s On The Shelf | Games, Music & Culture

I don’t know a single thing about the Warhammer universe beyond this: it’s massive, it’s absurd, and it’s been described in ways that raise an eyebrow or two. My only exposure before this was the Vermintide games. So if you’re looking for deep lore analysis, you’re in the wrong place. This is purely about how Warhammer 40,000: Space Marine II feels to play.

Released in 2024 and developed by Saber Interactive—one head of the ever-growing Embracer hydra—Space Marine II is a third-person horde shooter that leans heavily into spectacle. You play as Titus, a genetically enhanced walking tank, alongside your equally massive squadmates Chairon and Gadriel. The scale difference between your squad and regular humans in the hub world is borderline comedic. These aren’t soldiers. These are refrigerators with legs and chainsaw swords.

Your primary enemies are the Tyranids. If your brain immediately goes, “Oh, like the Flood from Halo,” you’re not alone. There’s a familiar hierarchy: swarming fodder enemies that sprint at you without a second thought, ranged units that stack poison damage, and larger threats that demand a bit more attention. It’s a recognizable structure, but it works.

Combat is where the game earns most of its keep. You’re juggling a health bar that only refills with consumables and an armor system that regenerates through aggression—executions, parries, and smart positioning. The loop is simple but effective: stay active, stay violent, or get overwhelmed.

Your toolkit covers both melee and ranged options. You’ve got chainswords, knives, pistols, primary weapons, and occasional heavy weapons for crowd control. You can wade into the chaos and carve through enemies up close, or hang back and thin the herd from a distance. Both approaches are viable, and the game encourages you to adapt on the fly.

Melee combat brings a bit more texture than expected. Light and heavy attacks, parries, and dodge rolls create something adjacent to a simplified Souls-like rhythm. A well-timed heavy can stagger enemies and open them up for a quick, satisfying headshot. Build enough damage, and you trigger executions—brutal animations that also restore a sliver of armor. It becomes a constant balancing act: offense as survival, movement as defense.

You’re not meant to stand still. The game pushes you into a constant dance of positioning, timing, and resource management. Even if you’re playing well, you’ll go down. Thankfully, there’s a built-in safety net—your first down gives teammates a chance to revive you before things fully fall apart.

Each character also has an ultimate ability, though these feel underwhelming. Whether it’s a burst of healing or an area-of-effect explosion, they exist more as a bonus than a core mechanic. You’ll use them, but you won’t think much about them.

And somehow, all of this is still just the tutorial.

The opening mission drops you onto Kadaku, where you crash land and immediately get thrown into escalating encounters. It’s a steady ramp of mechanics—movement, shooting, grenades—before culminating in a wave defense sequence that highlights the game’s scale. This is where Space Marine II makes its strongest impression. Watching massive swarms of enemies pour over the horizon is both technically impressive and genuinely tense. There were occasional frame drops, but given the sheer number of bodies on screen, it’s understandable.

The mission ends the only way a Warhammer tutorial can: with a dramatic, unwinnable fight. You deploy a viral bomb into the atmosphere—probably fine—and get absolutely demolished by a rhino-looking monstrosity before being rescued at the last second. It’s chaotic, over-the-top, and very on-brand.

If a lot of this sounds familiar, that’s because it is. Space Marine II feels like a blend of several established games. The bulky armor and cover-adjacent movement echo Gears of War. The executions and aggressive combat loop pull from Doom. The horde shooting scratches a similar itch to Helldivers. Even some of the headshot mechanics feel pulled from somewhere your brain recognizes but can’t quite place.

This isn’t necessarily a problem, but it does highlight a lack of originality. The game executes these ideas competently, but rarely pushes beyond them. It plays it safe within a well-worn formula.

That familiarity starts to wear thin. The first few hours are genuinely exciting—there’s weight to the combat, spectacle in the scale, and enough chaos to keep things engaging. But over time, the repetition becomes more noticeable. Encounters blur together, and the novelty fades.

That leaves Warhammer 40,000: Space Marine II in an awkward middle ground. It’s a solid, sometimes very fun game that doesn’t quite carve out its own identity. If you’ve got two friends to squad up with, there’s a lot more value here. The cooperative chaos elevates the experience in a way the solo campaign struggles to match.

But on its own, it’s harder to recommend unless you’re already invested in the setting or the genre.

And if what you’re really looking for is that same aggressive, high-intensity combat loop done at its peak… Doom Eternal is still sitting right there.