Gameitall In my home town, being a gamer, didn’t really earn you much respect, in fact it was difficult to find people to play Tabletop games like Warhammer, and Dungeons and Dragons, so sadly I was never able to get into the Lore of the 40K series. Once I got into Game Design, I kept hearing about the Lore of the 40K universe, which kept wanting me to play the game. To this day, I still haven’t played an actual 40K game, so when THQ and Relic studios announced that they were working on Space Marine, I thought this would be a game for people who were heavily into the game already.
Thank God I was wrong.
Warhammer 40K: Space Marine, is Relic’s way of attempting to bring more people into the series, showing that this game is much more then a bunch of people sitting around painting figurines and reading books, this shows the brutality of War in the 41 century.
In Space Marine, you play as the a squad of Ultra Marines, or in other words, the badasses of badasses. In the demo that I played (which is available now on Xbox Live and PSN) you play as Captain Titus (played by Mark Strong (Kick-ass, RocknRolla, Sherlock Homes) a Ultra Marine who leads a team against An ork horde as it’s launches an invasion of an Imperial Forge World, a planet-dedicated industry that manufactures vehicles and weaponry for the Imperium’s soldiers. Early in your trip you fine a ServSkull, a flying skull that delivers messages to people, here you learn of a Inquisitor, who is building a secret weapon to fight the Orks.
Now unless you know something of the Warhammer games, that may be confusing you, but let me tell you what’s not confusing. Combat.
Game play is quick, fluid and brutal, as Captain Titus has a huge range of weapons, ranging from a bolt pistol, heavy machine gun called the Bolter, Grenade Launcher and Sniper Rifle. A great combination of guns to mow down hordes of Orks that will stand in your path.
Shooting and movements feels very close to games like Gears of War, except for one thing, there is no cover system, now this may feel like somethings missing in harder attacks, but then you remember my previous statement, Ultramarines are bad asses.
During the game I found myself getting swarmed by a huge wave of Orks, sometimes up to 50 or more at a time. Getting too close for effective shooting distance, decided to use Titus’ melee weapon, the Chainsword. This is where I learned an awesome feature of the game, to regain health you much do a grab kill on your stunned enemies, which usally involves revving the Chainsword to rip the Ork apart, or Curve stomping him in a bloody fashion.
The second part of the demo introduced the Jump packs, a jetpack style system that allows you to Jump large distances and land on an enemy, either crushing him to death or stunning him so you can pull a grab kill. It turns out to be allot of fun to annihilate large amounts of Greenskins in a single bounce.
Space Marine comes out on September 6th 2011. Demo is out now on Xbox Live and PSN, I highly recommend trying it out.
