Warhammer 40,000: Space Marine Previews

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Written by BuckGB on May 5th, 2011

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When it comes to crowd management, your best friend here is the Fury. As you cut and blast your foes, you'll fill a gauge that eventually allows for a powered-up attack - in the demo you could either go for an area-of-effect melee spin, or a short-but-useful burst of bullet time. In addition to light and heavy slashes, you've also got a button for performing sync kills, elaborate finishers that polish off the enemy in gruesome ways. While it's certainly fun to hack an Ork completely in half with the chainsword, the real advantage of the Sync kills is that they add a massive chunk to the Fury gauge. As a result, you soon fall into a habit of performing these moves as often as you can. There's such an emphasis on style here that you almost feel that the game would benefit from some kind of scoring system, but presumably that would clash with Games Workshop's protective ethos.

Relic says that it's designing Space Marine in a way that'll attract newcomers, but on current evidence it still seems as if it'll be the hardcore fans who get the most out of the package. This is the first Warhammer 40k title in quite some time to focus on the Ultramarines, rather than the Blood Ravens; from an outsider's perspective this might just seem like the developers have got bored of drawing red-armoured men and decided to go for blue ones instead, but if you're invested in the universe you'll no doubt appreciate the change-up. The plot setup follows Captain Titus - voiced by that Mark Strong chap from off the telly - as he and his squadmates attempt to defend an important Forge World from a massive invasion. It's not just Orks you'll be fighting, either: at some point in the story you'll go up against Chaos troops too, although sadly the Tyranids have been ruled out. On the "good guys" side you'll also get at least a supporting cameo from the Imperial Guard, so there's a decent spread of races taking part.

These are top of the line weapons, including a chainsaw-based sword known as the Chainsword, which can easily rip enemies to pieces; and a sweet bolter rifle that shoots out painful rounds at incoming enemies. Grenades are also provided for those situations that call for explosives. Over the course of the game, other weapons will become available, including a nifty grenade launcher, a smaller version of the bolter fortified into a pistol, and a plasma gun that fires charged rounds. We didn't see all the weapons in action as we played through the demo, but we checked out enough to give us an idea about the scope of destruction. There's no question that Warhammer: Space Marine has been inspired by Epic Games' Gears of War series. The look is suspiciously close when it comes to design, as the enemies and levels look like something good ol' Bleszinski would cook up. But Warhammer doesn't perform a rip-off here. Instead, it tones the look of the game into the overall story arc, and manages to fit it right in without the need to really adapt much. Plus, it gets downright brutal during the action sequences, as you don't have the comfort of cover to rely on. (Take that, Fenix!)

Without cover, you need to work towards a combination of fast-paced gunplay and some well executed melee attacks. You'll use these together in a variety of situations, whether it's fending off a position from incoming enemies or charging into a battlefield just crawling with the creepy green guys. Seeing as how your ammunition isn't unlimited, you'll actually incorporate melee into your offensive approach making the game much more personal than your traditional third-person shooter. The melee attacks don't just slice into someone's first layer of skin they lop off limbs and head like a good chainsaw-based sword would. Other melee weapons will be introduced over the course of the game as well, including a thunder hammer (we're talking Thor level here) and a power axe. Titus has a fury meter that fills up over the course of the action, too. Once it's juiced and ready to go, he can either execute ranged fury attacks to pick off Orks from afar, or use a fury strike, which fires off a powerful sweeping attack that takes out enemies in a nearby region. The choice is yours when it comes to the level of devastation, but we're leaning more towards the strike because, well, it's messy. (And damn good fun.)

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