Warhammer 40,000: Space Marine II Review

I've been playing a lot of Darktide recently, Fatshark's weirdly janky but strangely enjoyable horde-'em-up, which has turned on some sort of back-of-lizard-brain desire to devour every and all Warhammer 40k game and book I can get my hands on. Space Marine II was on sale when I went scouring the PSN store, so I snapped it right up, mostly excited for the multiplayer, but knowing I needed to plow through the single player campaign to get the most from it. I wasn't so much looking forward to this part though as two AI companions are foisted upon you, and AI teammates are usually pretty dodgy at the best of times.

Regardless of my doubt, Space Marine II begins with a bang. You start off as a Blackshield of the Deathwatch, sent with your squad to the planet Kadaku to repel endless invading swarms of Tyranids, but it all goes a bit tits up straight from the bat. With every other member of your squad downed, it's up to you to blast a virus into the atmosphere to either kill or weaken the Tyranid invading force.

With your initial task complete, you're reinstated to the Ultramarines and teamed up with your boys Chairon and Gadriel who will help you barrel through the rest of the campaign, and to be fair, they aren't anywhere near as shit as I expected. It's an enjoyable enough romp, carving through wave after wave of Tyranids, ripping and chopping and popping heads. Lovely. This enjoyment sadly stalls once the legions of Chaos appear. Now I've read a few 40k books and I've played Darktide, and Chaos in both of these has been grotesque, full of pustules and terror. The archenemy in Space Marine II does not fit this criteria at all. Chaos in Space Marine II is very much bright colours and fairydust. Nothing is more disappointing than cracking a Chaos Marine open like a piñata and finding them filled with nothing but rainbows and glitter.

This tonal inconsistency just doesn't match the grimdark setting I was expecting. The Tyranids are thrown to the wayside and largely forgotten in favour of these neon blue clowns. Even the big bad ends up just being some guy cosplaying the Green Goblin with a pet shiny verdant dragon, doing over the top campy evil laughs for good measure. Now Darktide isn't serious by any means, and is campy as hell with some of the dialogue, but the setting there still feels much nearer to what you'd expect.

And for all the overblown bombastic machismo space pew-pewing Space Marine II strives for, the voice acting is just bad. Everyone is stilted and one note. When characters are talking I often can't tell who it is because they all sound the same, apart from the one Scottish guy. There's a scene near the end with a rousing speech that falls flat because there's a 3-second gap between the end of his speech and the cheering from the crowd.

Loading times on the PS5 feel like they take forever too. I swear it's upwards of 2–3 minutes to go from the mission prep area into the mission itself, which in this day and age of SSDs feels just wrong. It's also putting me off delving very far into the multiplayer. It's not so much hop in and play as hop in, make a cup of tea, read a bit of a book, go for a slash, come back and it's still not loaded in.

I really wanted to love Space Marine II, but once you're past the Tyranids, it's all just a bit silly and repetitive. Hard to feel threatened when you've gone from hacking through mind-bending horrors to popping the heads off bubblegum pixies. The loading times just add to my feelings of ambivalence.