The Space Marine is the cover in Space Marine, and regenerating health uses a system that feels a lot like the early inspiration for Doom 2016's Glory Kills. When waist-high cover systems were all the rage, Space Marine was a game that looked like Gears of War at first glance, but threw the cover system in the trash. Space Marine is a fantastic, indulgent action game, but even more so if you've done the extra-curricular reading.Īnd now that I have a runway, I can finally appreciate what a unique game Space Marine actually is and how it was directly in conversation with Gears of War at that series' peak popularity.
Every time we cleave an Ork in two or crash down on a horde from 50 feet in the sky during a jump pack segment, I'm hollering. Every time Captain Titus, the protagonist in Space Marine, belts out praise to the Emperor or salutes a fellow marine near death in blind, horrific allegiance to some mega powerful sad boy entity, I'm hooting. So when you see an Ork explode for the first time in Space Marine, Relic's attempt at a 40K third-person action game, that flat, misty particle effect takes on new life if you've even dipped a toe into the extended universe. Without the ability to nest Space Marine's narrative in the self-aware, satirical context it's built on, there's not much to grab onto unless you're just in it to gut Orks. Space Marine plays on the surface of the 40K universe, rarely spending time developing characters or building out big, important story arcs-it feels like a fan game, and even though my knowledge of the history of the 40K universe is thin, I’m a fan now, but it’s clear why I glanced off so easily when it was released. With fresh eyes dripping with gore, I knew I had to revisit the pile of unplayed 40K games in my Steam library, and Space Marine was at the top. Space Marine is a fantastic, induldgent game. I don't think I've cackled so much reading a book. Paired with a sociopolitical culture that places loyalty, power, infinite capital gain at all costs, and total emotional repression at the fore, and you get galactic wars spanning millennia that are largely driven by greed and petty male bullshit. Men are made into Swiss cheese, melted, chopped, baked – the violence is so grotesque and indulgent that it just becomes comedic. And like Redwall's pages-long feasts in which every dish is detailed from top to bottom, texture to smell to taste, the same word counts are applied to describing what happens to a man when he's pressed through metal grating or sliced from tip to toe by impossibly sharp bladed gauntlets.
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