Space Marine is a fun Third Person game that combines shooting and hack & slash elements almost perfectly
This is the strongest point of Space Marine.
Killing Orcs,Chaos minions and other space marines just never seems to get old. The gameplay is fluid, feels natural and the controlls listen to your every command. Theres nothing more satisfying then charging into a horde of orcs and using your thunder hammer to kill them all.
The gameplay is combo of Third Person shooting and hack & slash elements, thought don't expect the hack & slash part to have crazy combos or to be very complex. The hack & slash part is pretty simple yet very satisfying and fun, you can perform normal attacks and interupts which are usefull against enemies with slower attacks.
There is no cover system, this isn't another generic TPS game that forces you to take cover and peak out every few seconds to kill an enemy, NO! in Space Marine, YOU are the cover. You are like a giant walking tank of death, nothing can stop you. The game makes you feel powerfull, like you really are a Space Marine from the 40k lore.
There is no health regeneration, if you want more health you have no perform brutal execution moves on enemies to get your health back, allthought this gameplay element does not carry over to the Multiplayer.
Presentation :
Graphicly the game isn't very impressive, you'll notice alot of blury textures, the reason for this is becuse the game supports a ridiculous amount of enemies at the same time on screen, in many scenes you'll find yourself fighting over 100 enemies at the same time, so lower quality graphics aren't really surpirsing since the game would've been to demading to render so many characters models in such high qualety.
Sound is done well, gun fire sounds allright, explosions are also done well, voice acting is fantastic , music is just down right awesome and epic. Overral the sound quality is good.
The levels in the game lack color, thought this really is to be expected since the planet the game is taking on is a heavy industrial planet that produces weaponry, so expect to see alot of Brown,orange and grey colours, still you can brake this small variaty of colours by painting your space marine pink in the multiplayer.
Features :
The game features a 6 or 7h long Campaign, an addictive co-op mode where you and 3 other friends clear levels and compleat missions while fighting a massive army of Orcs/Chaos minions/Space Marine/Imperial Guards man.
The game also has a multiplayer, it supports up to 18 players sadly the multiplayer suffers from lagg problems, this is caused becuse of the consol P2P system, so yeah the game doesn't have dedicated servers which is a big letdown but still i found the MP to be a lot of fun even with the lagg issues. In the multiplayer you can play as a Space Marine or as a Chaos Marine, both are the same when it comes to gameplay and stats but the apperances are diffrent. In the MP you can roll as one of 3 unique classes, these 3 classes can be fully customizes and have a large variaty of weaponry. The tactical marines is you standart class, he can carry a normaly sized weaponry(at least for space marines) and has a dodge abbilaty, the devestator is a heavy marine, he can carry giant weapons such as the heavy bolter, becuse of that he's very slow and can't roll around to dodge attacks. Then theres the assault marine, the assault marine is armed with melee weapons and a jet pack, he's the most fun class to play as since you can jump around the maps and slaughter your enemies with a chainsword or thunderhammer. The multiplayer lacked maps and gamemodes at the begining but that has been fixed now, 2 new gamemodes have been added for free. Relic also released 2 map packs which added alot more variaty to the MP and co-op mode of the game, these map packs are worth picking up since they're not overpriced and bring enuf content to Space Marine to make it feel fresh again.
Story :
The Story in the single player folows the Ultramarine Captain. Titus. He and he's brothers have been sent to a forge world to clear out the Xeno infestation, as usual things are never simple. The dark chaos gods somehow got them selfs involved with the attack and have very dark plans for the entire sector. The story has alot of plot twists,betrayals and deaths so i won't talk about the story all that much, don't wanna spoil anything.
Overral :
Space Marine is overral a very unique and extreamly fun game, i suggest you pick it up.It's definitely one of my favorite Third Person shooters now, when i first played the demo my jaw almost fell down onto the floor how amazed i was.
Still becuse of the lagg issues,lack of variaty in the SP and the lack of dedicated servers i have to give the game a 8.5 . I hope RELIC will make a second game and fix some of the issues and add more variaty into the gameplay and hopefully a bit more color.