Warhammer 40,000: Space Marine

With such a streamlined approach, it's nice to see that the game is getting the important stuff right. Set in a rusty, dusty factory wasteland, Space Marine is a very hefty game. Your personal super soldier and his occasional squad mates (there to provide narrative chatter and additional firepower but not available for ordering around) move with an earth-shuddering weight, plucking Orks out of the ground with beefy hands and then popping them open as if they were a race of unpleasantly evolved watermelons.

Combat is split between ranged weapons, which pulls the camera in for a familiar over-the-shoulder view, and melee offerings like Chainswords and large, nasty hammers. These push the screen out a bit so you can enjoy the thumping, chewing and goring. Nothing happens in Space Marine if it doesn't end with Orks lying around in chunks and gun barrels sending out snaky wisps of smoke.

The occasional set-piece will break up the action now and then – a turret section as you provide support for a fleet on Valkyries looks better than expected, in part due to the hilarious Orks-on-jetpacks animations – and there will be the odd special weapon for you to run across.

These are generally five minutes of fiercely-overpowered fun with a single clip of ammo, and they give the developer a chance to ramp up the enemy numbers even more than normal. For the most part, however, you'll be fighting through a range of industrial settings one bullet and sword-swipe at a time.

Variety could be a problem, but the locations shown so far – sewers and abandoned cities for the most part – manage to make dereliction look pretty, if rather brown. While there's a train section, the train in question is vast and filled with tactical intricacies, and you're on it while trading rockets with an Ork dropship that comes with its very own mohawk.

Equally, while there are only a handful of different enemy types in the current build, taking in small Orks, slightly bigger Orks, and Orks with shields, these are early days, and there are dozens of others coming together in art packages back at Relic HQ, apparently. No word yet on whether it's an Ork-only affair, however.

With co-op and multiplayer offerings still to be revealed Space Marine is looking like a supremely visceral shooter, with chunky weapons, chunky enemies, and chunky sci-fi words littering the predominantly grunty dialogue.

Ever since Danny Bilson took over core games at HQ, his mantra has apparently been, "release it only when it's ready." That worked well enough with his daughter, who was apparently in the womb for 13 years (this is not true so don't put it on Wikipedia), and things look to be turning out okay here, too. With a little luck, then, this is the game to prove that although a Space Marine's job may be simple, it's rarely boring.