Warhammer 40,000: Space Marine 2 review - a thunderous triple-A spectacle that's truly electric in co-op

I've always been wary of people who say about a game "It's better when you play it in co-op" because virtually every activity is improved by the presence of friends. Cleaning the sink is more fun when you've got one to three pals monkeying around in the kitchen with you, tossing you extra sponge-scourers and reviving you when you faint because of the thing you just pulled out of the plughole.

Space Marine 2, however, really is better in coop, and not just because your mate Dan keeps making jokes about 'Krak grenades' being the product of eating too many beans. Not only is its campaign elevated with the presence of player companions, Space Marine 2's real heart lies in what comes after the story has finished – its chaotic, class-based, Left 4 Dead style Operations.

None of which is to suggest Space Marine 2 is a bad time in single-player. Saber Interactive's campaign does a perfectly preposterous job in following up Relic's quintessential 7/10. The story once more revolves around the Ultramarine Titus, who has been demoted to a Lieutenant in the big blue brotherhood following accusations of heresy in the original. The introductory mission prefaces all this in a fun way that I won't spoil, but ultimately Titus winds up leading a new squad of marines in a large-scale operation to rid a trio of Imperial planets from a Tyranid infestation.

And when I say "large-scale", holy Omnissiah, Space Marine 2 knows how to put on a show. Its linear campaign takes you through gigantic gothic Hive Cities being pummelled by Tyranid spores, vast, churned battlefields crisscrossed by lasgun fire, and sprawling Imperial fortresses that house cathedral-sized artillery guns. It's a gloriously extravagant depiction of the 40k universe, and also a game that feels genuinely next-generational in its presentation.

One of the major separating factors here is the busyness of the screen; the skies are constantly filled with whirling flocks of avian Tyranids, while encounters with later game enemies display some of the snazziest particle effects you'll see outside of CERN. The standout trick, however, is Space Marine 2's vast, boiling Tyranid swarms. The game loves to show you them flooding toward you out of the backdrop, or pouring from a spore-missile that landed smack in the middle of the battlefield.

Unlike the other points mentioned, the Tyranids are more than just a visual flourish. These Xenomorph-ish aliens are your primary foe in Space Marine 2, and you'll spend much of the campaign mastering how to combat their writhing hordes. As with the first game, Space Marine 2's combat is built around a mixture of melee and ranged fighting, with you swinging chainswords and Thunder Hammers to cleave through large groups of foes, while using boltguns and plasma incinerators to soften up larger enemies or pick off distant targets. Also returning are the eye-poppingly gory executions, with Titus and his team impaling Tyranids on their own talons, squashing their heads between their armoured palms, or in the case of the floating Zoanthrope enemy holding it down by the tail and ripping off its face.

Yet while the broad strokes are the same, there's considerably more nuance to the system this time around. Saber sprinkles a dash of FromSoft in the game's dodge and parry system, while performing executions regenerates your armour, helping you remain in the fight for longer a-la Doom Eternal. The most interesting mechanical flourish, however, is the gun strike. A perfectly timed parry or dodge paints a literal target onto your aggressor, at which point pressing fire will see your character whip out their sidearm and fire a snapshot right into your enemy's mush, knocking them backwards and possibly opening them up for an execution. It's a marvellous little innovation, reminiscent of Gears of War's active reload for how disproportionately it contributes to the experience.

Overall, I think Space Marine 2's combat is mostly great. That said, it can sometimes feel like trying to play Bloodborne in a mosh pit. While nowhere near as demanding as a Fromsoft game, it does ask you to remember quite a lot, and there are times where your attempt to do a cool thing, like grab a leaping enemy or perform a gun strike, gets gunged up by the roiling swarm. Moreover, some weapon impacts would benefit from being crunchier, as they can be drowned out by the orchestral score and the collective gargling of the Tyranids.

There are a couple of other points worth plunging into the campaign's chitinous flesh. Initially, Space Marine 2's story threatens to be interesting, as it peeks beneath the armour of the Ultramarines to prod at the hot mess of trauma underneath. Titus himself has been through a lot since the last game, and both those experiences and the aspersions cast upon him clearly weigh on his shoulders despite his claims to the contrary. Meanwhile his new squadmates, Gadriel and Chairon, are less than thrilled by their assignment to the Lieutenant, and their doubts only intensify as Titus' behaviour grows seemingly more erratic. You can feel them biting their tongues on particular subjects as they follow you around, indirectly questioning and even scolding Titus through the Ultramarines' ornate rhetoric.

Saber clearly wants you to think of its characters as more than metal-plated meatheads, and I enjoyed how the campaign hints at the character's emotions by their very attempts to avoid showing them. Sadly, it never delves much further than this, and the campaign drifts increasingly toward tropes and fan-service as it proceeds. It's still entertaining, but doesn't transcend itself in the way it suggests it might in the first half.

The other key point is, as you might expect, that the campaign is at its weakest when played solo. Not only are there numerous set-pieces clearly designed to be played in co-op, combat is noticeably less consistent in single-player. The Tyranid swarms lean more toward trickle than torrent, with some engagements ending oddly prematurely, and you left mopping up executions your AI buddies have failed to enact. Yet when a Zoanthrope appears on screen, the difficulty swerves into borderline punishing. Again your AI companions struggle to manage the intensified swarms, leaving you to frantically dodge around as you try to take down their annoying floating master.

When played cooperatively, the campaign feels far more consistent. The Tyranids flow better, the combat's more intense, and those difficulty spikes are sanded down. Gadriel and Chairon also have their own active abilities, which lends a campaign replay a slightly different angle.

Personally though, I reckon Space Marine 2 is strongest outside of the campaign. Operations mode offers six individual, campaign-like missions with a couple of twists. First, you play as a specific class of Space Marine with distinctive abilities. Assault marines are equipped with a jetpack and Thunder Hammer for maximum smashing, for example, while Bulwark marines carry a shield and can deploy a standard that creates an armour regenerating field. I'm particularly fond of the Vanguard marine, who wields a combat knife and uses a grappling hook to dropkick enemies from a distance, which is tremendous. The other key difference is that its Tyranid swarms are more dynamic, controlled by a Left 4 Dead-style AI director that moderates the frequency and intensity of attacks, and lets larger enemies call in reinforcements. This combination results in a greater emphasis on teamwork, while also facilitating some proper gnarly scrapes.

Where the campaign offers the most spectacular set-pieces, Operations is where the mechanical side of Space Marine 2 is allowed to fully breathe. That said, it's worth noting the Operations missions are similar in size and scale to those of the campaign. The first of them, Inferno, is directly tied to an early campaign mission, with you playing as a secondary marine team, tasked with stemming the flow of Tyranids from around a Mechanicus facility by setting off a massive Prometheum bomb. There's a ferocious central set-piece where you have to defend the bomb as it's being primed, and the final battle where you hold off the Tyranid swarm until it detonates is every bit as stunning as anything in the campaign.

Each Operation takes about an hour to complete, with more coming post-launch. Combined with a PvP multiplayer mode that's also no slouch (albeit a less natural fit for the systems) Space Marine 2 might just have some post-launch legs. Some might see this as a sad indictment of where AAA gaming is at, that you can't just make a linear, single-player action game anymore without it having some kind of live-service element. Thing is, that was the case thirteen years ago. The original Space Marine launched with a multiplayer mode that was obligatory in the post Call of Duty era. With Space Marine 2, none of this feels tacked on, or like an afterthought. As I said at the outset, the campaign is better in coop, while the Operations might be the strongest part of the whole package. Never mind what Saber might have prepared for the future, I want to play some of these missions again now.

I do have one complaint about Space Marine 2's multiplayer functionality, and that's the lack of an external menu for those modes. To get to Operations or Eternal War, you have to load into your campaign, then switch to your chosen mode, then invite your friends (or vice-versa), and then go and alter your abilities and equipment if you need to do that. It's slow, fiddly, and annoying, and no replacement for a menu that lets you do all of those things on one screen.

Nonetheless, in an industry that is currently so fraught and volatile, Space Marine 2 is a smart and effective tactical strike. It at once sparks fond memories of the pre-Souls era of third-person action games, while also being cunningly adapted to survive in the modern gaming scene. It also looks mint and lets you smash aliens with a big hammer, which makes it difficult to dislike. It's the KFC party bucket of video games, delightfully messy, almost certainly bad for you, and best shared with friends.

A copy of Warhammer 40,000: Space Marine 2 was provided for review by Focus Interactive.