Slashing through waves of enemies, running through a nondescript city, and having a plot with a ton of holes, this is Space Marine 2. Released on September 9th, 2024, Space Marine 2 is quite an incredible game for what it does. The game starts epically with you running through a planet after crash landing, fighting through waves of Tyranids to launch a bioweapon to the stratosphere while listening to your whole team get eaten by Tyranids, only to then at the end almost die to a Carnifex. What this does is cement into your mind that the Tyranids are dangerous and give you this real threat that they are an unending swarm of destruction. The opening ends with the massive reveal that this Deathwatch character you have been playing is Titus himself. (The main protagonist.)

Now you get into the meat of the game, which consists very blandly of you getting a mission, having a chaplain talk about your heresy (basically a priest), then going down and slaying Tyranids and doing x y, or z. This is saved by the fact that the actual gameplay is just so amazing and the pure spectacle of the sets carries the story a lot. In the third mission, you uncover runaway soldiers that are in chaos, and out of nowhere the Thousand Sons (Chaos Space Marines) appear and mog you, and then you just kill them. It’s not great. Compared to what they gave the Tyranids, it doesn’t do them justice and then they introduce Imurah (a chaos sorcerer)  who is the “main villain,” but you don’t even get an introduction. He just shows up, you fight him, and then he leaves. 

After that point, you are mostly done fighting the Tyranids for some reason. They are just shoved under the rug and ignored. You learn more of the plot about some ancient device that is never truly explained other than it is vaguely dangerous and chaos cannot get it. This leads you to the final mission where Imurah has taken control of a tech priest invention and there is some way this works, but without any Warhammer knowledge, you wouldn’t know that it’s Blackstone and that it has special properties to enhance the magic. This becomes an epic final battle where you get to hold the company standard and Marneus Calgar (the Chapter Master of the Ultramarines) shows up randomly. It’s clearly for the fans and the game would be fine without it. Then they assault this Lord of Change (a massive greater demon) and Imurah, seeing his plan is failing, opens a portal supposedly to the Warp? Now this breaks all sorts of conventions in Warhammer as Space Marines cannot survive in the Immaterium, so hopefully, this is just Tzeentch (chaos god of the Thousand Sons) magic and they can play it off. But if they don’t, this quite literally would break Warhammer. The boss fight against the Lord of Change and Imurah is pretty good, it has fun action parts and is genuinely hard. And that’s it. You beat Imurah, Titus gets victory laurels, and then he goes off with Marneus for something else. This leaves tons of plot holes, like what about the Tyranids? Why does Imurah want to do this? What in the world is going on with Titus and how did they restore his trust so fast? Overall the campaign is a solid 7/10. It is carried hard by the main combat and epic scenes, but the plot feels super rushed and unfinished. However, if you love Warhammer or have a deep fantasy appreciation and want a game in a fleshed-out world, then this is your game of the year. But it is certainly not the game of the year.