#but also 6/10s aren't bad to me as someone that plays JRPGs and jankier third person shooters

[theaceofskulls]

Beat Space Marine 2 and yeah... I enjoyed it but that one PC gamer article that pissed people off wasn't entirely wrong about some things.

The co-op design of the game led to some annoying design decisions that could've been mitigated in the single player by a squad command system, but that's a lot of complexity and isn't just a "this should be patched in" kind of thought.

To explain, the game asks you to manage melee and ranged threat simultaneously against hordes of enemies, and the ranged threats tend to not be trivial even when they're horde enemies, but especially for special and pseudo-boss enemies. Enemy aggressiveness seems to be increased when you attempt to aim when they are swarming you, meaning that the person who needs to deal with ranged threats needs to not be the person in the thick of things.

Enemies tend to prioritize the player, which is the correct way to handle these games as it engages them more and asks them to problem solve. It's therefor the wrong answer to have your AI squadmates deal with ranged threats for you without any input on the player's side.

This extends to weapon selection. Your AI partners will always be using the average across the board guns and ask you to figure out what weapons you want to take, especially to deal with special threats. With only two weapon slots and a melee weapon, because the game was designed for multiplayer where you'd want someone to be more specialized, it's difficult to justify picking up two heavy hitting, but specialized and low ammunition weapons, one of which must be a pistol, so I often found myself avoiding a lot of the more interesting primary weapons as the plasma pistol tended to just be the better answer for that slot for me.

This is not to say you have useless AI partners, and the game regularly throws enough things your way to feel like they're actively contributing, but the flow of combat can often feel like you've gotten stuck in melee (emulating the tabletop somewhat) and are frustratingly trying to clear enough room to deal with the ranged threats that can be more devastating, especially since the tools to dodge ranged attacks don't seem to have as much invincibility frames for melee attacks, often leading to dodge rolls that end with you being sucker punched from the back.

It's also worth noting that like with a lot of Warhammer games, this is indulgently for fans and will introduce almost nothing. The first game had this issue, and this is clearly for the fans, but watching people ding Age of Sigmar's game for that then immediately shout at anyone new who engages with their favorite game for the same thing is annoying. It is a legitimate criticism when the game is being broadly aimed outwards and a lot of the fanbase spent months going "This should be the game that finally makes 40k mainstream".

I have to reiterate, I liked this game. I really enjoy dumping a couple days into it and want to try out the multiplayer as people finish up the campaign and don't just drop into lobbies only to immediatley quit them so they can customize their marines because for some reason there's no option to mess with that without joining a game despite the fact that the technology is clearly there (I don't blame anyone for leaving when I realized I'd done the same thing).

This is a type of rough game that we don't get a lot of anymore. It's a finished game with a lot of issues in its design because it's aiming to be something that's not sanded down to be a universal game, and it's trying something out with enemies and game flow in a third person shooter that honestly manages to remain enjoyable for over 10 hours.

Its story is there for the fans and a lot of subtleties are going to be based off preexisting knowledge and expectations of the factions going in (one character kind of demands that you know what a Primaris Marine is and what Calth was, which was 19 books into the Horus Heresy if you're not the type to watch loretubers) and a big late game thing depends on you knowing about some characters that were much more important to the story of 40k before the "current era". It's going to get some wildly different reactions that I'm already seeing, and that's also because this game was built up by the community.

Even with my love of the setting, this is a game that had enough small gameplay annoyances to get me to think about the reasons why they exist while playing, and I definitely could see how much being a fan matters to your final score of the game, probably raising it by a whole point or two on a 10 scale.

A lot of it does feel like a direct response to Space Marine 1 criticisms (and even some about Boltgun), and the first time there was dialogue on an elevator I almost lost my shit after watching Mandalore's video on the first one recently.

If this is a game for you, you likely already know that it's for you and the only thing this post will tell you if you haven't picked it up is that the hype is overselling it and that it's not perfect and you probably won't think this is the greatest thing you've ever played in your life like some people claim, but that it will still be for you (though you might want to play with the difficulty almost dynamically during certain sections to mitigate fights with enemy AI designed for human players coordinating with each other).

If you don't know 40K or are not that big into Space Marines, this probably isn't a full price kind of game for you but there's a good chance that if you're willing to put up with a few frustrations you'll actually like it as well down the line, especially if you played anything in the 6th or 7th console generation (PS2/PS3 era).