In the grim darkness of the far future there is only war, at least according to the Warhammer 40K-universe. Humanity is on the brink of destruction, and all kinds of monsters and aliens are attacking us on all sides. And the only defence standing in the way of extinction is the mighty super soldiers known as the Space Marines.
Earlier, Relic has shown the Warhammer 40K-universe from above in the strategy series Dawn of War. With Space Marine, Relic will take us down to the ground and straight on to the battlefield and strategy has been replaced by bloody action and the mouse has been replaced by a gamepad.
You are excused if you look at the screenshots and think about Epic's Gears of War, because there are obvious similarities between the two games. Both games feature huge muscular men as protagonists, armed with even bigger weapons and they are both third person shooters. Producer Raphael Van Lierop does point out to me that they don't want people to believe that Relic's new game isn't more than a "Gears of Warhammer."
Take the cover system in Gears of War, for example. Relic did consider including something similar in Space Marine, but decided against it. "It simply didn't fit with what a Space Marine is. They don't hide - they charge relentlessly towards the enemy," Raphael says during a presentation of the game. The testosterone that flows out of every pore in Gears of War doesn't really fit Warhammer's more melancholic space warriors.
The 40K-universe is a dark and hopeless place, since the battles are already lost. It doesn't matter if the fight is won, when another horde of Orks is already on its way. The only thing we can hope for is that we will last for at least another day.
As part of the Emperor of Mankind's last bastion, you and your fellow Space Marines only fear one thing. It isn't the Orks, that pop out of the ground like mushrooms (literally), or the mysterious Eldar. No, the only thing that the powerful Marines fear is the inner corruption, the terrible whispers from the destruction of Chaos. Everyone in the 40K-universe has to walk that tight-rope, because if you fall to Chaos, catastrophe will follow. The Space Marines in particular have to fight against the temptation to give in, and guard mankind against these demons - and their physical, terrible forms.
The short demo of the game I got opportunity to play was meant to show what Relic hope will make Space Marine stand apart from the competition - melee fighting. While you still fire your bolt gun in the way you'd expect, the push of a button will unleash a devastating attack with your fists - meaning that you can easily go from trying to fill an Ork with bullets to smashing his head in.
And it works quite well, and the two ways of fighting does flow between each other just like you would hope. There's of course a simple combo-system for more interesting attacks in place as well. What I did find interesting in Relic's game is that there is no real difference between how far away or how close the enemy is - in other games you're usually a lot more vulnerable once you end up in melee range. Not so in Space Marine, which gives the game a whole new tempo.
In other games you might try to keep your distance, but in Space Marine you rush straight into the center of the battle. That's not really correct either - you are the center of the battle. And the more fight, the more is added to your Fury-bar which, when filled, you can unleash in a bullet time slow motion move like in The Matrix or in a powerful melee attack that will take down most opponents in a single blow. So there's a point to jumping straight into a group of orcs and cut them to pieces with your chainsword and then take out the snipers with your ranged weapon in slow motion afterwards.
The gameplay has a certain weight to it. You hardly ever fight a single Ork, instead they charge you in groups, and your weapons tear through both flesh and both with a monstrous sound. The bolt gun really makes real weapons seem like Super Soakers, and is a thrill to use. A mine-thrower had to be used strategically, with its charges manually detonated, and while the sniper rifle I got to try felt more conventional than the other weapons at my disposal it was still very satisfying to fire it from the hip.
Space Marine is incredibly violent and there's blood and gore everywhere. The environments are visually interesting, like when you get to fight your way up a Gothic iron bridge with a huge Colosseum-like building standing in the background. And everywhere you see the signs of the never ending war, with ruins and the bodies of fallen soldiers covering the landscapes.
Relic didn't make a secret of that they are not trying to make Space Marine into more than blockbuster action entertainment for the 8-10 hours the game's campaign is said to last. They did promise some kind of online-part, probably co-op, but the developers I met didn't want to say more than that.
In fact, the final impression of the game that I took away from my visit to Relic, is weight. Not the weight of all the limbs and the litres of blood that I had spilled during my time with the game. But the weight of the terrible fate that awaits the people living in the 41st millennium. It's a refreshingly nasty place to place a game.
Space Marine doesn't look like it will be a revolution of the third person shooter genre. It borrows from all kinds of genres and media - from movies like 300 to two famous game series that both abbreviate their titles "GoW". Instead it's an attempt to tell the sad and dark story of the 40K-universe in a genre that is easy to get into.
What I got to play was an early alpha build, but it seems like Relic got the Space Marine-feel nailed down already. If it will be interesting all the way through the single player campaign remains to be seen, and it's easy to see how the mayhem would get repetitive after a while. We'll just have to wait until this summer, when the game is supposed to be released.
