I'm am entirely sick of games petering out. Why oh why, in this modern age of gaming do developers concentrate on the first half of a game then give up for the end.
This time I'm talking about Space Marine, the new hack-n-slashing-shooting-squishing game from THQ. As I have stated before, I am a massive Warhammer 40k fanboy. So I was more than excited when I heard that they were going to be making a game letting me be a proper Space Marine in all it's stompy glory. Especially so because it was THQ who was making it (let's forget about Dawn of War 2). I pre-ordered the collector's edition, I don't care if it was overpriced, I now have a pure fridge, with it's very own purity seal.
I played the Space Marine demo when it was released about a week and a half prior to this review. I absolutely loved it. It captured every boyhood fantasy I had about being a Space Marine. It was delightfully visceral. The Space Marines moved as if they were in several hundred kilos worth of armour. The close combat weapons were nice and meat inducing, and it was the first game I've encountered that properly represented what a bolter should shoot like. The demo was great.
Cue this morning (yes I know I got the game and completed it in a day, I'm a sad individual, I went to the pub before I completed it so at least that kind of evens it out right... please?) I was awoken by the sounds of my house mate doing his morning ritual of brushing his tongue and making noises like a fish trying to swallow a brillo pad... I wish I was joking. I opened my door to see a nice big parcel for me on the window sill. I chucked it in my computer and after a long install time (2 disks! In this day and age) I was in the game, all giddy eyed and happy mouthed (I'm not very good at metaphor).
The first few hours, amazing. Exact experience as I had in the demo. I was cutting up Orks left, right and centre. It felt good, it was fun. I was playing the game on hard and it was the perfect difficulty, I died a few times but it felt challenging yet enjoyable. That all changed when the Chaos Space Marines were introduced. The entire pace of the game changed. This was mainly due to the fact that meleé was made almost entirely redundant by them. Their aim, along with the cultists, which I'll get to in a moment, those bastards, was so perfect, and the range of their weapons was so huge that if you tried to charge in and kill them, you died almost instantaneously. The majority of levels from the point that the Chaos Marines joined in were designed in a way that either put you at the end of a very long corridor, or in the middle of some low ground in which your enemies encircle you entirely. Now, Space Marines are known for their tactical prowess, but I'm starting to doubt it, the amount of times I was forced to walk directly into what was clearly an ambush astonished me.
I was forced to stand as far away from my enemies and pump rounds and rounds of bullets into my enemies in order to thin their ranks. The game went from a beautifully fast and exciting combat game into essentially a point and click adventure. “But Badger”, perhaps you're saying, unlikely unless you're prone to talking at your internet browser, “maybe your aim was just poor?” Well fuck you random reader! My aim was fine, depressingly so, seeing as I got the 250 headshot achievement about an hour into the game. The Chaos space marines merely take around 2 clips from your go-to bolter to go down, I spent the majority of the second half of the game with my hand off the keyboard, just holding down the shoot button and thinking about something else.
Maybe I am slightly to blame, I do have a confession. There is a section in the game where you get a Thunder Hammer for the first time, for those of you who don't know, a Thunder Hammer is a massive two handed mace, that looks like a block of metal on the end of a lamp-post that some GENIUS decided to pump electricity through. I have to say, this point of the game was possibly the most fun I've ever had. My house mates could hear me cackling throughout the house, to the point where one of them decided to come sit on my bed and watch me whilst playing Pokémon (one at a time ladies this is the Casanova house I know). It was due to this extreme amount of enjoyment that I developed a kind of neuroses, a separation anxiety disorder with my hammer if you will. Nothing could make me put the thing down. Even when the Chaos Marines showed up and I couldn't even get close to them I still held it aloft in my hands and persevered through, but why should I be forced to, why is it that the second half of the game has been decided as being ranged only? There were also sections of the game where I couldn't get rid of the bastard thing when I'd actually had enough. Seeing as you need to replace the hammer with either an axe or a chainsword, you can't just drop the fucker, apparently Captain Titus has separation anxiety too.
There are other things that these Chaos Marines ruined as well. Whilst fighting the Orks I was entirely engaged. The combat was so intense and as realistic as I presume it could be without genetically engineering some humans, putting them in concrete/steel armour and finding some Orks. When the Chaos Marines appear this feeling was completely removed. I know they're supposed to be tough gits, and plated in some futuristic armour, but if you get shot in the face, you're bound to react slightly, I know my character did whenever it happened. They just stood there, firing at you as if nothing was happening. Even when they got dazed and you kept firing at them, they just looked down, then as they died, stood up, then disappear into the warp. (Which by the way, they shouldn't fucking do, I know this is nit-picking but Chaos Space Marines are not demons, when they're killed they don't get banished to the warp, they die, they're flesh and bone.) The entire process of fighting with them feels so disjointed that I just didn't care about the game at all. Usually when I get sucked into the game I can't tear myself away from it, but with Space Marine, on the last level I went downstairs and decided to go the pub instead.
Enough about the Chaos Marines for now, let's talk about the worst enemy I've ever faced in recent times, the Cultist. In the Warhammer 40,000 universe, cultists are the bitches of the Chaos massive. They do all the bitch work. They make things, they get used as sacrifices, it seems in this game however, they are the hardest things in the universe. They would randomly teleport in and instantly I would groan and hide behind something. Cultists, float in the air, they have a seemingly massive amount of health. They also have what appears to be an infinite range attack, that is completely accurate and does the most damage of anything else in the game. If one appears and you're out in the open, have fun looking at the loading screen, because there is no way to defend against it. The amount of times, where I would die after a large fight just because a cultist destined for the next area would appear and shoot me through some railings was infuriating.
Now, I appreciate I've been ranting quite excessively in this one, but bear with me, I'm nearly done, just one last angry outburst. Oh and a mild warning for anyone who is planning to play the game, there will be spoilers in this upcoming section. Why, oh why, do developers seemingly have this train of thought:
“Getting a bit bored of this game now, nearly finished, started well... dum de dum, how should I end it? Epic boss fight? Massive encounter with the villain you've been chasing since the... 'twist' (OOC: And if you play this game and don't work out the twist you're a moron). Seems like a lot of work... Quick Time Event? Yeah Quick Time Event will do.”
ANOTHER game that ends with a mediocre QTE. After your enemy becomes amazingly powerful, after spending the game literally disabling you using just his mind, you... push him off the cliff and have an aerial fight with him like Gandalf and the Balrog. It's not even a particularly epic one, it's about three animations looped over and over again, until you eventually crush his head. It looked amazing, I'll give it that, and I know I haven't talked much about how the game looks thus far, but it does look fantastic, the graphics are phenomenal, the animations brilliant, but that wasn't enough, it was a glorified cut scene of a final boss and was the shit covered cherry on top of the mediocre icing on top of an amazingly promising cake.
