Stop me if you’ve heard this, but this is the game named for the words that are spoken most frequently in the duration. My wife certainly tired of the Orks’ tendency to shout “Space Marine!” and “Kill the Space Marine!”. It gets better when the Chaos dudes show up halfway through though.

I don’t have a strong attachment to the Warhammer/40k franchise, but from having a local game store growing up and several friends with armies of their own, I have a familiarity with the setting, especially 40k. I like the richness of the lore even as I have little interest in playing and collecting the tabletop game itself. Therefore this game represents a way to experience some of that world without the exorbitant cost of entry, not to mention storage space.

As a device for delivering lore, a game is perhaps one of the better media, and this example especially so. Although the setting employs only a handful of characters, three races, and a single planet, you get a very good feel for the culture of the Imperium, by exploring different locations on one of their factory worlds under siege. You also get audio logs of its citizens, giving insight into their daily lives, which are ruled by the ever-present warfare of their culture and the oppression of their society. It’s very evocative stuff, and the architecture you traverse is simply amazing, a blend of massive sci-fi structures and gothic cathedrals. Your main characters also demonstrate the themes and common interaction among the classes of the Astartes. Fascinating stuff.

The game is a third-person shooter, fairly standard as I understand it. I’ve said before that I rarely play this sort of game, but as far as I can tell this is a serviceable example. You have a few weapon slots that you can switch out, and some hard-hitting melee combat to supplement it. There are gradual upgrades through the game, and as you progress you also find a set of weapons you’re comfortable with, even knowing when to switch out some for a given situation. Even when I died several times in a row, I mostly felt good about going back to reassess my approach.

The enemies ramp up as well. I was initially disappointed with only having Orks to fight, but as you get familiar with them it helps to recognise what it’s throwing at you so you can respond. Then the Chaos came along, which was a great upset and added a new dimension to the type of fights you get, especially at first when you’re stumbling into fights between the two.

The Chaos element adds a lot to the plot, as it’s an underlying aspect of the whole mythos and the Imperium is very paranoid about it. You get some nice tension between your Captain Titus and the Inquisitor you meet on the planet, as well as suspicion from your own comrades when you find that you’re resistant to the energies of the Warp. (This was a bit of a mystery in the game, but I did some research afterwards and found that Titus may in fact be a member of the Illuminati, which in this universe consists of folk who’ve been possessed by Chaos Demons but have freed themselves, and have to keep it a secret for fear of persecution.) The ending is also a bit bleak, which totally fits the setting in which there are no winners.

Overall I had a great time, I’m not fatigued by playing too many shooters like this so I do enjoy the occasional one. I found it fun to play, and well made. And the story and setting were very compelling to me as well. I tried the multiplayer mode too, which was a bit meh. You need to put some time into it to get the good weapons, and everyone else already has them.

I should mention too that this was made by Relic, who made one of my all-time favourite PC games, Homeworld 2. They became stewards of sorts for 40k games after that, which sucks for Homeworld but if they make things as good as this, I can’t complain. I hope they continue to produce at this level after the collapse of THQ. Actually, looking a bit more they made Impossible Creatures too, a wacky strategy game where you put animal parts together to create strange killer hybrids. In fact, this is like their only non-strategy game. I can take or leave dull WW2-themed games, though. Well, as the Orks say, “Humans to kill!”