SPACE MARINE I - COPS IN SPACE

Titus looking epic/cute on an Ork Barge

We are back. I broke down and purchased the original SPACE MARINE on Steam since I was jonesing for a trip back to the Warhammer 40k Universe. Of course, the game came out 15 years ago: it won’t boot up. Something about compatibility mode, second monitors, and a .dll file that you need to download from GitHub. There is only a 30% chance that I downloaded a virus

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… but the game works. Praise the Omnissiah

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The intro is good. Like. Really good. It shows the dispassionate Imperium struggling to solve the problem of an Ork invasion on a Forge World through text messages. First option? Destroy the planet in an Exterminatus. That would have likely gone through, but the Forge World creates some neat stuff for the Imperium. Wanton destruction of the planet would create an “unacceptable reduction in industrial output”. 

All at once, we know several things are true. First, this happens all the time. The intro has the vibe of two exhausted people texting, because this is the 34th planetary invasion today. Secondly, at least on this side of the galaxy, the Imperium is more interested in industrial output and blowing up the planet than saving its people. 

But this planet builds Titans, 100ft tall war machines, and thankfully (at least to some of the people still living on there), that means it has to be liberated. Send in the ULTRAMARINES.
Thus, we meet Captain Titus, local bad ass and SPACE MARINE. In a small playable intro, he kills some orks, blows up their ship, and lands on the planet. Throughout the game, Titus (voiced by Mark Strong!) is rather subdued and soft-spoken. I actually like that as an acting choice: he has seen this before and been victorious. For Titus, it’s almost like filling out a spreadsheet. If you follow the lore, you can see he has two service studs, which tell you he has been at this for 200 years. In later installments, Titus is a bit more gruff and yelly, but 200 more years on the Death Watch will do that to you.

Titus has squadmates, too. But as SPACE MARINES, you are required to follow buddy cop movie tropes. You have Leandros, the by-the-book stick-up-his-ass cop, Sidonis, the grizzled two-days-from-retirement veteran cop, and Titus, you, the hotshot-willing-to-break-the-rules renegade cop.

Gameplay.

It’s fine. You are a whole lot chonkier in the original installment, and that oddly feels right. The whole trope is that SPACE MARINES are walking transhuman brick shithouses, and that should cost some mobility. You can’t turn fast while running, and every time you walk over uneven ground, Titus stops, as if he just stubbed his toe.

As for guns, you have your bolter, your sniper rifle, your extra-large bolter, and the melta. The plasma rifle was interesting. It required manual heat dispensing, giving the gun a unique feel. This is, at least, an interesting weapon design, even if I didn’t use it that much.

There is an important melee aspect, I am sure, but I am a person who only engages in melee when my bullets are used up. My understanding of military history is that melee in battle was obsolete in the 1860s. Plus, melee is a mess, mostly because I am shit at it. There are button combos that I didn’t care enough to memorize, but mashing kind of works. You can do “executions” to regain health, but they are incredibly long and don’t provide any kind of invulnerability. This means Titus will almost certainly be gunned down right before the final flourish of his seconds-long execution and the regeneration of health. From a game development perspective, this is interesting; you see these ideas percolating here that don’t quite work, which are finally perfected in Doom 2016.

Luckily, most of the game’s dilemmas can be solved by slowly moving backward while shooting and killing off all of the units that initially charge. Then you can just pick off any ranged units that dare shoot back. The Lascannon sniper rifle generally solved most problems before they started, and the game got immensely easier when I finally picked it up. You also keep getting armor and bolter upgrades that keep the game at a set level of difficulty. Just as it starts to get hard, you get a permanent health or damage upgrade that drops the difficulty.

Despite the violence, chest-high walls, and set-piece fights, the missions feel empty. There are giant open rooms just off the main path. Sometimes there is ammunition, sometimes there is an audio recording, but mostly they are empty. As if the game is 90% complete and they had to cut content to release it on time. 

Plot

This is the third Warhammer 40k property I have played through, and they all use the same plot. SPACE MARINES show up to put down an alien invasion, but the invasion is just a front for CHAOS, who was HERE THE WHOLE TIME. What a twist! Didn’t see that happening except in all the other properties I have played (i.e., Space Marine II and Dawn of War).

I understand that (tyrannical) order vs (insane) chaos is such an important part of the WH40K universe, but the same plot over and over gets cold real fast. It’s always chaos. It's always a super weapon/artifact. One of the selling points of WH40K is that it is so big, and there are billions of other stories to tell, so why recycle the same fucking plot?

Regardless, Titus lands on the planet, kills some Orks, and then links up with the remaining Imperial Guard (normal people with laser guns) led by 2nd Lieutenant Mira. Lt. Mira is the only officer left alive and has been holding the line with a company of soldiers against “a million” orks. She has the vibe of being the one who finished the group project at Tactica School, while everyone else was drunk or sleeping. Even the SPACE MARINES note that the unit's survival is an impressive feat; thus, the game refuses to elaborate further on this interesting journey that could have been a video game in and of itself.

Besides Lt. Mira, you don’t see any other women in the entire game. Even in the 41st Millennium, it’s hard to pass the Bechdel Test.

There is constant baiting of better story lines happening off-screen. When focusing on SPACE MARINES doing SPACE MARINE things, it’s kind of boring. It turns out the transhuman warrior monks that only do war and are angry about chaos are kind of boring when all the yelling stops. There is no love, laughter, or human connection to these people. Maybe that’s a point: SPACE MARINES are just bullets to be fired out of a gun for the Emperor without pity or remorse. In reading SPACE MARINE lore, they don’t even enjoy the perks of life, like a good cup of coffee or, you know, sex. I wonder if this is why they are popular with incels.

The game and plot are at their best when focusing on the world itself and humans just trying to get by. This is told through audio logs scattered around the game. You hear the Magos Biologis exasperate when they run out of sanitized bandages. The workers who don’t quite believe an Ork invasion is possible, and then find themselves out of time. The automated messages that 1000s of workers are late and that discipline will be enforced. Workers escaping the carnage to find their families. The mediae injecting the dying with “lethal doses” before the orks break into the infirmary (this game came out only 6 years after Katrina, mind you). 

The audio logs have better acting and provide more compelling stories than the main plot. Just a taste of Warhammer’s world-building, but then, because this game is about SPACE MARINES, these stories are politely filed away and never explored. We have to be warrior monks.

So you kill more Orks, save the Imperial Guard, and eventually meet Inquisitor Drogan, who is a piece of work. Well, you technically never meet him, because (spoiler) his body secretly houses a Chaos creature, but you do learn about him from his audio logs. He is the kind of guy who happily builds the Terrordome from the cautionary tale “Don’t build the Terrordome.” “Consequences won’t happen to me,” he gleefully shouts in audio log 4, “I’m being careful!”

So at Drogan’s behest, we get the powerful artifact, and apparently, Cpt. Titus can resist its effects. Then we take the artifact to the top of a spire and attempt to use it to kill all the orks. Oops, we were deceived! Activating the magical artifact accidentally let the armies of Chaos through!

So throughout the game, Titus can (somehow?) resist the effects of the warp, which, per his squadmate Leandros (and the SPACE MARINE bible), is an indicator of Chaos corruption. This is obvious to everyone, including Nemeroth, the Chaos champion who orchestrated all of this, who calls out Titus in a cutscene, “You do you, but I’m pretty sure we’ll be hanging out soon.” You can see Leandros nodding in the background, I think.

In another cut scene, Sidonis is killed, three days before retirement, to give Titus something to be angry about.

Time to stop Chaos and get our revenge. The SPACE MARINES eventually liberate the artifact, load it into the aforementioned building-sized Titan warmachine to boost its power, and then shoot the warp gate with the Titan’s upgraded weapons. This conveniently blows out the vehicle’s power system, meaning it can no longer help you on your journey. More importantly, it means the SPACE MARINES broke the equipment that they landed to save.

After blowing away waves of enemies, you face Nemeroth alone and basically punch him to death through quick time events. This is great. Boss battles are always a problem in shooters, so having a punch fest where the hero and villain exchange pithy quotes lands about as well as anything else.

The day is saved. But the ending is bittersweet. It turns out Leandros turned Titus into the Inquisition for potential corruption. A reasonable call since everyone (Chaos and SPACE MARINE) agrees that Titus’ resistance to the warp is evidence of corruption. Titus is taken away in (metaphorical) chains, but gives Leandros a speech about how Cops don’t turn in other Cops to internal affairs.

We get a text message at the end that the planet is quarantined. I guess Mira never gets to leave.

Should I play this?

Like SPACE MARINE II, this game is the worst version of “fine.” Sometimes there are transcendent IP media: they become more than the well-trod ground the IP covers. Andor is a good example in the Star Wars universe. The writing and the background become something greater than the sum of their parts. People argue that Andor is an exceptional show because it's “great” without needing to be a Star Wars property. I think that’s true, but Andor is even better because it gains something from being a Star Wars property. That’s a different essay, but SPACE MARINE could have fallen in the same space. SPACE MARINE (and SPACE MARINE II) has these little tiny slivers that show the potential is there to create something interesting and transcendent. Instead, you have something that is just bleh. I am not mad that I paid $7 and a few hours to march through the campaign, just disappointed.

If you are jonesing for an experience, just play SPACE MARINE II, it's not 15 years old.