Intensely simple
Warhammer 49K Space Marine is one of those few games that you know going into it what you are getting out of it. I knew going into playing SM that I was going to be playing a gruesome third person shooter. On that front, it did not dissapoint. The combat is fun, the controls are easy to pick up, but the health system definitely takes some getting used to. At first, it is very off putting to have no health packs or regenerating health to speak of, instead your shield is the only thing that regenerates, and you must get health from pressing Y to finish an enemy and then press B to get health from him. It adds a lot of tension to the battles, but it ends up dragging the game down, since the animation to do the health finsiher doesnt protect you from outside damage, and you will find a lot that youll die right about when you are to get more health.
The world itself is large and intimidating, but the scenery and color palette doesnt change much throughout the game, leading to a constant sense of deja vu for many battles. The only color variants come from enemy skin color and weapon ammo. The whole look of the game begins to feel stale after a while. The game is very linear, and you are pretty much always going in a straight or jagged line to your next objective. The gameplay itself is very derarative, as you just go from objective to objective shooting orcs, for about 10-12 hours, depending on how good you are with the game. The only other type of enemies in the game are in the last couple hours, I found this very disappointing, and the game really needed more variety when it came to the enemies and environments,
The only real strong point of the game is how it makes you use your arsenal. The weapons themselves are kinda lame to use, espcially the powerful enerrgy ones, because you only get 10-15 shots with them. You really do have to be able to shoot enemies from afar, medium distance, and close distance using different weapons for each. This game did get frustrating in spots, and many times did feel overwhelming due to the amount of enemies onscreen. The last thing I feel I must comment on is the cutscenes. They were ok as far as quality goes, but they were very frequent, and the QTE's were not fun at all. Having to squint at the screen for the right button to press is no fun, and it really detracts from the awesome action happening onscreen.
At the end of the day, SM is a linear third person shooter backed up by some great fiction and some run of the mill gameplay. I feel this is a must play only for die hard Warhammer 40K fans, otherwise, you can do much better.
