Space Marine covers a single engagement on a single planet. The plot revolves around two betrayals, one so obvious that the game would have been more interesting if it hadn't happened, and one during the final cut scene that makes you feel like you just wasted $50 and ten hours. That cut scene is a cliffhanger. THQ probably won't be making a sequel.
I've played two..."modern" first person shooters recently, and both of them had similar retarded gameplay elements. One is the stupid shield recharge thing from halo. You have this shield thing that takes damage but only recovers when you're not being hit. This forces you to constantly find cover and sit there, waiting for your shield thing to recharge. Fun Game Activity #1: Sitting around waiting for your armor to recharge. Mostly the reason I was playing this game was because I wanted to pretend I was a Space Marine. Given that the main character is a Space Marine, I thought that would work out, but Space Marines actually don't burst out, kill some people, and then run back to cover. Space Marines don't actually ever run away, because thanks to conditioning that likely makes them homicidal maniacs, they are literally unable to experience fear. In this game, though, you have to run away and hide in cover. Because of your Halo shield. Sometimes people blow your cover while you are sitting around, waiting for your shields to come back up. Then you die.
Another element is this thing where you can only carry around a limited number of guns. In real life you can probably only carry around one or two large guns. This is one of the reasons I don't go around shooting people in real life. Video games are fun because you aren't actually killing people, and you can deviate from real life in order to make it fun. The main character in this game is a human that has probably lived for hundreds of years, wearing a special armor suit that magically repairs itself and which is made of some fantasy material that can withstand high powered impacts but is so light that it doesn't cause a large crater and kill the wearer when you fall 50 feet. You're fighting aliens that don't exist, who can be shot more than five times directly in the face without dying, and the realism they chose to add was that I'm not allowed to carry more than 4 guns. So, obviously, on a planet that was recently besieged by 2 million orks, you, at regular intervals, come upon rings of supply boxes perfectly arranged for you to select various weapons. Fun Game Activity #2: Trying to decide which weapons you have to take. Many of the weapons in the game only work well on certain enemies. Many enemies in the game can only be effectively with certain weapons. When choosing which weapons to take with you, you rarely know which enemies you will face. The best way to choose weapons is to pick some at random, die, and then come back and pick the right ones.
A third, actually, stupid element of the modern shooter is the inability to save the game. Being able to save and load games has actually been a part of PC (not console) video games since the beginning of PC games. In recent times, though, I guess, they don't want you to be able to save and load whenever you want, because I guess people keep, you know, cheating, by saving right before the difficult parts and just loading them again and again until they beat them. Fun Game Activity #3: Running down the same long-ass hallway and playing through the same boring battle twenty times in a row because you keep dying sometime after that. Now, take this auto save thing, and combine it with only being able to carry 4 weapons. Now imagine there is a part of the game where you have to fight these flying enemies that are all flying around a tenth of a mile off the edge of a cliff, but you accidentally chose weapons that are nearly useless when trying to kill flying enemies. Now lets imagine that the gave auto saved for you right after you chose those weapons, with no way to go back and change them, so that no matter how many times to reload the game or die, you still come back in the game with the wrong weapons and your only choices are basically to fight a UAV with a pistol and an axe OR go back and play the entire game all the way through again just so you can reach the same spot again but hopefully remember to choose the right weapons this time. Remember, though, you're not allowed to save the game, ever, so if you restart it, you lose everything you just accomplished in the past few days.
Space Marines fight in squads. You are given probably the smallest number of people that could ever count as a squad: 2. Its just you and these two guys. You don't command them, at all, or use any kind of squad based tactics. You just fight near them, and they follow you around like little puppies, and they are invincible, and also all of the enemies inexplicably target you instead of them so you can't even invent your own tactics based on being followed around by dogs. Later, one of them dies unnecessarily to add weight to a cut-scene, and the other betrays you while you are (literally) single-handedly saving the world. There is a brief bridge battle where you get to fight alongside other Space Marines for real. That was fun. And lots of them are Blood Ravens, the chapter that I wish this game had been about.
Sometimes you can to use a Jump Pack, the things that make assault marines able to fly. Jump packs dont work very well but they are fun. You can use them an infinite amount of time without them running out of fuel, but when you enter certain hallways after certain battles they always run out of fuel right then and the main character discards them.
The only way to get health (most of the time) is to perform an "execution" by pressing F on an enemy that is "stunned." The computer tells you an enemy is stunned but putting circles near his head. There are many enemies that you are told are stunned because they have circles over their head (and because you just beat the shit out of them) but when you try to execute them they suddenly wake up and fight back and hurt you a lot. The only way to execute these enemies is using a special melee weapon that is a Hammer. Yup, futuristic science fiction game where you fight with hammers and they thought limiting the number of guns you can carry would be important realism. The reason this hammer is special is that while carrying it, the number of other weapons you can have drops from 4 to 2, and the 2 weapons you are allowed to use are the least useful ones. So you have a choice between not being able to get health back from half of the enemies or having ineffective weapons. I made my choice and started carrying that damn hammer everywhere, because I was tired of dying, but that was when I ran into that part where I had to fight flying vehicles and couldn't go back and get more effective weapons. I realize that this is serious business and all, but wouldn't it be cool if you had a thing where you could pretend to be a space marine and could use any weapon you wanted? It would be like a game.
In the Space Marine universe there are these people that are like doctors who fix you up. We call them Medics. Space Marines call them "apothecaries" because space marine medic just wasn't badass enough. There isn't a single fucking Apothecary anywhere in the game. By the way, the main character is a Captain in command of hundreds of space marines. He could probably requisition an apothecary if he needed one. Nope. Only way to get health back is to execute enemies. Fun Game Activity #4: running around trying to find small enemies to "execute" instead of fighting for real. Executing enemies leaves you vulnerable to ranged and melee attacks while you do it, which means that by the time you finish and execution you took a lot of damage and need to perform another execution in order to regain health, which is literally a vicious cycle.
The Apothecaries, had they been in the game, would have had this cool-looking white armor.
The gameplay is a lot like Duke Forever, which I guess is how most modern first person shooters are done now. You are let along the most constricting critical path from cut-scene to cut-scene like a balloon full of coke being squeezed through someone's colon. There is almost always exactly one path you can take, and all of the door handles glow. You can't ever go backwards; you have fewer choices than I've ever seen in an FPS. Its like you are just being spoonfed tiny bits of a game.
You don't get to pilot any vehicles or tanks. The only Space Marine equipment that appears in the game is the Thunderhawk transport. You occasionally find a heavy bolter but can't carry it around around for long. Since you don't have a squad, you don't have the option to give one of your nonexistent squadmembers a heavy bolter, or heavy flamer. No dreadnoughts or terminators appear.
The game appears to have been designed to force you to use hand-to-hand combat in almost every encounter. If you prefer shooting...you should probably play a different game. Tactics don't matter a whole lot beyond choosing which stack of crates to cower behind.
During an Ork invasion, the main character, Captain Titus of the Ultramarines, rescues an Inquisitor who turns out of be an agent of chaos when he betrays Titus and opens up a warp rift, allowing the Chaos Marines, arch nemesi of the Ultramarines, to invade the planet. Then Captain Titus watches his best friend die and single-handedly saves the planet. While he is busy saving the planet a rookie space marine calls the Inquisition (basically secret police) on Captain Titus, and once the planet is saved a second inquisitor arrives and threatens to have the inquisition start a war to kill all of the Ultramarines and all other humans on the planet unless Titus surrenders and lets himself be arrested. This second inquisitor is a hollow, flat, single-minded character who probably doesnt care if Titus is innocent or not, who takes Captain Titus away in his gay little shuttle just as the game ends. Again, there probably won't be a sequel.
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