Backlog Busting: Warhammer 40k Space Marine (2025)

Warhammer 40K: Space Marine — which I will only refer to as Space Marine because who has time to type out Warhammer 40K all the time — has been on my backlog for 13 years. That’s basically half my lifespan and I’m not even a Warhammer fan. Why would a non-fan of Warhammer have a Warhammer game on their backlog for 13 years? Well answering that is kind of why I’m writing this in the first place.

Space Marine is one of those games where when I first heard about it I thought it looked good and wanted to play it. But — if you’re a gamer (which I’m assuming you are otherwise why are you reading this) this has definitely happened to you many times — as these things often go I just never could get around to it. Eventually I just completely forgot about it. It was always there in the back of my mind though, like a hymn implanted into a hypnotized cult victim, “Remember that game where you hack up a bunch of orcs”. It also helped that a new Warhammer game came out seemingly every month in the intervening years.

This is a Retro Game and You’re Old

So, let’s flashback 13 years to the origins of my interest in this retro game. That’s right, this 2011 game is retro, I know that makes you feel old but that’s because unfortunately, you are. Time waits for no one but denying it is just sad. This came out on the PS3 and Xbox 360. Those are both 2 generations old. It’s retro, deal with it you geezer.

As I was saying. 13 years ago I used to watch a daily television show called Reviews on the Run which was a half-hour program completely dedicated to video game (and sometimes movie) reviews. That’s right, television used to be good. This show is how I found out about most new releases. Before I discovered it my knowledge was confined to whatever had advertisements in GameStop or what had a cool cover art.

One day they review Warhammer 40K: Space Marine. I had never heard of Warhammer before and wouldn't again for several more year when they decide there needed to be a new Warhammer game in every genre released every 10 days. All I knew was that this game looked cool, nay, it looked sweet. A man in a giant suit of armor hacking up hundreds of orcs with a chainsaw sword was exactly my, and I’m assuming every other 14-year-old boy’s, shit. And to top it off they gave it a good review because of course they did. It’s a game where you hack up hundreds of orcs with a chainsaw sword. And also shoot them with a gun.

Unfortunately, as we all know, sometimes you just can’t make time for a game and it slips through your fingers like the Dorito dust slips into the crevices of your controller during an all-night Call of Duty binge. So I never ended up getting Space Marine and eventually, it faded from my mind. Now and then something would cause it to pop back in there as “that game where you kill all the orcs” and I’d google it, go “Oh yeah that looked cool” and then never think about it again.

Then we entered the era where Warhammer games came out at the same rate Nick Cannon has kids. With each new release, I was reminded that I had never played Space Marine, and with each new reminder I pledged to eventually get to it only to forget. Then they announced Space Marine 2.

Finally, this is my chance to play the first one. I hoped and I prayed (not literally because as we all no there is no higher power and if there was she wouldn't;t bother giving us such frivolous things) that they would re-release Space Marine. It seemed sensible. Remasters are all the rage these days, some studios even remaster games that came out in 2020. And with over a decade between entries it made sense they would make the first one playable on modern consoles.

Well, they didn’t. Because as I said there is no god which is why I didn’t actually pray to begin with. Luckily I have an Xbox 360 and a PS3 but I still didn’t have the time. But then I had a brilliant idea. Me and my friend had dabbled with doing Let’s Plays and we were going to do a co-op playthrough of Space Marine 2 so what better way to force myself to finally play Space Marine than by doing it for our Let’s Play?

Making Content is a Pain

Turns out that was a terrible idea. I bought a 360 copy of Space Marine and my friend, who for the purposes of this story I will call Jonah because that’s his name, and I geared up to start recording Let’s Plays again.

We had stopped because I got busy with work and he re-enrolled in college but we finally had time again and things were off. We recorded 4 episodes in 2 sessions and were having fun. The game was fun and held up decently well to modern standards. Most importantly, the act of slicing and dicing dozens and dozens of orcs held up to what I imagined it would be.

Then came exam time. And if you’ve ever been a student you know this is the worst time of year. You have a handful of final assignments all due the same week for some hellish reason and multiple exams to study for that should you do poorly don’t just affect your education but also waste all the money you spent for the opportunity to take that test.

Having gone through that myself I was completely fine with halting our Let’s Play. After all, I waited 13 years to play Space Marine, I could wait a few more weeks. Then weeks turned to a month and a month became 2 months and he was done school for the summer but we still hadn’t gone back. I rarely brought it up to him because I felt like bad pestering my friend about when we would make content. Then Space Marine 2 came out and I didn’t buy it because I was determined to play the first one, well, first.

We recorded 1 more time and again I had fun. Hacking orcs to bits is a blast. Whether you use the chainsaw sword, the power axe, or a giant hammer that makes you feel like Thor, appropriately titled Thunder Hammer, turning the orcs into red paste is timeless. Some of the shooting isn’t that great. Aiming is stiff in a way that a lot of games from that time are stiff despite your warped memory thinking it was smooth as butter. Luckily I could just mow down orcs indiscriminately with my bolter.

After that, we went another month or so without going back to it. I had other games to spend my time with so it was fine. But the feeling kept creeping back that I really wanted to play it some more but I didn’t want to make it seem like I only wanted to hang out to record content. That’s when I decided we should just quit the whole Let’s Play thing and he agreed. Folks, if there’s one thing I want you to take away from this, it’s that you should never try to become a content creator with your friends, eventually it will get in the way of your friendship. We can’t all be Mr. Beast and have no hobbies, interests, or personality beyond the robotic algorithmically fueled content creation stream.

For the Emperor

Finally, I could just sit down and play the game. So that’s what I did. My new goal was to finish the game as quickly as possible so me and Jonah could start our Space Marine 2 playthrough. We had stopped our Let’s Play about 2/3 of the way into the game so I didn’t have long to go. It should have been smooth sailing.

However, because the universe is a jezebel, I discovered that the final third of Space Marine was its most frustrating and least fun. I should preface this next part by saying that because me and Jonah were recording a Let’s Play for the first 2/3 of the game I was not paying attention to the story. I didn’t even notice Mark Strong voiced the main character until the credits rolled and I saw his name.

Not long into my solo run, I reached a point in the campaign where a giant bizarro Space Marine emerged from a portal and brought with him Wish.com xenomorphs. I’m assuming this is common in the Warhammer 40K universe but it certainly threw me off because up until that point, this was a game strictly about gibbing orcs. No hint of red xenomorphs from hell anywhere. And unfortunately, these things were not as fun to fight as the orcs.

The orcs had a couple of things going for them over these demons. Firstly they had personality. They all had silly cockney accents and would shout things like “I’m gonna get ya Space Marine”. The sheer notion that in this grim dark universe, orcs, who hail from their own planet made up exclusively of orcs, would all have silly cockney accents just fills me with glee. It’s such a ridiculous detail and I love it. The knockoff Xenos obviously had no such thing, they just screeched.

The main thing that made the orcs as satisfying to mow as old Mrs. Plumb’s lawn was the feedback. There was a weight to cutting the orcs down. You felt each hit with your weapon. It felt tangible. There was a satisfying squish when you sawed through their flesh or popped their heads. Fighting the Soulja Boy Console Xenomorphs felt like fighting air. They didn’t react to getting hit and my weapons never felt like they were hitting them.

To top it all off, the last third of the game is filled with the most frustrating sections of the game. In addition to the fake Xenomorphs, you also have to fight evil Space Marines from hell that have the same power armor and guns as you. A game that previously prioritized melee combat and had shooting as a secondary combat function now became a game that was primarily about shooting. That’s not good for two reasons. For one, the melee combat in the game rules, at least it does when you’re fighting orcs. It’s responsive, it’s weighty, it’s badass.

So much is this game based around melee combat that the only way to heal is to stun an enemy and perform a glory kill. That’s right this game had glory kills before the Doom reboot. So now you’re forced to mostly shoot your way out of places but you can only heal if you get in close to go a combo to glory kill which often leads to frustrating deaths since the enemies in these areas have a pinpoint aim.

The second problem with this is that the shooting in the game is sub-par. It’s fine. It gets the job done but it’s not good enough to base a game around. It’s good enough to be the secondary combat method in a mostly hack n’ slash game. Once it becomes the focus, the cracks start to show. That’s when you notice how stiff it is, that’s when you notice the enemies are bullet sponges, that’s when the power fantasy of being a Space Marine comes crashing down and all you’re left with is frustrating areas where you have to stand behind a box and snipe people instead of doing what you want to do which is hacking orcs to bits like you’re a Benihana chef.

Maybe it’s because I just wanted to finish it to get to the sequel. Maybe it’s because of the stop-and-start nature of my time with it. Maybe it’s because I was playing Metaphor: ReFantazio at the same time and was 70 hours in and ready for it to be done as well so I just wanted to get back to it so the age of a new king could stop drawing nearer and just get here already. Or maybe it was all of the above but the last act of Space Marine just really underwhelmed and soured me on what was at first, a really fun time. Either way, that’s one more game off the backlog. Now to get back to Metaphor, I still have 30 hours left.

Backlog Status: BUSTED