We NEED To Talk About Warhammer 40k Space Marine 2

so as you probably know Space Marine 2 recently released and it's gone pretty well the game reached a peak player count of 134,000 concurrent on Steam which put it in the top 15 games on the platform for the week which in and of itself isn't bad but there's two additional points worth adding for one this was the pay extra for earlier access release with the lowest available option ringing up at $90 so I expect that there are a decent number of people who are waiting until the official launch on Monday which is priced at the standard 60usd this will at the very least bring another surge of players if not surpassing the prior Peak either way though it's uh quite impressive for the franchise because you have to consider Point number two and that is that 134,000 concurrent players officially puts Space Marine 2 just behind Total War Warhammer 3 as the second most popular Warhammer game to launch on Steam ever and that is awesome putting aside my general dislike for the whole pay us extra money to play the game earlier than those who don't trend we've been seeing this across the entire industry and I don't love it ever but those marketing and sales tactics aside the game itself what do I think of it well I think it's very good like fact is I actually think it's the best Warhammer game I've ever played as far as I'm concerned in terms of its gameplay its production value the World building the sheer badassery of the whole thing it is really it's a great Warhammer game I mean I've just thoroughly enjoyed Space Marine 2 it's not a perfect game there's plenty of room for improvement but I have generally loved my time with it thus far even more so now that the PVP is up and running which has been stupid good fun by the way it's rather simple and straightforward not a lot to it but it's still fun and yeah so for all those Reasons I'm quite happy to see that the game is doing well right now now the critic reviews they've sort of been a mixed bag they do lean positive currently the game's averaging a score of 83 on Metacritic and also an 83 on open critic with getting a 91% critic recommendation the reviews range from being in the 80s and 90s to the lowest score from a major publication being 60 and that came from both PC Gamer and PC games n now even for all my various critiques of Space Marine 2 which I do have a few it was curious to see scores quite that low six out of 10 I don't know just doesn't jive with me right now the tldr of my review was that I really like the game I think it does a ton of things right and I would recommend it to people with a few caveats and exceptions however for me the pros outweigh the cons and those Pros include the gameplay being really good like exceptionally good I'd consider the momentto moment combat in Space Marine 2 to be like a 10 out of 10 just the whole process of mowing through hordes of tyrannids and Chaos Marines they knocked it out of the park you were constantly surrounded by an insane number of enemies fighting your way through cleaving down the weaker ones focusing with and clashing on the bigger ones timing your parries and Dodges to get perfect counters while also keeping an eye ey out for interrupts for dodging sniper fire and for aiding your teammates when they need help all of this coupled with the over-the-top finishers that break up the action just the whole thing it's very enjoyable it is visceral and it all has a real nice flow to it honestly it's one of the better combat systems in a third person action game that I've played in a while I just really really like it and as someone who isn't even into the franchise it's also pretty clear to me that they have nailed this whole Space Marine fantasy I mean you are playing as what is essentially a lumbering bringer of death stomping your way through levels and and yeting everything that is in your path into this alternate Dimension death they're all dying while at the same time all of this like over-the-top crazy stuff is happening there are just so many moments where all around you off in the distance and up in the skies there just swarms and swarms of literally thousands of enemies with explosions going off everywhere lass and bulk gun fire constantly raining while you and your team is stomping ever forward smashing your way through those masses in my review I said it feels like the personification of playing through like a death metal Al album short of something like metal hellinger Space Marine 2 gives exactly those vibes and with that as well the World building here is topnotch the developer clearly has done a great job and has a passion for representing the Grim oppressive feeling as well as the massive scale of just about everything in the 40K Universe these towering Gothic inspired structures that pierce through the clouds those never-ending waves of enemies pouring through the streets and filling up the skies while you and your allies as well as your artillery there to meet them in a bombastic show just the visuals the sounds all the set pieces and all the action that's taking place it is pretty amazing from start to finish as far as that is concerned and then the game ran well for me and performance was really good outside of a few notice noticeable hitches here and there for the most part game ran smooth as butter although I do have a high-end PC and from what I've read and heard not everyone's performance has been great now for all of that in mind there are some cons starting with a few of the smaller gripes I had like the lack of fov slider this is especially known noticeable playing on PC uh the game does have this like Dynamic camera where it will change positions based on what's occurring on the screen and at its very worst your character can easily take up a fourth if not a third of the entire frame the whole screen which is just a bit much but yes at all times I think an fov slider that lets me extend my field of view that would be very very welcome another con is this inconsistent field to the Parry system which just resulted in me dodging most of the time because it was far more reliable and far less punishing even if you didn't have perfect timing at least you dodged away from the damage rather than sitting there in an animation that missed and then getting hit I felt the campaign pacing was just a little off with lots of stops to the action lots of Fades to Black and downtime with the Abundant use of corridors and elevators all throughout and also the game has what I would consider a fairly almost artificial feelingly drawn out PVE class progression it took us roughly 30 hours on average to reach max level on a single character class which in and of itself wouldn't be a problem if not for what is my biggest issue with the game currently and that is its content variety the game's just a bit on the lighter side in terms of the amount and variety of content there's nothing else to it uh the campaign took us just under 6 hours playing on hard which people thought was fast at the time of the review I got that feedback but now that the game is out in the wild it seems like many other players are also finishing in that 6 to 8 Hour range so most of your time and most of the replayability in Space Marine 2 is going to come from the other modes those being the PVE Co-op operations and the competitive PV the PVP is a lot of fun I really enjoy it and for those of you who do that's great it's rather simple and straightforward you got teams of six competing on a handful of maps in one or three modes that amount to racking up kills or controlling zones it's been fun simple but fun it's a nice mode to mess around with but I'm also aware that not everyone cares about PVP in which case after the campaign what you have left is the PVE Co-op operations so there are six missions in total which you will run over and over again you do this to level up your classes unlocking new perks and weapons making you stronger and this lets you push the difficulty higher from tiers 1 2 to three and four but beyond the enemies getting tougher and a more frequent occurrence of the mini bosses not much changes from the easiest to the hardest difficulty it it is the same missions that have the exact same level layout every time the corridors the Halls the open areas it is all always exactly the same it's just the mix of enemies that you get their placement what types of them that will change from run to run and then of course the higher the difficulty the harder they are they deal more damage they kill you faster etc etc now the game play is amazing like I said I love playing Space Marine 2 and I do recommend the game it's just the one major caveat being the fact that it is on that Lighter Side of content so depending on your appetite for the PVE operations grinding those or for playing PVP your mileage AKA your play time may vary quite a lot now they do have some big updates planned with more content coming but that's happening in time time not at this very second as for myself um I've already played over 50 hours and counting I will be playing a bit more over the next week for sure specifically I'm planning to spend more time with the PVP and I'll be totally happy if I finish this game at around a 60 or 70 hour mark because hey not every game needs to last forever or be a live service with thousands of potential hours of content but I also understand that not everybody feels that way which is why I bring it up it's why I talk about it because the game does clearly have a limited scope and limited content variety people's budgets for gaming are different and there's plenty of people out there who are looking to maximize the bang for their buck and I get that uh not every game can can fulfill that and I don't think Space Marine 2 really does but again to me that's totally fine I just need people to be aware if that's not the case for them now that the game is officially out the usual reviews have also started pouring in on launch day they started off at a mixed rating but it has since been climbing and currently actually sits at mostly positive with a 77% as of this recording if you're C ious by the way the threshold here is 70 So Below 70% down all the way to 40 a game will have a mating rating of mixed and then once you reach 70 it tips over to mostly positive and then from 70 to 80% at 80% it bumps into just plain old positive now I believe on launch day that mixed score was something like a 66 or 67 it was around there so it's already climbed 10 points all the way up to 77% and I think there's a good chance it it gets those additional three points and at least breaks the 80% threshold tipping it over into a Flatout positive rating because yes it is a good game overall in spite of its shortcomings uh user reviews have seemed to mostly Echo the main points that I had in my review in terms of the positive sides of the game although obviously you also on top of that have the whole dedicated 40K fandom in here who are far more invested and fanatical about the franchise than myself so there's a whole lot of like for the emperor being shouted in the user reviews it's it's kind of funny and honestly good on them I'd say it's about time as I mentioned earlier Space Marine 2 is officially the second most successful Warhammer game to come to steam in terms of concurrent players even though there's been quite a lot of Warhammer games many of them didn't turn out so great so I think it's awesome that Warhammer 40K fans and just Warhammer fans in general are finally getting some good games for their favorite IP now beyond all the positives and the negatives covered in my review there have been some additional launch specific pain points that have cropped up so these include being matched into lobbies with a duplicate class to the one that you've selected okay so there are six classes in the game they fill different roles they got different play Styles and special abilities and weapons they can use and in the PVE operations there can only be one of each class per Squad now when we played the game for review this wasn't a problem my friends and I we all just picked separate classes we played it and we liked what we played right however now that launch is here people are picking the class that they want to play so let's just say it's the bull workk and then they are matchmaking into operations and they are getting placed into teams that already have a bull workk which then forces the joining player to pick a different class now seeing as they have selected a class before they even enter matchmaking the obvious solution here would be to not match people with a squad that already has the class that they have selected in it or at the very least give players the option to do so even if that means a slightly increased Q times to match into a smaller pool of players right so hopefully this is something that they can address soon because I've seen this complaint crop up quite a lot speaking of matchmaking it has had some issues with the server likely loaded these first few days matching has been inconsistent if not downright broken at times even just loading into the game like even just getting into the battle barge has been difficult during certain times a day it's just not happening and then you have the people attempting to join an operation or to queue into PVP and simply not finding any matches just forever spinning the wheel essentially and this isn't due to lack of players there's over 100,000 Peak players playing every day but the matchmaking services are clearly not working properly and that is likely due to over load so this isn't an uncommon issue but it is nevertheless annoying whenever it happens although it is likely to smooth out over the coming week so we're H for that another one of the recurring complaints that I've been seeing is the fact that the AI teammates are just bad like something that I didn't notice in my review because I played with real people but now that the game is out and players are trying to solo the harder difficulties with an AI Squad apparently it's not good not not even they're just really really bad they don't work with you at all they tend to not stick to the objective and they deal what seems like negative damage I do remember that from my preview the other month now on the plus side it does seem like they never die and they will res you almost instantly if you go down but that doesn't clearly make up for all that they are lacking considering how many people prefer to play games like this solo hopefully they can address this soon the first thing that comes to mind would be allowing you to issue commands to your AI teammates even if it's just like a focus fire command even if you could just tell your two Squad members to shoot a particular Target I think that would add a lot in fact the game already has a ping system so maybe they could just move this functionality into that as well another big thing I saw people complaining about was the fact that the game automatically installs the Epic online services so the developer has stated that this was done in order to support the optional crossplay between Steam and epic players as well as to synchronize friends list between the two stores the fact that they installed this additional like supportive software in addition to the game does not bother me at all but I know there's people who really don't like this this sort of thing if it does bother you as far as I've read you can totally uninstall the Epic online services and the game will still function properly it's just you won't have that like steam to Epic gam store synchronization but if you don't care apparently you can still run the game without it by installing the game and then uninstalling epic online services now while the game did run perfectly fine for me in terms of performance it hasn't been Universal as I mentioned some users have reported issues with the game ranging from fluctuating frame rates and random stuttering to outright hard crashing to desktop obviously something that we hope they address and then finally uh the final big consistent complaint that I'm seeing is the lack of fov slider now that was in my review but I want it so badly I just had to bring it up again just please for the love of God give us an fov slider that that's that's it not much else to say just give us an fov slider all right so the PVP um when we did the review if you recall the matchmaking servers they were down prior to launch we just couldn't test the PVP at all but now that the game is out we have been able to play it I've spent a couple days with it and I'm happy to say it's good I like it a lot it is simple and straightforward but rather fun it kind of feels like an old school PVP game there's three basic modes you got what is Team Deathmatch the first to 50 kills wins you got domination where you capture a zone that moves throughout the match try to cap out the points you win and then King of the Hill which is the same thing instead of the moving zones there are three static zones try to capture them cap your points you win now the PVP certainly isn't as robust as like dedicated PVP games games and like I said it is pretty darn simple but it's a nice additional game mode on top of the PVE Co-op operations I like it I like it as a as a way to mix things up the gameplay feels also quite different than when you're playing the campaign or when you're playing the PVE operations mainly there's a much shorter time to kill here and then also there's some mechanical differences like for example melee bypasses armor so when you're shooting a character it deals armor damage and then Health damage but when you melee a character it goes straight to health and ignes whatever armor that they have and I that's an interesting balance decision and I've seen a lot of people saying that melee is really bad but I don't think it is I think if you know how to properly utilize it you could come up to a character who doesn't have a lot of Health but then their had replenished their armor say from a banner from a bullwark character and if they don't have a lot of Health but they have a lot of armor don't shoot them just melee them you're going to instantly go to their health and kill them probably straight away so yeah simple straightforward but it is enjoyable it's been fun messing around for a few afternoons I plan to do this for at least few more afternoons with my friends now as for the extented thoughts after launch you know I've had some more time to sort of ruminate and think about the game digest everything the general sentiment that I had in my initial review it stands I think the game is quite good it's definitely the best 40K game that I've ever played while it is fairly Limited in terms of that longer term replayability if that's something you're looking for keep that in mind the launch version of the game doesn't necessarily have a ton of replayability but just as a base experience like playing through the campaign grinding some PV call operations with your friends and then playing some PVP you can easily get a good 20 40 50 plus hours out of the game like it totally delivers that but it's not going to be a 100 200 300,000 plus hour live service game that's not what they are aiming for and that's not what this game delivers I will say the road map looks pretty good and because the launch has been so successful it seems very likely that the developer will be chugging away over this next year and totally delivering on what they had on their road map that's my expectation in which they are going to be planning to add a dueling system private PVE lobbies there will be new PVE missions a fifth difficulty tier new enemies and weapons new PVP game modes and for PVE they will be adding a hoorde mode now as of now this is slated for the fourth update which is I don't know sometime mid to late 20125 I think they should push this up and add this as soon as possible because I think adding a hord mode to this game would go a very long way if it's if the hord mode is constructed properly it would go a very long way in adding pretty much potentially endless replayability I mean when we were playing through this game when we were playing the campaign but specifically when we were playing the PVE call Operations we kept saying oh hard mode would be unbelievable because the combat feels so good the moment to moment is so fun it's so over the top it's just so exhilarating there's so much flow to the whole Act of engaging in combat if they had a mode which was just literally wave after wave like M mimic Gears of War where you get increasingly harder waves and they technically never end but it gets to a difficult points where eventually like yeah you start off with the basic ones and a few Elites here and there and then you get more and more Elites and then you start throwing in the mini bosses the car effectes and the neurop and then eventually you get like you get to a point where you're coming up against like 20 30 carif effectes like you could just make it could be so crazy I don't know maybe the game's performance-wise couldn't handle it but the the idea of a horde mode if properly implemented it just would take this game to another level in and of itself even more so I think than adding three more operation missions I think a horde mode should be the number one priority at least for me that's something I'd really enjoy I would also love larger scale PVP but I don't think that's going to happen because they've already reigned the game in from the original game which had 8 verse eight it's now down to 6 verse six so I mean but yes I would love like a battlefield style uh PvP with this game's combat system that's a pipe that's not happening at all but we do know the horn mode is happening and I really hope they execute on this and it because it could really be so amazing it could add so much more replayability to this game but anyways I'll also add speaking of which their prior Game World War Z that got a significant amount of updates in the years since its release they've continued to support it and that game peaked at just under 7,000 concurrent players I would say this is a very good sign for Warhammer 40K Space Marine 2 because this game has been so much more successful than that one really great sign that they will be supporting this over the coming year and hopefully years all right yeah well that just about does it for this video just wanted to kind of uh recap the launch of space spring to kind of wrap up my thoughts about the game and again I wanted to share with you now that the PVP has come out that I've played it and it's pretty fun it's really simple it's not it's not something that people are going to be playing for months and months most likely the most dedicated sure but the average player probably not but even just adding like a couple of extra weeks of fun that alone is is more than enough it's a good time I like it and yeah in general I like the game I really like it I recommend it just keep everything we set in mind in terms of like how much how much do you want your $60 like how much game do you want out of it is is 20 to 40 50 hours enough if so this is a great game if not well then it might not be the game for you but I like it and I do certainly recommend it all right that's it for today thank you as always for watching hope you enjoyed see you all next time