Space Marine 2: Early Player Reviews Pour In And We Have Winner
Players are getting their hands on Space Marine 2 and the early reviews are sounding positive. It’s time to purge some Xenos!
A couple weeks back I looked at the initial reactions from content creators and the reviews were good. With yesterday kicking off early access, we’re finally seeing reviews from the players at large. As of writing this article up, it’s sitting at a 74% on Steam for a “Mostly Positive” reaction.
Now, that’s actually after a bit of a rough initial start where it was at 55%. But I’d like to point out those review numbers as well. The 55% was with only 600 reviews. Now it’s almost at 10k. Which, for a game that’s still in “early access” is saying something. It’s also sitting at an 83 on metacritic for what it’s worth. Now, from what I can tell the negative reviews basically fall into three categories:
- Infinite “Loading” Bug
- No “Ultrawide” Support
- Epic Online Services “stealth” installation — even for Steam users
Let’s talk about those issues really quick. As far as the Epic Online Services stuff, I do find this odd. But the Developers have responded (as you can see above). It’s there for Cross-play purposes and you don’t actually need it. I know there are some really diehard folks out there for the whole Steam vs Epic…and sure, it would be nice to opt-in/out of that. I don’t have a dog in that fight and don’t really care as I use both for PC gaming already.
The No Ultrawide complaint is understandable. However, this is a “known issue” and we’re going to get a patch to support it sometime in September according to the roadmap:
The Infinite Loading Screen bug is also just that — a bug. While I would also be a bit ticked off if I purchased either the Gold or Ultra edition specifically for the early access, I’m pretty sure this will also get resolved as a bug. Welcome to new game launches in 2024.
Other complaints I’ve seen range from “The A.I. Teammates are useless on the harder difficulties” to “The PC controls are bad.” I suspected the KB/M controls to be a bit of a learning curve. I’m willing to try them out and also to plug in a controller to my PC. I remember having this same discussion with the very first Space Marine game and actually preferred the controller. As for the AI Teammates, well….bring some friends on higher difficulty or just lower the difficulty?
Now, as far as the sea of positive reviews goes…
There’s load of meme reviews and I’m trying not to post any spoilers here. I picked these four specifically because they each have over 10 hours in the game already. You can read the reviews for yourself if you want more of this. But overall, the general consensus is really just more of this:
It seems like folks are having fun and this game has some legs to it with the post-campaign PvE modes and also the PvP in the game. If you’ve played it drop us a line in the comments and keep the spoilers out of this discussion, please and thank you.
Oh, and as a fun little experiment I checked the review page again. In the time it took me to write this entire article (and add screenshots, make a thumbnail, etc…) another 500ish reviews came in:
There is definitely a player base that’s fired up about this game.
Today might be the day that I dive into that early access…
