Generation Zero Review (First Eight Hours; Free Weekend Promo Review; May 2020 Version)

Red Dawn + Terminator = 1980s perfection. There are some glaring flaws though. Here's my Generation Zero review of their May 2020 build.

A caveat: This is just a mini-review based on the seven or so hours I invested in the limited-time freeware promo the devs gave out a couple of weeks ago. It is by no means a complete review. Even with my limited time with the game, I opted to do this review because Generation Zero’s premise—that of a band of friends staving off a robot uprising in a 1980s setting—is so intriguing that I really want this game to improve. In the interest of improving the game, this critique will largely focus on what needs to be improved rather than its positive aspects. Hopefully, the devs, who are very active on the forums, will act on what they deem to be workable aspects. (Because I do understand they are not a Triple A outfit). 

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Avernum: Escape from the Pit Review

It is no secret that the video gaming industry has a love affair with technology. Back when the first 3D games came out, video games were just all about movement. Flight sims—particularly those with six degrees of freedom games like the Descent series—flourished. Sure, there were games that broke the mold (one of which is the forebear to the Avernum series) but most of these only got a cult following and largely took the backseat. In 1998, Valve’s seminal game, Half-Life, happened. Suddenly, flight sims vanished and the industry jumped into the first-person shooter bandwagon. Fast forward to the second half of the first decade of the 2000s and on-rails shooter focusing on powerful action sequences elevated the FPS industry to new heights. And QTEs. Lots of QTEs.

It was this predictable sine wave of trends that killed my fascination for triple A productions. Companies started getting into projects that were considered to be financially safe—you cannot imagine the number of Call of Duty clones that popped into existence like drab-hued mushrooms after a stormy night. There was no experimentation and aside from the drive to ramp up visual fidelity, no pushing of the envelope. Things started feeling to be run-of-the-mill affairs, cookie cutter products that rolled out the digital assembly lines like virtual minions of doom that conquered the world.

It was a breath of fresh air then that back in 2009 or so, a friend of mine told me about Spiderweb Software and their Avernum series. Intrigued, I pored over their site. Sure enough, the isometric view and the hand drawn sprites intrigued me to no end. For some reason though, I didn’t buy a single one. Which was just as well as recently, the first game in the series floated on my radar as a remake. I figured that with the new engine and revamped graphics it was a good time to jump into what Spiderweb Software was offering.

I never regretted the decision.

Avernum: Escape from the Pit is a turn-based, isometric, role-playing game that may not have impressive visuals but stands up on its own—and then some—on its other aspects.

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RAGE PC Review

RAGE’s developer, id Software, has ever been on the forefront of technological innovation. They—along with John Romero—have developed and launched the first games to define the first-person shooter genre, coined the term “Deathmatch” (Romero), and with the release of Doom 3, launched the very first game engine that introduced specular highlighting and bump mapping, two features that catapulted video game graphics to new heights. They even trumped Romero a year after he left id Software with the Quake 2 engine (which featured advanced lighting and 3D acceleration, forcing Romero to further delay the launch of the ill-fated Daikatana).

While I never got to play Quake 2 and three when they launched, I did spend a substantial amount of my life playing Doom 2 and 3, two games that really impressed me. id Software’s dogged persistence to bring to the table avant-garde technology and/or innovative gameplay concepts with each release firmly made me a follower of the company’s brainchildren.

Fast forward several years later and RAGE got released. Read this RAGE PC review to find out the answers to the following: Did Carmack and company manage to impress the industry once again? Has the game’s gameplay concepts manage to shape another niche in the PC first-person industry? This RAGE PC review discusses the aspects that make RAGE an above average game and the flaws that pull it down from joining the elite ranks of its id Software forebears.


Several of the flaws are the bugs; game-breaking ones at that. Let’s delve into these first before the good parts.

The RAGE PC user review after the jump.

The Horrors of the Future

[Note: This review was made before the 1.2 patch came out.]

When I first started the game, a powerful and haunting intro provided me a glimpse of mankind’s valiant efforts to protect its intellectual elites from an asteroid impact. The cinematic’s series of scenes that alternate between asteroid Apophis’ inexorable progress towards our planet and the pre-cryostasis sequence that Earth’s inhabitants subjected themselves to effectively sets the player’s mindset that the survival of Earth’s civilization as we know it will still rise from the ruins of the impact.

After this impressive start though, things take an apocalyptic turn—both in the story and the technical aspect of RAGE. The game proper launched—and greeted me with psychedelic bands of white, green, and black. I got it to work by exiting Steam and restarting the game. To my consternation, I found that the game didn’t autosave after the introduction, forcing me to watch the whole sequence again. Up to this day, I still get this bug occasionally when I start a new campaign. RAGE seems to loathe PC applications running in the background. Letting other programs run while launching RAGE oftentimes causes this glitch to rear its ugly head. To say that the bug is annoying is an understatement; if there’s ever a thing that totally breaks the immersion, it’s a glitch that forces players to watch a game’s introduction 1-3 times before letting the thing run.

AAAAAAAAAAAH!!

The game also intermittently suffers from this bug when loading new areas. However, this is easily solved by reloading the autosave that kicks in at the start of each level so it’s more of an annoyance than a major issue.

What will really vex you is the infamous RAGE texture streaming pop-in bug: every time you abruptly turn around, you will notice the game trying to catch up with you; textures will pop-in belatedly—think 640X480 textures being rapidly “clothed” with higher resolution ones. While I have solved this (see my “How to Solve the RAGE Texture Streaming Pop-in Bug” guide), this does present problems to those who aren’t into tweaking PC games.

There are also mini-freeze bugs that last for 2-3 seconds though these happen only rarely on my system.

The above aside, RAGE is a great PC first-person shooter. True, it does have some glaring flaws but this FPS still provides powerful peregrinations across a dystopian landscape.

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Which is more sickening? The mutant growth or the blurred textures? You be the judge.

Gameplay
Before the RAGE PC review proper, I would like to stress this out: RAGE is NOT an RPG-Shooter hybrid. Many people discovered to their chagrin that it’s not a Fallout-like game and have expressed their ire in video game forums. I find this strange as id Software never actively advertised it as such. Granted (and as I’ll discuss later), there are several aspects that might initially mislead the player into thinking this PC FPS is an RPG-shooter hybrid, but RAGE is more of a full-on shooter with several minute RPG aspects thrown in. I’d like to think the these aspects as things that break the monotony of a pure shooter and not as failed efforts on id Software’s part to make an RPG-shooter game as others purport.

There; you have been warned.

RAGE tells the story of an Earth ravaged by an asteroid impact. At the game’s onset, you emerge from an “ark,” a massive underground metal sphere that was designed to protect mankind’s elite. The plan was to preserve scientists, leaders, and military personnel in numerous arks and then rebuild civilization several years after Apophis hits the planet. Unfortunately, something goes wrong and the timing of your ark goes haywire; you emerge several years late than the rest of humanity’s remnants. Upon stumbling out, you immediately get ambushed by bandits but get rescued by the head of a nearby settlement. From there you embark on a series of quests that pit you against bandits, mutants, bands of hostile settlers, and the Authority, a faction that reminds me strongly of Fallout’s Brotherhood of Steel.

No, he's not one of them but see the finger? He's trying hard to be one.

What bothered me was how the game is structured; RAGE sets you off on a string of missions that never fully captivates the player. Why should I help these people? If the missions are so important why do they set me off alone against swarms of mutants? What motivates these other factions? Why should I exterminate the whole lot of them? While the characters in the game are certainly interesting enough—the crazed, rambling hermit and the silver-tongued TV show host come to mind—the PC game just doesn’t draw the player in to really care about the world RAGE is set in. Several scripted events or cutscenes would have helped. As it is, this dearth of compelling reasons why you should throw your lot in with the quest-giving NPCs leaves the game’s plot uninteresting.

And then there are choices: when NPCs give you a quest, you are given the choice to accept or decline. This is just an illusion of freedom. In reality, choosing “Decline” doesn’t divert the plot into another story arc; you’re just effectively putting that quest on hold. Some of them you can take later but some need to be accepted and completed before the game can progress. As has been mentioned, RAGE is NOT an RPG PC game.

This isn’t saying that RAGE is a bad game, far from it—every time I start the game hours fly past without me noticing. It has flaws but it is as (bugs aside) immersive as the best ones out there.

RAGE’s gameplay is a breath of fresh air from all the games that have copied Halo’s two-weapon inventory system. While I still prefer the latter (being more realistic and tactical in the sense that it forces you to think about which weapons to carry in what situation), I was pleasantly surprised that id Software has stuck with the old school tradition of letting you carry a whole arsenal with you.

Killburst pistol ammo is good for mutants who have a penchant of going up close to eat fistfuls of lead.

And what an arsenal it is. In the course of the game, you’ll acquire a pistol, a shotgun, an assault rifle that looks every bit a Kalashnikov, a crossbow, a sniper rifle, an Authority assault rifle, and a rocket launcher. There’s a weapon you get to use in the finale but I’ll leave that for you to discover. It’s gratifying to fire these; unlike in Doom 3 where most of the conventional weapon sound effects lean towards the higher frequencies (the assault rifle for example, sounded too tinny), the weapons in RAGE sound just right: massive and powerful without going overboard. Sure, there are other games whose weapons sound better (Killing Floor comes to mind) but RAGE is up there with the better ones.

What ups the ante in the weapons department is the ammunition system of the game, which makes the firearms veritable Swiss Knives. Running low on rockets? Craft Pop Rocket ammunition for your shotgun. Getting peppered by long-range fire from hostiles who are in close proximity to each other? Load your crossbow with mind control bolts and inoculate one of them with nanites, making the hapless individual a ticking time bomb that you can control and detonate at will. Ran out of sniper rounds? Whip out your pistol, load it up with armor-piercing Fat Mamma rounds and use a makeshift scope to take out targets from afar. It’s this system that makes RAGE fun to play. Even your other items can be upgraded or converted with the recipes that you can buy from merchants. Grenades for example, can be converted to EMP ones, which are very useful for shutting down force shield-equipped Authority soldiers. Sentry turrets and bots can be upgraded to advanced versions, which have better rates of fire and armor respectively.

And yes, there’s a limited crafting system involved. Objects that can be picked up pepper the game. Some of these are worthless other than that they can be sold off while others are better off being kept as recipe components. Recipes range from straightforward ones like the aforementioned Pop Rockets and Fat Mammas while quite a few are situational (like the one that boosts the damage you dish out, something I’ve never really used). While the range of recipes in RAGE isn’t as numerous as that found in MMOs, crafting is one of RAGE’s numerous aspects that instill diversity in what would have otherwise been a purely linear shooter.



id Software really made an effort in diversifying RAGE’s gameplay. As most probably know by now, it features vehicular combat. Players can take part in various races that provide three types of games: time trials, races, and rallies. Time trials are solo events that are pretty much self-explanatory. The second category is made up of minigun, rocket, and pulse races, which are traditional races with a twist—you get to use the type of weapon listed in the event you sign up for plus a few consumables (discussed below). The third was what struck me as flawed. In rallies (which are still made up of minigun, rocket, and pulse types), you don’t do lapses. Instead you race around a racing track running over pillars of light. Each time you run over a beam, you score a point and the beam vanishes for a time. While this is fun, the beams respawn in sequence. What this means is that once you run over Beam C, Beam A respawns. This mechanic inadvertently punishes players who are going too fast; AI-controlled vehicles who have eaten your dust might be near the vicinity of Beam A when you made the grab for Beam C, resulting in you not being able to catch up to them to get to the first pillar. Time and again, I had been forced to purposefully slow down to let them catch up to me before taking a beam. Even then, the time it takes you to turn around will cost you precious seconds—time enough for the other cars to get a significant lead over you. This slowing down to let others purposefully catch up so you can have an equal footing when going for the next pillar just doesn’t strike me as an exciting gameplay mechanic. The only map where I thoroughly enjoyed a rally was Canyon, which featured a linear path. There, the one who leads typically gets the most number of pillars. Other maps are just too open for the rally modes, resulting in the odd mechanic I discussed above.

Racing prizes come in the form of racing certificates, a form of currency that can only be used to buy car upgrades. Upgrades come in the form of armor, traction, shock absorbers, engines, and ramming grills. The upgrade system is not extensive but it’s still enjoyable upgrading your ride. (Again, there’s only a handful of these; don’t expect a whole fleet.)


You can also buy numerous consumables in car shops with money. While these are numerous—ranging from plain minigun rounds to hover turrets, there are only three of these that you should consider as mainstays—shields, repair modules, minigun rounds, and rockets. Later in the game, you can buy pulse rounds, which are more effective than rockets. The rest are still useful but aren’t as cost-effective as the ones I mentioned.

Players who are worried that purchases might slow down the game need not worry; RAGE does provide opportunities to make easy money while in the confines of friendly towns. Players can engage in three types of game: dice rolling, 5-finger fillet, and a card game that strongly mimics the mechanics of the Facebook game Warstorm. The last one is addictive for a time. In the course of the game, you will acquire cards. You can use these to bolster a starter deck that you can buy at the settlements. Each card has a point level; the more powerful a card, the more points it has. Cards come in four types: melee, ranged, vehicles, and explosives. Explosives are single use cards that damage all cards that the opponent has in play. Vehicles, while not having the ability to attack, force ranged cards to target them, making them hit point caches that tank for your other cards. Melee cards can only target cards that are opposite them (cards are arranged in rows; yours and the enemy’s). Ranged cards can choose which cards to target (unless there’s an enemy vehicle in play as mentioned above). Aside from the above, some of the cards have special abilities; some can heal other cards, some provide hit point and/or damage buffs to specific types of cards, and some have the chance to stun enemies, to name a few of these. The card game is by no means as complicated and as engaging as Magic: The Gathering but it’s far from bad either.



Audio

Nothing to write home about really; RAGE’s audio effects are impressive but they don’t push the bar. Water drops are soothing to hear when you are in subterranean levels while at the same time reinforcing the feeling that you are far away from the safe confines of civilized parts. Bullets clang against armor. Sentry bots sound like what they appear to be—a combination of salvaged high-tech components and rusty gears and plates of metal. There are better games out there though in terms of audio clarity in a surround sound setup. I’ve now careened off towards the subjective but for me, Dead Space still has the throne.

Multiplayer

Either the MP community had died off or the game suffers from connectivity issues. After eight tries of looking for a match and not being able to connect to a server, I gave up. Maybe it’s my router or my ISP but this is irrelevant: I’ve lots of games and most of them don’t let me jump through hoops if I want to play multiplayer.

Graphics

Where visuals are concerned, this first-person shooter is one impressive powerhouse. RAGE’s story unfolds in a region wherein the terrain is dominated by sheer canyon walls, sun-scorched valleys, and serpentine desert paths. The id Tech 5 game engine delivers this desolate atmosphere with searing intensity. Sun flares dazzle your eyes, canyon walls reflect the midday sun with unmatched realism, and dust eddies roil and billow in your wake as your vehicle rips through the landscape. In underground levels, drops of water convincingly snake down your visor, shafts of sunlight lance through dark hallways, and steampunk machinery and cobbled-up towns that are a mishmash of corroded and chrome-plated components jut out from the landscape.

Breathtaking.

id Software’s attention to detail is laudable. Sentry bots walk rapidly on spindly legs while closing the gap between them and the enemies, firing their mininguns all the while. When they get close enough, they do this rapid, in-your-face kill sequence that has to be seen to be believed: they leap, firing all the while, shredding their prey with white-hot lead and sharp appendages. When the dust clears, they run up and turn their robotic eyes up at you, very much like beagles seeking approval from their owner.

It doesn’t stop there; some of the enemies have helmets that get blown off when you score headshots. Enemies reel from such impacts. In RAGE you can see the effects of your withering fire as bandits and mutants get chewed up and armored adversaries whip every which way as each round slams against them. These visual reports make the game one of the more impressive first-person shooters out today.



AI

RAGE’s AI is a mixed bag. On one side, it’s hands down, the most convincing AI I’ve seen to date. Enemies take cover; communicate; swear; throw grenades; cower behind shelter with only their arms and rifles sticking out, spraying you with suppressive fire; switch covers; and even—when they see their numbers dwindling down—retreat to more advantageous positions while holding their hands above their heads. (Minute details like elite Authority troops not running helter-skelter away from you, armored foes reeling from explosives, and bandits springing from the ground to dash across nearby walls to confuse your aim are admirable.) Dying enemies even keel over in pain and fire potshots at you while clutching their torsos. It’s enemy behavior like this that lends this first-person shooter truly immersive firefights that few PC games today can match.

On the other side of the coin, RAGE’s AI shares the same flaws as that of FEAR 3’s (See my FEAR 3 PC Review HERE); they rely too much on cover and most don’t really advance on you (nor flank). Most of the factions also don’t fire as often as the AI in other games. Worse, more often than not, parts of them stick out from cover, resulting in some firefights devolving into turkey shoots. With the scoped pistol’s range and accuracy, you can take out most enemy groups one soldier at a time; you won’t even need your sniper rifle.

They're not the best hide-and-seek players this side of the universe.

It’s this observation that really struck me as perplexing. id Software has been known for the Doom series, a series that has been known for their cathartic difficulty levels. Since then, I’ve seen a massive drop in their games’ difficulty levels. Doom 3 for one, displayed a significant dip. Doom 3: Resurrection of Evil upped the difficulty but with RAGE, the difficulty level has once again, taken a serious nosedive. I’ve completed the game on Normal, Hard, and Nightmare but even in the last playthrough, I died less than ten times.

Really, what good is a Swiss knife approach to the ammo and consumables system when the game is too easy? Give a game a rocket-firing shotgun, medikits and regeneration potions that can be crafted, a pistol that can double as a medium-range sniper rifle, a built-in defibrillator, and a ridiculously timid AI and you get a character that’s well-nigh invincible. The regeneration potions are overkill, given that you already have a regenerating body courtesy of the nanites that have been injected into your system when you submitted yourself to the Ark project.

Did I mention a defib? Yes, you have a Lazarus device in your chest. You die and you play this seconds-long minigame where you have to time pushing the activate button when these two nodes crisscross each other. The better your timing, the more health you get when you revive—at which time your body emits a powerful electrical charge that kills all nearby enemies. Talk about overkill. (Did I mention the word “overkill” twice now?)



It’s this ridiculously easy difficulty level (that's brought about by the factors I've discussed above) that’s really the most frustrating point about RAGE. You can see it claw and hammer away towards being one of the classics that John Carmack and company have created but sadly, it gets stopped dead in its tracks by a huge wall of design oversight. The ending doesn’t help either; it’s marked by uninspired level and enemy design and a weapon that appears much too late. Even the ending cinematic is an invective-inducing cliffhanger sequence that’s neither exciting nor powerful.

As it is, the firefights are still impressive but they could have been so much more. Let’s hope they introduce beefed-up difficulty levels in another patch.

The Rundown

RAGE is a rare gem that dazzles you with bleeding-edge technology while hurling players back to the days of yore when blasting everything to bits wasn’t saddled down with a bazillion features that aim to please the market. This isn’t to say that RAGE isn’t an innovative first-person shooter; far from it. The innovations it has flow seamlessly with its core mechanic, planting powerful, old school shooter action firmly on the center stage. However, several things mar its numerous gameplay facets, preventing this game from reaching the heights others of its id pedigree have achieved.



Is RAGE a good game? Yes it is. It’s just frustrating that for all its pros—an AI that moves realistically, jaw-dropping graphics, vehicular combat, etc—numerous cons like ammo-conserving enemies, objects that have blurred textures, and the bugs really prevent it from becoming one of those games that people talk about months after its release.

Ratings:

Tilt: 7.0 – RAGE is one awesome shooter that is as immersive as it is fun to play. However, numerous bugs, story, and design issues hurt the game. (Note: This has been tested on an Nvidia-powered gaming PC; ATI-AMD users might give this game a much lower score due to the game-breaking bugs it contains.)

Gameplay: 7.5 – Solid, blood-pumping action that’s reminiscent of the old Doom games can be found here. However, timid AI, design flaws in one of the racing modes, insufficient enemy count per skirmish, and an anemic ending prevent this game from scoring an 8.5 or higher.

Graphics: 8.5 – I would have given this a 9 or even a 9.5. RAGE though, is an odd game where graphics is concerned. It would have set a new level with its unparalleled textures. However, even casual players will quickly notice that many objects in the game appear blurry. Effects are top-notch though: enemies move convincingly and explosions are spectacles to watch.

Audio: 8.0 - RAGE has impressive audio effects but they don’t really push the envelope.

Replayability: 7.5 – RAGE is good for a replay or two but it’s not exactly a multiplayer-centric game. While it does have several game modes, they’re not really the type you would be investing your time on for several months.

Score: 7.7

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Warhammer 40K: Space Marine Review

[Updated Dec 23, 2011]

I first heard of Warhammer 40,000: Space Marine in some video game forum that I can’t remember. My first reaction to the news was: “Relic Entertainment is moving away from its highly successful RTS line? It’s a hoax!” And for a time I did think it was. The Dawn of War series is a successful PC strategy product line. Its games have pulled off what dozens of Warhammer 40,000 games before failed to do—draw in legions of fans and newcomers alike. For Relic Entertainment to wander off from this unprecedented trend was, for me, an odd decision.

Fast forward a couple or so years later, and I just finished Warhammer 40,000: Space Marine on the Normal and Hard difficulty levels. In both playthroughs, I had to grudgingly admit that Relic Entertainment did pour in an awesome amount of effort to bringing the “hoax” to life. It is a solid game in more ways than one. However, Warhammer 40,000: Space Marine does have its flaws. This Warhammer 40,000: Space Marine review, made by a fan, discusses the pros and cons of the game. More than a review, this article also discusses what Relic Entertainment should have done to more fully immerse Space Marine players into the Warhammer 40K game universe.

"No more micromanagement! Hallelujah!"

The full review after the jump. 

Warhammer 40K: Space Marine puts you in the role of Captain Titus, an Ultramarine who leads one of the numerous strike forces tasked with staving off an Ork invasion in one of the Imperium’s forgeworlds. For most of the game though, the only Space Marines you see are Leandros and Sidonus, two characters with contrasting personalities. The former is a newly christened marine who insists on following rules to the letter while the latter is a grizzled veteran. Though at first you might think that these dissimilar personalities would introduce enough conflict to the story to make it fascinating, the game will disappoint players in this aspect as the interplay among the three is so bland as to make it uninteresting. Thankfully though, the action is more than enough to keep you glued to the screen.

While it’s immediately apparent that the developers meant for Space Marine to be a melee-oriented game, they haven’t left out the shooter aspect in it. In Hard mode, you would have to thin out the ranks a bit before thundering in with a chainsword, power axe or a warhammer. You first start out though, with a large nondescript knife and a bolter but these get swapped out later for better weapons. There are four types of bolters in the game and each is a clunky but solid-looking boxy affair. I like how Games Workshop has brought out the “forgotten technology” feel of the Imperium’s weaponry. The upgraded bolters are the very epitome of that design direction: huge, unwieldy, but their shots sound powerful; firing them feels like you’re really dishing out rounds that can punch out exit wounds the size of plates. Later in the game, you will get your hands on two types of plasma-based weaponry, two types of sniper weapons (the lascannon and the stalker bolter), the powerful melta gun (a short-range shotgun type of weapon that fires a plume of superheated substance) and the vengeance launcher. The last is what struck me as odd; its smooth red-and-silver body looks as though it belongs in a Quake game rather than the Warhammer 40K universe. I did some research and I was right—before the game, the vengeance launcher—which fires grenades that can be remote detonated—is non-canon. However, rumor has it that Games Workshop will be making it as.

"What do you mean the shoulder plates make me look fat?"

The shooter element of Space Marine is only a secondary aspect though—melee is where it’s really at. Like most hack-and-slash games nowadays, successive swings form a combo and Relic Entertainment’s game is no different. Click four times and Titus will form a four-hit combo that ends with a devastating swipe that sweeps in a wide arc, decapitating most foes. Click F (the default button in the PC version) after one to three attacks and Titus ends with a move that stuns enemies. Stunned foes immediately display a QTE (quick time event) icon above their heads and if you press E (the default execution button in the PC version), Titus makes a brutal coup de grace, killing them. What makes this whole thing unique is that every Execution replenishes Titus’ lifebar with a considerable amount of health. However, Executing an enemy triggers a rather lengthy 2.5-second animation and in that time that you’re busy tearing apart an Ork’s head or burying a power axe into a Chaos Space Marine, his fellows will be busy trying to rip your armor apart. This mechanic allows for frenzied action (apparent in the Normal and Hard difficulty levels)—should you Execute an enemy and hope the animation finishes and heals you up before his fellows kill you or should you continue cleaving away and hope you finish them all before your flagging health hits zero? This design decision makes for hectic action sequences as you roll, dash, cleave, Execute, and shoot the endless hordes the game throws at you. Quick thinking and quicker reflexes define the core action of Warhammer 40,000: Space Marine.

As impressive and addictive as this is (and it IS!) some people may be bothered by two things:

1. As implied above, there is no way to cancel an Execution animation. An ill-timed Execution could mean your death and not the enemy’s. I’ve always believed that one of the elements of what makes a video game addictive is its level of control. I’ve discussed this in how Area 51, a freeware PC first-person shooter, handles grenades in your inventory. Space Marine hits this same problem with its Execution system; you simply do not have control once the animation starts.

2. Seeing that the combo system is limited and that Titus can’t jump, the PC game’s melee system basically is a one-trick pony: you dash in, whale away at everything and if the enemy eats away your armor and start to chip away at your health, you start to search out the best way to Execute something without exposing yourself needlessly to enemy attacks. And while this is addicting, it could have used some more variety shown in other melee combat games like say, Darksiders.

Rooster Teeth gave their Red vs Blue series an apocalyptic twist.

Speaking of one-trick affairs, this is Space Marine’s biggest flaw; the game basically pits you against wave upon wave of enemies while slogging your way through its levels. Though there are sequences that do break up this repetitiveness, I wish the developers put in more of these. For example, there’s a part where you get to man an Imperial Guard Valkyrie’s heavy bolter turret as you soared through the skies. It’s a very entertaining sequence. Why they didn’t put in two or more segments akin to it is beyond me. Rolling across a vast landscape in a Land Raider for example, or fighting alongside a Dreadnought that shakes the ground every time it takes a step would have been awesome. Complaints aside though, Warhammer 40,000: Space Marine is definitely one of the better melee games I’ve played in quite a while. It’s also the first one to render this many enemies to take on; the first time you see a wave of gretchin, bomb squigs, and Slugga and Shoota Boyz, you can’t help but be impressed of what Relic Entertainment has done here.

Unlike several hack-and-slash games, Space Marine has a dearth of puzzles—which is actually a good thing. The Warhammer 40,000 universe is all about war, bloodshed, and wanton genocide. Introducing puzzles meant for pointy-eared, effeminate, sword-and-wooden-shield-toting elves would have only watered down the action. This is an action game through and through. This is about killing aliens and purging the unclean.

An action game, no matter how good its mechanics are, would suffer significantly if its artificial intelligence is lacking. So how does Space Marine’s AI fare? Truth to tell, it’s unimpressive but it gets the job done. Warhammer 40,000’s Orks are Orks; they’re bloodthirsty creatures, shouting “WAAAGH!” wherever they go. The game’s AI serves this role well: Orks, except for the Shoota Boyz, invariably charge at you en masse. Shoota Boyz just hang back and well, shoot. They skip several steps sideways when you shoot at them but aside from this, they just stand there and take whatever damage you dish out. Nothing impressive there but it definitely gets the job done.

Ah uzed to be a weirdboy like youz but then me knee took a warhammer...

What really bothers me is the part where you get to encounter Chaos Space Marines. Most of these will be carrying ranged weaponry and so initially you won’t find anything amiss with their AI. However, as the game progresses and you encounter more of these, it will begin to dawn on you that they really don’t give the impression that these are former elite troopers of the Imperium. While they are more mobile than the Orks—they’ll actually run for cover—they just don’t act like elite troopers. F.E.A.R.’s Armacham Elite do a better job at this. Chaos Space Marines wielding melee weapons behave much like Ork Slugga Boyz, adding to the disappointment.

Your companions fare no better. There were only a few times in the game that I felt I was fighting with a squad. Leandros and Sidonus behave like slow-moving invincible turrets with low-caliber weaponry. They can still kill enemies but they do it at a significantly slower pace than you. The Space Marines are supposed to be a close-knit cadre of elite killing machines. Except for a few segments here and there, this game doesn’t give you the feeling that you’re fighting with coordinated battle squad.

Warhammer 40,000: Space Marine’s boss battles are few and far between and what handful there are are nothing to be impressed about. In fact, the last boss fight is a QTE fest, something that, while realistic (you couldn’t realistically go toe-to-toe with the last boss considering what he is), left me a bit disappointed. This is something that bothers me; Games Workshop had two decades to expand and hone their lore. Relic’s failure to capitalize on that rich a storyline perplexes me much like Day One Studios’ palpable indifference to some of the deeper aspects of FEAR’s. (See my FEAR 3 review here.) Giving Warhammer 40K: Space Marine more boss fights and enemy types would have deepened the game’s immersion greatly. If they didn’t have the time, casual references to the other races would have sufficed; an abandoned Eldar temple here, an uttered line about the Tau there and it would have immersed the player more into the Warhammer 40,000 universe. As it is, Warhammer 40K: Space Marine barely skims the surface of what Games Workshop has created.

Lascannon to the head: exorcism, Games Workshop style

To continue this line of discussion, the very first Dawn of War game featured Orks and then Chaos in the course of its singleplayer campaign. Do all Warhammer 40,000 games have to feature the popular races all the time? Why not Chaos and Tau? Or Chaos and Tyranids? Orks and Dark Eldar? While this borders on nitpicking, this trend of spotlighting Orks and Chaos in the first game of every Warhammer 40K PC game series is starting to become formulaic.

Also where are the awesome quotes? It would have been cool if Relic gave players the chance to do taunts by pushing a hotkey or two. Bellowing “Show me what passes for fury among your misbegotten kind!” in multiplayer would have been awesome.

Multiplayer

[Note: I will provide a separate review for the Exterminatus and the CTF game modes in the coming weeks.]

Warhammer 40,000: Space Marine does have a multiplayer component that’s split into two modes: Seize Ground and Annihilation (basically Take and Hold and Team Deathmatch, respectively). While the two modes are very entertaining, they don’t have much in the way of what makes the game appealing: to be an elite, nearly invincible supersoldier who can take on waves of monstrosities by the lonesome. In the multiplayer component, you’re up against other space marines, who have the same hit points and armor values as you and who—needless to say—are significantly better than the singleplayer campaign’s AI opponents. This devolves the MP component into just another shooter as both sides jockey for flanking positions to optimize firing arcs. (While the Assault Marine class is a melee-oriented one, the action is just different from the singleplayer campaign. Because you’re up against similar Joes, here, you’re just another ordinary dude who would seek cover every time you find yourself in a situation where you are badly outgunned.)

I've nothing to say about this screenshot except that I'm awesome.

The game’s archaic weapon designs also don’t improve matters; Space Marines move slowly even when they’re running and bolters aren’t the most efficient weapons if you figure in rate of fire, handling, and accuracy. To make matters worse, the Assault Marine class is somewhat overpowered compared to the other classes. Find yourself in a situation where there’s a lot of open terrain and you can be sure that in the next eight or so seconds, death will come at you from above. Assault marines can, of course, be countered, but it takes expertise to successfully evade one.

It should be brought to light that there is no server browser; the matchmaking system is peer-to-peer. This might prove problematic for people who are living in regions where there are too few Space Marine players.

Taking all the above into account, the game’s multiplayer is great but it’s not something I would play every day for weeks on end. (It’s being actively patched though so things might change in the future.)

The game’s other (technical) aspects are impressive but not overly so. Below is a breakdown.

Graphics

The amount of particles Warhammer 40,000: Space Marine throws at you is impressive; Orks erupt in globules and buckets of blood, dust swirls away at swings of your melee weapons, and plasma rounds detonate with such ferocity that you can almost smell the ozone.

On the other side of the coin, closer inspection reveals the graphics to be inferior to games that use bleeding edge game engines. Also there isn’t much in the way of bump mapping. As a result, the cutscenes strike me as being too CGI-ish. They’re not cartoony but they definitely don’t raise the bar.

Red carpet cleaning Imperium style

The game’s environs are, however, convincing; forgeworld Graia shows signs that it has been recently ravaged by an invading force. There’s no signs of civilians though, something that greatly detracts from the whole picture. Also, the game could have benefitted from a more diverse level design; Space Marine only has basically two: the surface, which features dust-covered urban rubble and canyons; and facilities, which feature sterile surroundings that are predominantly gray. The latter are relatively unimpressive; while the surface levels feature a more vibrant color scheme and dust that get kicked up in battles, the facility levels don’t have anything going on.

Audio

Warhammer 40,000: Space Marine’s audio gets the job done and more. The Orks’ “WAAAGH!!,” their death screams and shouts of agony, your chainsword’s keening wail, all these give players a cathartic and immersive experience. The music also shifts to a more ominous tone whenever you get embroiled in a skirmish, adding to the immersion.

Relic’s effort to bring the Warhammer 40,000 universe into the hack-and-slash genre is a success. While the game stubbornly sticks to its core action mechanics from beginning to end, there’s no other game that gives you the opportunity to wade into seemingly endless waves of Orks and Chaos Space Marines.

Lock and load soldier of the Imperium—in Warhammer 40,000: Space Marine, your belief that the “Emperor protects” will be severely tested.

Half a league, half a league onward! And into an outpost held by a solid wall of Imperial Guardsmen scurried the orks and squigs.

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Tilt: 7.5 - The game shipped with a flicker bug that has since been fixed. The storyline presents a premise that isn’t something to be impressed about. The developers didn’t delve too much into the rich material that the Warhammer 40K universe has. Overall, though, the game is a fairly hiccup-free experience that’s worth checking out.

Gameplay: 8.0 – Fluid combat that’s only tarnished by the game’s stubbornness in sticking to the same core mechanics from beginning to end. Warhammer 40,000 though, presents the players with all the brutality that the Games Workshop codices envision the far future to be. Multiplayer is weaker relative to the singleplayer component but it still delivers.

Graphics: 8.0 – It’s definitely not bleeding edge but what you find here is definitely impressive. Blood spray every which way, debris scatter in the heat of battle, and hulking adversaries paint the events ravaging forgeworld Graia with a realistic intensity. It’s just marred by the console-ish feel of the game’s engine.

Audio: 8.0 – Nothing to complain about the audio; meaty bolter reports, ear-shattering death screams, and martial themes really place you in the thick of battle. Vox-casters though would have lent the game a better score; SMs sound more awesome with them.

Replayability: 7.5 (Note: This will be adjusted soon as I release my review about the two new game modes.) A limited Easter Egg system in the form of digging up what happened to the forgeworld by recovering servoskulls encourage players to replay the campaign a couple of times. The game though, is a boon to those just simply seeking a cathartic experience; hacking away at hosts of adversaries never gets old. Warhammer 40,000: Space Marine’s first two multiplayer modes are bland affairs; they’re not something you would want to play again and again as much as the leading multiplayer games today.

A chainsword--Jason Voorhees wants one for Christmas

Overall: 7.8

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