Warhammer 40k: Space Marine 2 is currently on sale on Steam for $23.99 (£21.99) until December 4, as part of the massive Black Friday sale on everyone's favorite videogame marketplace. It's a fantastic price for what is - in our opinion - the best Warhammer 40k game ever made, which has only improved in the year and a bit since it launched, thanks to continuous support and free expansions from developer Saber Interactive.
Wargamer's Space Marine 2 review was pretty harsh - we gave it a seven out of ten, one of the lowest grades the game got. We had our reasons: we adored the bone-shuddering feel of combat, and the single player story is full of incredible set pieces, but the narrative is thin and the characters are insufferably broody until the last third of the game. The story campaign has some great multiplayer co-op set-pieces which, unfortunately, the AI companions were too dumb to handle when playing solo; and the versus multiplayer mode wasn't even feasible to test during our review window.
Then Space Marine 2 came out, and it turns out the versus multiplayer mode is sick. Saber took the criticism that single-player AI companions weren't up to the job and quickly tweaked them to be a bit more proficient. That was two of our big criticisms taken care of. After that, Saber embarked on a dedicated programme of expanding the game's replayable, build-maximising, gear-chasing PvE Operations mode, and its PvP multiplayer, via free updates.
The most recent update, Reclamation, includes an Operations mission to purge the Tyranid infestation from a burning voidship in orbit around the planet Avarax, and adds other features that build on top of a more than a year of extra content.
That includes four other new Operations, three of which feature massive unique boss fights; five new weapons; a Siege wave survival mode; two extra PvP maps and the Helbrute Onslaught Mode that lets one player play an utterly massive Helbrute; and new Tyranid and Tzeentch Major enemies that can appear in any of the existing PvE levels. That's just the headline features - there have been subtler things like balance patches, higher difficulty levels and a prestige system for PvE, and official recognition of community mods.
There's also a huge amount of paid cosmetic DLC to choose from if you want to dress up your PvP or Operations marine like your favorite Space Marine Chapter (on top of respectable free cosmetics in the base game). In short - Saber Interactive have put in great work here. Can recommend.
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