Recent reviews by mace

Thoughts after finishing the campaign:
- Aesthetically Pleasing
- Cinema
- Bolter ASMR
- My pledge is eternal service

If you're a fan of any of these, you'll like this game:
- Space Marine 1
- Warhammer 40k Imperial factions
- Dawn of War 1 intro cinematics
- Astartes
- Deathwatch
- Building/painting/customizing space marines

This absolutely nails the atmosphere of the 40k universe, and really brings to life things you read about in the stories/lore, artwork, and tabletop units (e.g. Spore mines from 4th Edition starter set - "oh that's cute" -> in SM2 "OH TERRA KILL IT WITH FIRE").

Further breakdown/thoughts:
- Campaign - 11/10 - has taken everything I liked about SM1 and dialed it up to 11, it's bonkers. The intro/tutorial mission goes hard. The attention to detail spread throughout, the little tidbits of conversations in the background etc.
- Operations - It's really neat how these are parallel storylines with the main campaign missions, showing the perspective of the other squads running their objectives. Recommend finishing main campaign first. Note - connectivity is a bit flaky initially - the Devs have already acknowledged this and are working to fix it in the first patch.
- PVP - haven't played this at all yet.
- Overall, to have all these ready at launch, with the upcoming roadmap of content will be free to all players, and the DLC is cosmetics only, this is a solid return to how gaming used to be 10 years ago.


My 2 cents on concerns raised in other reviews:
- Lack of 21:9 support - once getting into the game, this did not detract from my immersion at all. Too busy purging xenos. Devs already have it on the roadmap for the first quarter.
- Epic Online Services being installed - this is typical of many games as part of their backend code and infrastructure to handle crossplay, especially with non-steam platforms. In no way is this forcing you to install or run epic launcher, or login to epic. Aside from some initial connectivity issues in Operations, had several games playing with others on Xbox and Playstation. A battle brother works with the wargear they are given.


ALSO - PC Controls
- The default binds don't make use of side mouse buttons, so would recommend making use of them as you see fit. Having aim on middle mouse and then zooming in on scroll up wasn't as intuitive, so switching to right click to ADS and side mouse buttons for melee and parry made everything feel a lot more fluid for quickly mixing melee and ranged attacks.

If you like sorting, organising, making things efficient, and automating, this is the game for you.

Bonus points if you work in IT, Project Management, Engineering, Agile, any sort of related/adjacent field because now you can apply everything you've learnt but actually have it work! :D


Or if you like chaos, spaghetti, testing in production, throwing the math out the window like an absolute cowboy/madman, this is also the game for you.