Space Marine certainly knows its target audience.
To preface, I love Warhammer 40,000. I love the grimdark over-the-top ridiculousness of it. I love the fully automatic armor-piercing rocket launchers, I love the crazy magic Emperor god-king, and I love the audacious heavy metal scifi metal sensibilities of the setting. (That said, I don't exactly love Ultramarines, but for some reason nobody wants to make a game about cool Space Marine chapters like the Salamanders or the Sisters of Battle.) Obviously, a game purporting to be the most Space Marine-y experience to ever hit a TV excited me, but that excitement was tinged with a bit of caution after the stylish but resoundingly mediocre Dawn of War 2 games. Fortunately, Space Marine does faithfully deliver the experience. The Space Marines, Chaos Marines, and orks all feel right (particularly the WAAAAAGH!, which really shakes you to your core if you have a good sound system), and the game does a good job of communicating to you that you are an unstoppable genetically engineered killing machine, even if it does suffer from some tedium and a nearly terminal case of Last Boss Letdown Syndrome.
But what is this, some kind of blog where I have positive opinions about anything ever? Let's talk about the parts I didn't like!
Primarily, the characterization of the protagonist gives me pause. For those of you unfamiliar with the Warhammer 40,000 setting, let me lay out the big problem with a Space Marine protagonist: the Imperium of Man is an intensely xenophobic interstellar fascist theocracy ruled by the corpse of a guy who was kind of a dick when he was alive and the people in charge have no compunction about slaughtering their own subjects by the billion to accomplish even the least significant goals. A Space Marine is just a superpowered soldier for the Imperium, and even among Space Marines the Ultramarines are known for their extreme unquestioning orthodoxy and devotion to the literal wording of the Imperium's holy book, the Codex Astartes. I imagine the developers had some concern about presenting an outerspace ultraconservative hypernazi stormtrooper as a main character, so they decided to make the game about a different group of people entirely.
Haha, just kidding! That would have been pretty sensible, but what they did instead is make the protagonist, Captain Titus, completely unlike an Ultramarine without any explanation as to how he somehow became one of the most prominent members of the order. So if he's not an Ultramarine, what did they make him instead?
I tried to draw in a popped collar, but it was too hard so I gave up.
Honestly, he's kind of a bro.
Now, granted, the line between those two things is narrow in places. When Titus responds to every situation by yelling and charging forward to commit violence, we can hardly say that he's not being a good Space Marine. When he plants his feet and fires a massive automatic weapon into a horde of undifferentiated enemies who are racially evil or resolves a problem with a giant demon by punching it in the face while screaming, it may be OMGBRAHSOME but it's also the proper response to heresy. The divide becomes clear mostly during dialogue.
More than once during the game, a young Marine named Leandros will say to Titus something along the lines of "Hey, you know that book our order is universally famous for following? Maybe this would be a pretty good time to follow some of it." An Ultramarine would either just agree or explain how his plan really does follow the Codex, which is a book so long and vaguely written that you can use it to reinforce literally any course of action. Instead, Titus responds "NO BRO, RULES ARE FOR BITCHES, I'MMA DO WHAT I DO U KNO" and then jumps out of a spaceship with a jetpack on because he's an idiot. (And then he discards it immediately because argsohsad;fklaj.) At the end of the game, when Leandros correctly calls in the Inquisition because not only does Titus not act like an Ultramarine at all but also he has been displaying some very suspicious invulnerability to stuff for no reason, Titus gives him a little speech about how it's bad to follow the rules and narc on people and really he should just like be cool, be a bro. This shit probably sits pretty comfortable for the player at home who thinks that rules are just something the Man uses to keep him down, but for an Ultramarine it's all WILDLY out of character.
How did this guy get to be Captain of a company of Space Marines? I imagine him sitting in the barracks talking to girls on his cell phone while all the other Marines go about their strict regimen of praying, training, and praying, and then he interrupts them and asks if they want to go into town and score some skeech, and they don't even really know what that is because probably he just made that word up but like I bet it's either sex or drugs or sex and drugs and then he gets inexplicably promoted to captain. Maybe his dad bought the chapter a new Land Raider or something.
Really I just feel like the developers betrayed their premise here. Why would you make a game about Ultramarines and then have the protagonist act like he isn't one? Why not just make the game about another chapter (the Space Wolves, for instance) that doesn't care so much what the Codex Astartes says? Or, I guess, why not just write the dialogue a little better and have Titus reinforce his decisions with passages from the Codex? In what feels like an attempt to pander to a large and lucrative demographic, Relic has introduced a great big plot hole into the world and then expected us to happily identify with it.
Feel free to hit the comment thread if you are unable to restrain yourself from mocking me about getting mad over Warhammer lore.
I AM MOCKING YOU!
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