You’re an 8-foot tall, walking tank. You’ve been bred for war, brainwashed since a child to kill in the name of a corpse on a throne. You hack and shoot and kill on the orders of an obscene hierarchy, one that sacrifices people in their millions for the sake of a decrepit, dying society—the Imperium. That is the central theme, the beating heart of Warhammer 40K. In the latest game, Saber Interactive’s Space Marine 2, you’re made to feel every inch the super solider you play as. Never does it ask you to engage with its satire.
I’ve long enjoyed Warhammer 40K, but so often the people who write fiction for the setting struggle to handle the black satire that sits at the heart of the setting. It reminds me first of a series of video essays from Lindsay Ellis discussing the Michael Bay Transformers movies. In one video, Ellis broke down the first film by casting aside the vacant Sam Witwicky and positioning Mikaela Banes as the real protagonist. Despite her agency, her arc and character growth, the camera never pans away from showing the audience her chest or rear end. Ellis ends her essay with a quote that can help us understand how Space Marine 2 doesn’t do Warhammer’s satire justice.
“Framing and aesthetics supersede the rest of the text—always, always, always.”
I don’t hate the game. In fact I enjoyed my time with it the whole way through. I enjoyed it as much as I did with the first Space Marine when I played in high school. The problem is there’s a non-insignificant sexist, racist, and toxic portion of the Warhammer fanbase that tend to think the Imperium is correct in its methods. Newcomers might play it and not understand what the setting is truly about. That would be a shame.
In Space Marine 2, you play as Titus, a titular space marine who’s been ousted from his chapter under false suspicion of heresy by the zealous and paranoid Imperium. He’s reunited with his chapter once more, the Ultramarines, and sent to stop a splinter fleet of insectoid Tyranids from Hive Fleet Leviathan there to devour several planets and all who reside there. The Imperium is less concerned with that as it is a weapon of such supposed strength it’s worth not just blowing up all three planets to stop the invasion there and then.
And then with little preamble, you’re into it. You’re hacking your chainsword through waves of hormagaunts and termagants with little time for the whys. The first mission you take in the game is to launch a virus bomb into the atmosphere of the first planet you visit, a jungle world called Kadaku. In 40K, these are terrifying weapons of mass destruction. They don’t just kill one species of marauding insects, they destroy and dismantle all life on a planet. Books like Galaxy in Flames and Tallarn show the devastation caused by those bombs and the “life-eater virus.” But in Space Marine 2, the detonation does nothing to the planet. It only, supposedly, slows the Tyranids down. It’s a missed opportunity to show the devastation that the Imperium can deploy. It’s too preoccupied with heroic last stands and empty proclamations of brotherhood.
The story of Space Marine 2 continues directly from the first game released nearly 13 years ago. In that title, Titus is sent to a different planet stop an invasion of Orks. In the process, he’s betrayed and becomes embroiled in another invasion by the forces of Chaos, the mortal enemies of the Imperium. After killing practically every Ork he comes across and stopping the ork invasion near-single handedly, instead of being treated as a hero Titus is shamed. He’s taken away by members of the Inquisition—the Imperium’s jackboot intergalactic secret police force—simply because his compatriots are so paranoid about his supposed resistance to the metaphysical powers manipulated by the forces of Chaos.
The sequel starts with Titus forced to hide his identity as a blackshield–a member of the Deathwatch, a pan-chapter anti-xenos task force of outcast and penitent Space Marines. He’s reunited with his chapter, the Ultramarines (in the tabletop, they’re affectionately called “Smurfs”), after he’s gravely injured fighting the invading Tyranids. He is offered another chance, but those who know his past remain wary. It’s subtle but players can tell our main character is still feeling the sting of betrayal. He’s not forthcoming at all with the fellow members of his squad, but he’s the only one who protests when the Imperium seems bent on recreating the same superweapon that brought about the chaos invasion from the first game.
Titus can never question the system that hurt him. He can never voice his complaints about the Inquisition or the chapter that abandoned him. Instead, the game is too focused on just how much of a good space marine Titus is. His arc surrounds him learning to trust his brothers once more after being castigated for so long. In the final chapters of the game, big Papa Smurf himself, Chapter Master Marneus Calgar, comes down like an angel to Titus in his hour of need. He tells our hero that he was indeed right all along, that the reason he can resist chaos so well is because he’s just so good at being a Space Marine. They win. Titus is honored and is given a place at Calgar’s side. Everybody’s happy.
The story of Space Marine 2 isn’t nearly as grand and epic as its arenas, setpieces, and environments. Titus’ voice actor, Clive Standen, offers a performance that emphasizes the underlying reserved power of a centuries-old Space Marine. And yet, the most you comprehend of 40K’s satire stems from the spare dataslate audio logs and the few sequences where you watch regular human soldiers get shot for daring to run away from the hoard of 8-foot-tall ravenous bug monsters. That whole time, you’re just moving from one arena to the next, ready to kill giant murdering bugs or chaos cultists. The framing is heroic. The aesthetic is badassery. It doesn’t matter the context for the game, even if it were portrayed effectively.
Other 40K games, like the first Dawn of War RTS, manage to handle the satire slightly better, but I don’t think there’s been any better example of how to do it than with the recent Owlcat RPG Warhammer 40,000: Rogue Trader.
I ran through Rogue Trader from beginning to end on a Steam Deck before the latest patches and updates made it, ostensibly, more playable. It was buggy and unbalanced. The last chapter of the game was obviously rushed, and half the storylines come to such a rough conclusion it felt like I was at the far end of a train where each car is just crashing into the next. But the game handles both the Imperium and Space Marines with far more nuance than this latest third person shooter. The RPG allows you to take three separate tracks. You’re either an imperium sycophant, a chaos worshiper, or an “iconoclast.” In other words, you’re an anti-imperial humanist trying to carve out your own dominion of a small patch of space.
It’s an Owlcat RPG, so of course you have companions you collect throughout the game. At one point in the game, you come across Ulfar, a space marine from the Space Wolves chapter. The chapter is coded like Vikings of the 9th and 10th century, and they often get to act as the good guys compared to the Imperium’s obtuse paranoia and xenophobia. In Rogue Trader, the writers at Owlcat managed to make Ulfar completely alien to you or the rest of your human companions. His voice actor, Oliver Smith, offered us a deep, rumbling, snarling rendition of a super soldier whose humanity is distorted and nearly dismantled. The way to gain his trust is by understanding him and his culture.
Or, as a good member of the Imperium, you could decry him and his anarchistic ways. There’s a lot of silliness in this game, and that’s to its benefit. Warhammer is a silly setting. It was born out of the 1980s anti-Thatcherism movement. The name of the Ultramarines doesn’t stem from just how good Space Marines they are, but from the deep blue color of their armor. Warhammer is big, bombastic, silly, and constantly biting. The satire should bite harder than a Tyranid Hive Tyrant or a ripping chainsword. In Space Marine 2, it tries to ignore the issues at the setting’s heart for the sake of a simple power fantasy.
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