Ramblings of a Madman

This game is a breath of fresh air. There is no politics. There is no message. There is only war.

The Campaign

The campaign is short. It’s easy to play through in roughly 10 hours. However, this game provides more story in those 10 hours than most single player games of late have been able to do in double that.

It starts with dropping onto the planet Kadaku, where you play through a tutorial mission that ends with your character receiving seemingly mortal wounds. Or, what would be mortal wounds for anyone who isn’t a 9 foot tall modified human who wears a literal ton of armor.

The pacing is decent, with cutscenes between the missions that are just right. Not too long, nor too short, always to the point.

The character interactions are fantastic. Each conversation is short and well thought. Even the ones that are had by two random marines or a marine and a servitor while walking through the battle barge are extremely fitting.

Character Highlights

The three main characters, Lieutenant Titus, Brother Chairon, and Brother Gadriel, make up your squad, and feel like real people. The two npc’s in Chairon and Gadriel have their own backstories, and that plays a role in how they interact with and treat Lieutenant Titus, the player character.

Chairon and Gadriel eventually learn to trust Titus and even respect him just as the main campaign ends and Titus gets pulled off on another mission, and Titus feels the same. Going through hell and back will do that to people.

The campaign isn’t the only offering. Once that’s over, there are PvE and PvP modes in Operations and Eternal War respectively. A horde mode and sparring arena are also in the works.

What to do after the campaign

The two currently available modes don’t come without their own set of issues. PvE is relatively forgiving in the first two tiers, and downright punishing in the latter two. If your blocking, parrying, and dodging skills aren’t on point, you are going to hate life.

The weapons all feel good and there aren’t any that are worse than the rest. That is to say there aren’t weapons that could be considered better than the others. The Melta’s feel particularly powerful, even if limited in ammo.

Operations Missions are relatively linear in scope. The enemy mobs change, but the main events and bosses stay the same. The maps are static, and the devs have stated that for lore reasons they can’t really use procedural generation. I respect it.

There are six in total, and they effectively run concurrently with the campaign missions. While Titus and his squad are doing their mission, you are taking on the role of a second squad running these missions, so there are story elements involved. These missions are where the real replayability resides.

Player versus Player

PvP is, well, PvP. It was an addition that isn’t an afterthought, but you can tell it isn’t the focus. The only real progression is in unlocking weapons and armor pieces, and there aren’t many maps or modes available.

On the one side are the loyalist marines, in which you have the same customization options available that you have in Operations. On the other are the Chaos Marines, which, due to lore reasons, have very limited customization. You can change the colors, but that is basically it.

High Gothic Sci-Fi

The setting is amazing, and it’s one of my personal favorites. I dubbed it High Gothic Science Fiction. I may not be the first, but I like it. Saber truly captured the sheer scope of this universe.

The buildings are massive and ornate, the people are tiny and haggard. The enemies are numerous and extremely satisfying to kill, whether that occurs through regular attacks or executions.

Perfect parries stagger your opponents, opening them up to a salvo of violence. Perfect dodges allow for free headshots. Executions refill one pip of armor. It’s a truly simple system that, when mastered, feels amazing.

The Flaws…

It isn’t without it’s flaws. There are bugs, but apart from the connectivity issues, none of them are overly gamebreaking. Some of them occur in the math in the background, one being that with certain weapon combos the ammo crates don’t refill both weapons to max. The simple fix for that one is to simply swap to your other weapon and hit the box again.

The lobby issues are the worst ones. Random disconnects suck no matter what you’re trying to play. They have been working on adding server capacity in an effort to alleviate these issues.

Another complaint, that isn’t really a bug in my opinion, is loading into a lobby where someone else has already chosen the class you are trying to play as. When you don’t have other classes leveled, this makes higher difficulties much harder to run through.

Final thoughts

All in all, this is exactly what the industry needed. It’s a testosterone fueled power fantasy, and that’s okay. It also sells really well, as they’ve climbed over 2 million units sold. I don’t think it’s going to hit the numbers that Black Myth Wukong did, as the setting is too niche and the violence might be too much for some.

Is it perfect? No. Is it something that you will need to sink hundreds, if not thousands of hours into to feel satisfied? Also no.

Saber didn’t set out to make a game like that. They set out to make something that could be played and enjoyed for 10 or 100 hours, or whenever you feel as though you’ve gotten your money’s worth.

And the best part? They don’t expect you to pay for anything more than what you want. Everything in the game is unlockable by playing, and the only things that have been added via DLC is more cosmetic options.

Go forth and purge heretics and kill xenos, brothers. You won’t regret it.