Conclusion

Warhammer 40,000: Space Marine 2 is a third-person action game developed by Saber Interactive and published by Focus Entertainment, set in the famous Warhammer 40K universe. You are playing as an Ultramarine who is tasked with leading his squad against the deadly alien hordes of the Tyranids. The single-player campaign puts you in the middle of massive, chaotic battles where you'll need to switch seamlessly between powerful ranged gunplay and brutal melee combat. The gameplay reminded me of DOOM and Gears of War. While the maps are completely linear, they feel like vast battlefields with hordes of enemies like in Starship Troopers. The atmosphere is both dark and epic, with towering gothic architecture and a sense of constant danger, immersing players in the heart of an ongoing war. You may even team up with two more friends to face the enemies together.

In my playthrough I'm having lots of fun and to me this feels like the best game to introduce you to the lore of the Warhammer Universe. Personally, I would have preferred a little bit less focus on melee, but the combat is alright overall. Thanks to the roots in the Warhammer Universe, the story feels interesting and well-thought-through. Good game, but a little bit short I hear.

Graphics
Visually, Warhammer: Space Marine 2 looks good, especially the open world battlefield areas are impressive—there's always something interesting going on in the background. The indoor areas are well-crafted and try to be dark and claustrophobic without overdoing it, they are not relying on jump scares. Overall the visuals are "good," maybe "very good," but not as amazing as we've seen in some recent Unreal Engine 5 titles like Hellblade 2: Senua's Saga, Black Myth: Wukong, or The Last of Us. Under the hood, the game uses the Saber Interactive in-house "Swarm" engine, which does a great job at creating the hordes of enemies. It is still apparent that this isn't a 2024-modern engine. If you look closely, shadows and lighting are a bit dated, even though the map designers did a great job manually placing "interesting" elements throughout the maps, like light shafts or colored reflections. Reflections are screen-space, they still look good, again, thanks to well-thought-out maps without reflection spam. There is no support for ray tracing in Space Marine 2.

The FOV is a bit narrow and can't be adjusted, and there's some noticeable texture pop-in as you traverse the maps, or when the scene changes in a cutscene.

Shader Stutter and Accessibility
Unlike many recent titles, especially those utilizing Unreal Engine, Space Marine 2 does not suffer from shader compilation issues or shader stuttering. While the game has a "compiling shaders" screen at the start, this only takes a few seconds. Also, during map traversal there is some shader compilation going on, but it doesn't cause any stuttering and operates extremely smoothly—good job! I do appreciate the difficulty options, while not as extensive as in Star Wars Outlaws, it's still better than "Black Myth Wukong", which has a single difficulty—"git gud, we don't care." This opens the game to a wide range of players, of all ages and skill levels. There's also options to adjust the game for color-blindness.

Effects & Upscalers
Space Marine 2 has support for NVIDIA DLSS and AMD FSR 2. It's surprising that even though the game is AMD-sponsored, and one of their top bundle titles this season, there is no support for FSR 3. What's also missing is frame generation, not even on AMD. Even with upscaling disabled, there is some kind of always-on sharpening filter that's fairly distracting, no idea why they don't just give us a slider for it. The settings make you believe that you can turn off motion blur, but the "off" setting is actually "motion_blur_low"—I verified this by checking the config file. It's encrypted by the way, not sure who came up with the idea to make it that user-unfriendly. It's just zlib + XOR + MD5 hash, easy enough to crack.

Hardware Requirements
Hardware requirements of the game are quite reasonable, definitely lower than most AAA titles that we've seen in 2024. In order to reach 60 FPS at 1080p, ultra settings, without upscaling, you just need a RTX 4060 or RX 7600 XT—nice! Got a 1440p monitor? Then you need a RTX 3070 Ti, RX 6800, RX 7700 XT or RTX 4070. 4K60? That's in reach for RTX 4080 and faster, and AMD RX 7900 XTX. The RX 7900 XT is pretty close with 55 FPS. At lower resolution, the game is a little bit CPU-limited, on our 14900K test system, the limit seems to be at around 150 FPS. This also depends on the in-game location and should be more pronounced with weaker CPUs, even though we tested with the latest patch, which adds "optimizations for high-end CPUs." As always we opted for our own custom test scene, which is located in a typical outdoors area, with vegetation, some water and a bunch of NPCs. All GPU vendors have released game-ready drivers for Space Marine 2.

Settings Performance Scaling
The performance scaling of Space Marine 2 is pretty good, going from ultra to low, you can increase FPS by roughly +60%, which is quite decent. What's surprising is that the game looks almost identical no matter the actual settings. Our comparison screenshots show that the biggest difference is the texture quality. If settings profiles are available, then why not make sure they offer meaningful differences, in both quality and performance. Black Myth Wukong handles this much better, letting you triple the FPS with just settings.

VRAM
Our VRAM testing shows that Space Marine 2 isn't that dependent on VRAM. Even at ultra settings, we stayed below 10 GB usage. During longer gameplay sessions, the VRAM usage will go beyond that, but overall the game is not demanding in terms of VRAM. Our benchmarks confirm this, the RTX 4060 Ti 8 GB runs at virtually the same FPS as the RTX 4060 Ti 16 GB, even at 1440p and 4K.

Overall, Warhammer 40,000 Space Marine 2 is one of the best Warhammer action games and a great gateway into the universe. I'm not a tabletop games guy, but I almost feel tempted to pick up a book from the Black Library next. While the replay value of the game isn't that high, despite the multiplayer aspect, it seems that Saber Interactive will add more content to the game in the coming weeks and months.