In the grim darkness of the far future you will no longer get quite so violently annoyed with your Spiced Margerine battle-bros Chairon and Gadriel, because they will actually finish off flickering, near-dead Tyranids rather than waiting for you to clean up. Sometimes when I’m playing Space Marine 2‘s campaign, I feel like I’m trying to direct untrained child actors from the orchestra pit. No, don’t look at me, Gadriel – look at the Tyranid. He can only act concussed for so long. Hit him with your chainsword now, there’s a dear.
I get that the thinking behind Gadriel and Charion’s reluctance to carry out the finishing blow is that they’re saving the associated armour restoration for you, the player, but still, it don’t suspend ma disbelief, so I’m happy that they’ve tweaked the bot behaviour and much besides in the latest Space Marine 2 update.
“Various inhibiting restrictions were lifted, allowing bots to be more helpful and effective, while still not beating the game for the player,” explain the patch notes. In particular, restrictions on bots finishing enemies have been “heavily eased”, and bots are now allowed to help with Gargoyle objectives (e.g. stopping them swamping the antennae in that mission with the planetary defence guns). They’ll also help out focus-firing on zoanthropes – the flying psychic vermin with the shields who buff the regular nids and batter you with mind bullets. I really hate zoanthropes so colour me appeased by all this.
Bots aside, the update is a pretty copious overhaul of the game’s campaign, Operations mode, PvP offerings, and enemy behaviour at large. As regards the balancing, it’s a mixture of nerfs and boosts that seems healthy enough on paper. Enemies are less aggressive in the campaign on Veteran difficulty, for example, but player health has also been reduced a little to compensate for this and some armour management updates. It’s harder to stunlock all enemies with ranged attacks, but the accuracy of ranged enemies has also been reduced when attacking from off-screen, or when shooting at players in melee.
Spawn-killing in PvP will allegedly be “more difficult” thanks to tweaked spawn patterns, and what’s this, they’ve defanged the Vanguard’s grapple launcher a bit – it’ll now stagger and slow the target rather than inflicting a full stun. I haven’t played Vanguard in PvP but I remember how narked James got when I used the grapple to steal executions in co-op. I’m sure the class has its fair share of haters in the competitive modes.
It’s not all tweaks and fixes. The update also adds a sparring arena to the game’s Battle Barge, allowing rivalrous Battle-Brothers to rip chunks out of each other without entering a mission. It’s accessible directly from the Launch Bay. I like the idea of Saber expanding the small world of the Battle Barge, a meticulously lore-filled hub space full of crenelated background chatter. It’s a good place in which to mull over my on-going, slightly impromptu wider investigation of the Warhammer 40K universe, including possibilities for Warhammer 40K factory games.
Beyond that, the game now has the long-demanded ultrawide support on PC, together with some fresh visual customisation options, and there’s a new private Operation mode that lets you play alone with bots or with a single friend, without being matchmade with randos during the mission. Read the full patch notes here.