I’ve already said my piece on the hulking bugstomper in our Space Marine 2 review, but I’d like to celebrate one more thing about it – the photo mode. This is a fairly standard feature for a lot of blockbuster games, but in the world of Warhammer 40K there are so many mega-scale battles with pitch-perfect composition that I found it hard to resist hitting pause and taking a handful of snaps every few minutes. With a keen eye (and a beefy PC) you can capture some wonderfully violent moments.
Spoiler warning: I’ll be showing stuff from later in the game. So if you can’t stand the smell of development fluid, get out of the red room.
I’m sticking to snapshotting metaphors because, at times, it does feel like you become a war photographer of sorts. It shouldn’t be a huge surprise that a franchise built on the foundations of tabletop wargaming should know how to compose a cinematic battle scene. But the dedication to the atmosphere of interstellar conflict is still admirable. For fans of Starship Troopers gung-ho-ism, there are a lot of Klendathu drops in this game.
I said it in my review, but what gives these sequences their power is often simply the grandness of the environmental scenery. Say what you like about the zealous violence of an empire falling increasingly to ruin, they really know how to make a space cathedral (and then fill it with soldiers).
I wasn’t excited by the character of Titus, or any of the marines (even if I do admire the dialogue’s ride-or-die loyalty to the Warhammer 40K style guide). Yet the sheer weight of the art style carried me through the campaign with the ease of space marine carrying a sack of enemy heads. The campaign is filled with incidental detail that fleshes out the world. Little cyber cherubs floating in a spaceship’s chapel, dismembered bits of corspegore piling up at an abandoned chokepoint, firing squads mercilessly executing deserters.
A good photo mode is simple yet robust. But it’s only as good as its scenery and subject. In A Plague Tale: Requiem I had a similar snapshotting addiction, thanks to all the grubby medieval architecture and striking lighting. In Death Stranding, you could make the hero Sam take different poses. In Space Marine 2, there’s something similar, but it’s limited to the expression on your marine’s face. But this at least means you can make sure Titus is roaring appropriately when he is hammering a heretic or preparing to catch a leaping beakboi in your action shots.
So yeah, I guess all I want to do is reiterate how sumptuous the game looks, and give an appreciative nod to the pause menu polaroid. I’m still not getting into Warhammer 40K (you can’t make me) but in taking the time to stop and soak up the smoke and textures and particle effects, I have a new appreciation for this war torn world.