Space Marine 2 draws its visual inspiration directly from the tabletop

In the fiction of Warhammer 40,000Space Marines are the ideal bio-engineered soldiers, transhuman demigods armed to the teeth with bolter rifles, power fists and heavily constructed armour. They are the flagships of the setting and the original Space Marine video game in 2011 was one of the best manifestations of this ultimate power fantasy. The closer we get to the launch of Space Marines 2 In September, developer Saber Interactive revealed more information about how the game draws heavily on the tabletop game and its graphics to bring Titus and his crew to life.

“[Our visual inspiration] is 99% tabletop models and almost nothing else. Believe it or not, the production of each character in our game started with the construction of the miniature,” Dmitriy Grigorenko, lead game designer, told Polygon in a recent email interview. “It’s easier to understand how the model works and how it should be animated when you can rotate it with your own hands. Of course, some adjustments had to be made so that the final figure doesn’t look like a blown-up toy, but it all starts with miniatures. In the end, even people who weren’t Warhammer fans have a huge collection of miniatures on their desks.”

Image: Saber Interactive/Focus Entertainment

In the election campaign, Titus will be much darker and more reserved than in his original portrayal. “Titus was kidnapped by the Inquisition and that weighed heavily on him. That happened because he was very open and it cost him dearly,” said Grigorenko. “Now he is back in the same company he used to run and almost nobody knows him.”

Titus must fight his way through two planets; the first is a death world, a place barely suitable for human habitation. “The entire surface of the planet is covered with deadly and completely inhospitable jungles,” Grigorenko says. “It has never been a nice place to live, but now, with a Tyranid plague, it’s even worse.”

The second planet is a Hive World, similar to the setting of Warhammer 40,000: Darktide. Hive Cities house billions of people in vast vertical cities, ranging from underground apartment blocks to massive gothic towers. These are dense, highly detailed environments, and when the Tyranids swarm en masse, the game can get hectic. During a technical demo I tried last year, controlling Titus felt similar to the original Space Marine. The enemies, however – the swarming, endless hordes of Tyranids – are quite different.

“Tyranid swarms were obviously a big technical challenge. But we have our own proprietary engine that is perfect for such tasks,” said Grigorenko. “An earlier version of the engine was used for World War Z; it allowed us to have 500 zombies on the screen. However, with Space Marines 2we had to become even bigger both qualitatively and quantitatively.”

While the single-player campaign involves facing an asymmetric enemy with insurmountable obstacles, the multiplayer mode focuses on six-on-six combat between squads of Space Marines.

Image: Saber Interactive/Focus Entertainment

The Ultramarines and Thousand Sons are both Space Marine Chapters that appear in the main campaign, albeit with entirely different histories and alliances. Multiplayer gets even more detailed. Players can take part in Space Marine battles and choose one of six classes: Tactical, Assault, Vanguard, Bulwark, Sniper, and Heavy. Class loadouts and customization also allow players to swap out every single piece of their armor – gauntlets, wargear, greaves, helmets, pauldrons, and breastplates can all be swapped out. This detailed system lets players recreate bright yellow Imperial Fists, mysterious and cloaked Dark Angels, the Nurgle-infested Death Guard, and raging Berserkers of Khorne.

It’s great to see so much love and attention being given to the tabletop game that gave us the original representation of Space Marines. Hopefully we can see some of the fun tabletop variants originally as cosmetics, like the classic beak helmet. I didn’t play Space Marines 2 since the technical demo, but the insights into the multiplayer content are fascinating.

The board game can be a bit slow, with dice rolling, movement measurement and the occasional checking of a codex – but Space Marines 2 looks like a much faster and more immediate interpretation of transhuman struggles and eternal wars, but still pays tribute to the roots of the setting.