One final Space Marine 2 Preview – “Those Tyranids want to f*** you up”

thesixthaxis.com:

Chainswords chewing through chitinous armour, gratuitous gore soaking the war-torn soil, you’d be forgiven for forgetting that Space Marine 2 has a story to tell. It seems like a long time since we last met Ultramarine Titus, and it is, with the original game launching on the Xbox 360, PlayStation 3, PC and even the long-forgotten streaming service OnLive in 2011.

Things haven’t turned out all that well for old Titus in the interim, and as we surmised in our hands-on at last year’s Gamescom, he’s been skulking around in the edges of the Imperium, dishonoured and sent to deal with the universe’s worst threats as a member of the Deathwatch.

Let’s forget about all that for a moment though, and go back to those chainswords. Space Marine 2 is the best representation of Warhammer 40,000’s brutalistic sci-fi world we’ve ever had, and while that might mean cribbing from Microsoft’s own Gears of War, I’m willing to bet that the guys at the Coalition and Epic Games have a few Ultramarines squirrelled away in their drawers.

Everything is circular though, as Chief Creative Officer Tim Willits is clear to point out: “40K has influenced so much. I mean, just look at my history; if you get the original Doom Space Marine, what does that look like? If you look at the Lancer chainsaw and Gears of War, where did that come from? If you look at the power armour in Fallout, what does that look like?”

Tim Willits is a man that knows about explosive gunplay. His CV is a cavalcade of weaponry-heavy classics, with his time at id Software covering iconic franchises like Doom, Quake, and Rage. He clearly loves the format, words tripping over themselves in his excitement to talk about Space Marine 2, and how they’ve pushed its own combat forward, “We looked at the push-forward combat in the original Space Marine, you know, and we discussed that and then we added glory kills in 2016 which looked gorgeous in Space Marine 2. I’m like, ‘that’s f****** awesome, do more of that!’ you know?”

That push