So, the long awaited space marine's demo is now available, I am just wondering about people first impressions?

For my part I think THQ and Relic have excelled themselves yet again. It's like the game developers set out to show gears how its done. It is visually impressive, and the combat is somewhat stunning. The weapons seem well designed, and the health mechanic rewards players for getting stuck in without feeling out of place.

As for qualms with it, well it doesnt feel as strategically deep as games like gears, once a fight begins its basically blast away and swing your chainsword/power axe until all the orks are dead. But I can live with that.

Anyone else tried it and got impressions to share?

I played it and quite enjoyed it for what it was. I don't think it's fair to compare Gears to Space Marine though, one is a strategic based take cover shooter, and the other is a hack and slash and shoot game.

The health system was a little wonky to me, I'd be in the middle of doing a B attack to gain some health and all the while i'm being hit enough to make any health gain negligible.

The weapon selection was really nice though, I feel like the bolters could be tweaked a little bit, I never felt like they were as powerful as they should've.

Bottom line though is that the game was a lot of fun, and I like being a massive marine charging around and killing things.

Sorry if this seems poorly thought out, It's still really early.

I was dissapointed by the lack of strategic depth of the game, although it was stupid of me to expect it to have any beyond "pay attention to where the explosives are" or similar things. I do feel that the game gives you a lot of tools to try and resolve things through ranged combat if you feel that chainsword isn't your thing.

The squad mates were a positive surprise. They neither finish encounters for you, nor act completely retarded and useless. Again, a measure of control over them would be nice, but at least they know how to handle themselves and be useful to you.

Fighting is a simplistic delight. It's still too early on for me to declare if it's "easy to learn, hard to master", so I won't make any further considerations on it. Other than it's a lot of fun.

The disappearance of corpses and blood annoys me. After a pitched battle, I want to look behind me and see the carnage I wrought dammit! Especially so soon after fast and furious minutes of over the top violence. Good for not clogging up resources and keep things smooth, not so good for further ego-stroking. Duke Nukem Forever, for all its awkward development decisions, at least allowed you to play around with the enemies' corpses.

Ork voices were... wildly fluctuant in quality. Sometimes (Nobz especially) you really felt like you were dealing with a deranged mass of murderous muscle, sometimes you felt like you were kicking a foolhardy lad that fell inside a large barrel of green paint before changing into his work clothes. I'm not sure why they ditched the cockney accents.

Greatest complaint.... Demo too short. xD

LockLock said:

I agree with you on corpses, after all dow as an RTS pratically lead the way in persistant bodies and landscape scarring. But I think if the blood were persistant then by about 3 fights in your armour would be red instead of blue. I was very pleased with finishing my first fight and seeing the sheer amount of blood on my armour, made me feel like I had truly lain waste to those foul xenos.

I think that the bolters are some of the nicest looking bolters I have seen in a video game, I always felt the DoW ones didnt get the clunky hefty explosive feel of a bolter across properly. Having said that I agree that I think the bolter should have been more powerful, but taken much longer to reload. The way I imagine space marines fighting is emptying their clip as the orks close and then as the bolter runs dry charging into the softened up horde, but I felt like a clip wasn't that much damage in the face of an ork horde or nob. And in the RPG (which I think this was at least partially modelled on judging from the stalker boltgun) a bolter takes approximately 10 seconds to reload.

One thing that was extremely pleasant was crashing to ground on a jump pack in the center of an ork horde

Demo is Medicore in my opinion. I was hoping for less speed but a bit more tactic in combat, tiny bit. As for now its charge, kill all, watch cutscene, repeat.

I liked 2nd level with jetpack, i hope that at least half of game will give u possibility of going with JP.

Shame that game dont give u any possibility in customising your character in SP. Other than that: Smurf 2nd company yet again.

Judging from the previews I have seen it looks an average shooter that wouldn't get any significant success without the IP.

Alex

I find it quite good, and even if not really tactical you can manage your action and avoid parts of the ennemy horde just by cautious advance and good aim.

The melee is pretty brutal and deadly for your PC, i've only play the game in dfficult mode so don't knows for easiest level, but if you go too far in the melee you die. If you didn't take a look for ork shooter when you're in melee you die. And god what happy gretchins, I like those, they are useless and do pretty much no damage and can be smashed with fist, but they make their job, be in your leg, lost time and being shoot by ork on uperground.

The jump pack mission was also good but shorter than the first and same remark than sooner in the topic, the demo is too short.

I noticed in the advertisement for the Demo that Tricia Helfer is declaring to everyone that she is a Space Marine

Is she suddenly ashamed of her Cylon heritage?

peterstepon said:

No, she just likes an easy paycheck.

ak-73 said:

This. From the demo the game is enjoyable but mediocre at best. Just smash the 'x' button and away you go. What escalated the enjoyment for me was the immersion of the 40K setting, the attention to detail was very good. So i might get it purely based on the IP, but i am going to wait for full reviews first but i suspect they will be along the lines of 'an average third person shooter that will only be truly enjoyable for fans of the 40k setting'.

Replicant253 said:

I don't think it is any more reliant on the IP than say Deathwatch. The deathwatch system, particularly as sold isn't the best designed thing in the world, you mash the full auto button while the bad guys die, and it is full of typos, the RP equivalent of bugs. But the pleasure of stomping around as a space marine basically sells it to me on its own

ak-73 said:

The same thing can be said about the Dawn of War games.


Anyway, I played it. It was fun. It wasn't all that good, but it certainly wasn't terrible. It's an above average shooter elevated by the fact that you're a big Space Marine clomping around in power armour. Strip that away and there isn't much depth of finesse to the game. Hell I didn't even feel like I was fighting the Nobs - just hitting them to reduce their HP whilst they went through their attack animation before I dodged out of the way.

BYE

H.B.M.C. said:

Which I only played the demo of once. RTS sucks in my book.

Alex

Narkasis Broon said:

No, the Deathwatch RPG is what I make of it and flaws in the system are fairly easy to fix. You have comparable amount of freedom with that video game.

Alex

Overall feeling from the demo is positive although I would have preferred to see some other first founding chapter than Ultramarines and I didnt like that all marines were without helmets. The demo glitched on me when I needed to drop the cannon, couldn't activate the button. I had to kill myself with grenades and try again, the button worked on the second try. Has anyone else experienced this?

I have to say, I'm pretty underwhelmed by the demo. It wasn't bad per se, but very simplistic and repetitive. I'd much prefer if the game was more tactical. On the plus side, it worked very well in high details, medium shadows on my three years old notebook, and the controls worked reasonably well (though I still had more fun after hooking up an Xbox pad).

At this point, not sure if I'll buy it.

I quite liked the demo.

Was it only me or is the jetpack mission much easier than the other one?

And the Launcher doesn't do anything useful for me. I tried to use it to create a minefield, but it didn't detonate when the orks went over it.
Then I tried to shoot them directly which made the bombs stick to the orks and go off when the ork died, which most of the time was in melee range.

Can someone tell me how to use it smartly? Or does it just not work right yet?

Umbranus said:

Took me a while to figure out too. The launcher can only deploy a maximum of 6 bombs, with the oldest one detonating when the next one is placed if there are 6 already active. That's the slow way of doing things. The quick way is to press the reload button - that manually detonates the bombs (the launcher doesn't have distinct magazines like the bolters or bolt pistol, so the reload button needs to do something else).

Thanks for the info.

www.youtube.com/watch - Space Marine demo combat with some added epic music! =D

Needless to say, I love this demo! I'll get the game for sure!

Looking at the first half of it, to me it looks incredibly boring with its fancy visuals and the epic music being unable to hide its repetitive gameplay.

Alex

ak-73 said:

If you feel that way then it's definitely not the game for you! =) Hopefully you will find another, more awesome game, to fulfill your needs!

Personally I'm very happy that I enjoy the game, it will be awesome playing a Warhammer 40k game that is more "down to earth" than previous 40k games. Space Marine, here I come!

I checked out the demo and played the two missions, and I have to say I really enjoyed it! My big complaint is that armor doesn't protect you much in the game as far as I can tell. Seems like it's only there for looks

Still, pretty badass overall, and definitely gonna be a day one purchase for me. My plan is to pick it up and finish it in time for Gears of War 3, so I can give GoW3 my full, undivided attention on 9/20/11. ****, but September is gonna be an awesome console gaming month for me!

Woot!

I enjoyed the demo quite a bit. I thought it was visually appealing, it got the movement of the orks and Marines right and the combat was a lot of fun. I really like the spec. kills and Im hoping for a few new ones in the actual game.

The only gripes i have with it is that there isnt a crouch or a button to push up against a wall etc. it would have been nice to have one to ambush the orks with and that you didnt appear to have any control over your squad. I would have like to instruct them to supply suppressive fire whilst i snuck around the Orks but all in all a good demo and im looking forwards to the games release

Liked the demo (am I the only one who couldn't run in, slash everything I wanted and move on?), the flow of battle was a bit different since I wasn't immune to damage when doing executions and thus had to time them.

The bolter was autofire, a bit dissapointing but not unexpected, one has to pander to none fans as well in order to sell more copies and it helps keep weapons distinct gameplay wise.

Jetpack was overpowered, why use weapons at all if you had one?

WIll be getting this, partly due to the IP but mostly for the co-op. 5 player co-op? DO WANT!