I bounced off the first Space Marine (2011). Wasn’t really a hack and slash person. I played a lot of Dawn of War in high school, and then the Batman Arkham games in college, and Space Marine wasn’t really like either of those. Dawn of War was an Age of Empires-type strategy game, and Batman was a much more cerebral, atmospheric beat em up. Space Marine by comparison felt like an oafish hack and slash – it never quite clicked. Space Marine 2 (2024) fucking rocks. The character movement has a weight that belies the sensitivity of the controls. It’s heavy, but not a button masher. It demands a certain level of timing and responsiveness to enemy attacks, with subtleties around positioning and placement. And the environment is so ornate – it starts with these worlds under siege from Tyranids, the evil omnivorous space lizards in Warhammer 40K, and it’s all writhing organic pods crashing into planets and spilling out monsters over elaborate architectural wonders. There’s a stark contrast between the neo-Catholic sci-fi cathedrals and the ravenous Tyranids, between flesh and stone, hunger and the institution. That aesthetic shift helps the game click into place.

We were talking recently about Star Wars Zero Company, the recently-released XCOM clone set in the Star Wars universe. We’ve seen a few of these types of games where an existing franchise borrows a genre or style and coats it in the franchise universe – and they’re most successful, I’d suggest, when they use the trappings of the genre to say something about the universe they draw from. Zero Company doesn’t really have that much to say, for my money, whereas something like Jedi Fallen Order (borrowing from Dark Souls) has a lot to say about place and identity. Space Marine 2 is in the latter group. It has stuff to say. The ten-plus years of graphical advances help, but even if the original Space Marine was remastered, it came out during the era of the mud-brown colour palette in video games – it just doesn’t have the same aesthetic underpinnings. Space Marine is about Orks raiding an industrial planet. There’s a sense that they emerge from the planet itself – they manifest the polluted, industrial wasteland, the dirty clouds and poisoned water. Their aesthetic of scrappy, poorly welded iron junk aligns with the aesthetic of an industrialised factory planet: it’s all brown on brown. The Tyranids are much more at odds with their environment. The colour schemes of Tyranid purple clash against Imperium gold-plated steel and concrete. There’s almost a sense that the Tyranids are tarnishing the Imperium through their mere presence. At the end of any given battle, the deliberate, careful structures of the Imperial city are coated in blood and ichor and dismembered Tyranids. Their actual physical flesh reads as a violation: they get alien blood all over the triumphal arch. They are a messy, violent biological impulse that clashes with the rising idealism of palaces and towers.

Space Marine 2 is set across three worlds – Kadaku, a jungle world, Avarax, the industrial planet pictured above, and Demerium, a tomb world. The first two particularly embody the thematic contrast between the Imperium and the Tyranids. The jungle on Kadaku, which features overgrown relics and ruins, and ancient statues consumed by natural forces, is a vision of what the Imperium stands to lose. It portrays the achievement of civilisation brought down by a creeping biological tide. The industrial planet Avarax shows the Imperium at its height. It is a pristine construct, a complex ecosystem – like the jungle, but engineered by human hands, driven by intention and thought. The jungle, and the Tyranids, are mindless. They consume thoughtlessly, with no impulse other than the base biological drive to reproduce and spread. Space Marine 2 is thus a classic conflict between nature and civilisation. It’s about the struggle to maintain a society in the face of natural forces. And the skies – ugh, they just have such an eye for colour and cloud.

The genre of hack and slash also speaks to that thematic opposition between nature and civilisation. There are obvious precursors to the imagery of hacking at nature, whether it’s pastoralists cutting back bush to create fields for agriculture or European colonial explorers hacking through the jungle (“Dr Livingstone, I presume?”). It’s a long-standing trope with deep roots in our cultural history. It carries a potent symbolic charge – civilisation is imposed on the wilderness by force, through violence and action. Nature sprawls and creeps, it infects, it spreads. It’s disorderly and untamed, unplanned. The hack and slash gameplay is the effort to control nature, beating it back when it threatens to extend beyond its bounds. It has a violent physicality that echoes the bestial natural world but is elevated by its service to civilisation. If this is all sounding very racist, by the way, that’s – you’ve read that correctly. It should put you in mind of the colonial era, pith hats and African safaris, Rudyard Kipling – all that sort of thing. This is the same legacy that we touched on with Kenneth Clark’s Civilisation. Tyranids in 40K represent the untamed natural world. Their physical bodies represent the innumerable forces of nature, and you hack and slash at them like some colonial explorer hacking away at vines in the jungle. The gameplay is routinely gory. As with DOOM (2016), there are execution actions where you can take a nearly defeated enemy and rip it apart in an explosion of blood and innards. The executions emphasise flesh as the key characteristic of the Tyranids. That aspect is also present in their nature as a swarm, as flesh undifferentiated. Several sequences have unholy hordes of Tyranids bearing down on you, and you have to try and shoot them down before they get to you – and you blast away, explosive rounds ripping through the horde, which continues undeterred. The most powerful aspect of Tyranid flesh is its abundance. There are plenty of moments where you can get overrun, swarmed by so many little bastards (or big bastards) that there’s just no clean way to fight them off. The Tyranids are a roiling mass of flesh. They stream like water. The classic video game trope of hundreds of faceless enemies works in the game’s favour; it accentuates the framing of the Tyranids as a ravenous unending horde, as avatars of the biological imperative.

Those of you who are familiar with the game might be wondering here about the obvious gap – that is, the Tyranids are the main enemy only in the first half of the game. About halfway through, the Tyranid leader, the Hive Tyrant, is defeated, and the horde is dispersed. The second half of the game is taken up with battling the Thousand Sons, forces of Chaos who use the Tyranid invasion as cover to swoop in and cause problems. The aesthetic of the Thousand Sons is diametrically opposed to the Tyranids. When you execute a Thousand Sons Rubric Marine, there’s no blood at all – their bodies have long ago turned to dust, and their armour is held together by psychic force. The Thousand Sons are fleshless. They are aligned with the third world in the game, Demerium, the tomb world, where there is no life at all. It’s all barren rock and tombstones, and buried mechanical secrets. The vision of Space Marine 2 is not, therefore, as simple as flesh against the city. Flesh and fleshlessness are two diverging paths, two forms of deviation. There’s a satisfying unity to that pairing – it’s well-structured, but the Thousand Sons section I think has less resonance with the hack and slash gameplay. It doesn’t carry the same symbolic charge. If Space Marine 2 only had the second half of the game, it’d be less than half as good.