We were talking last week about the symbolism of flesh in Space Marine 2 – how the genre of hack and slash lines up with cultural narratives of civilisation beating back rampant nature. That’s part of the power of the game – how theme and game mechanic are aligned. Space Marine 2 also has a really curious structure for its overarching campaign. There are three gameplay modes – the campaign, multi-player missions, and a PvP combat mode where players can fight against each other. This structure broadly seems to align with your typical video game division into single player story mode and multiplayer competitive play. If you think about Call of Duty, for example, that’s your classic example of multiplayer and single player as two different streams, two siloes. The Call of Duty guys are chronic for codeveloping multiplayer maps that serve as the basis for the narrative mode, so each environment serves double duty. The level ‘War Pig’ in Call of Duty: Modern Warfare (2007) is built on four different multiplayer maps, including, most recognisably, the map ‘Bog’. It’s actually really fascinating watching this virtual space get used in two different ways – in the story mode there are scripted events, characters, plot developments. You have to complete unique narrative sequences in this fairly rigid way. ‘War Pig’ has this anti-aircraft gun in a courtyard, and you have to kill the operators to get access to your air support, and then once the gun is down a chopper comes in and hoses down a building for you. In the multiplayer mode, ‘Bog’ doesn’t have any of that – it’s a small deathmatch arena. The environment is the same, mostly, but all of the narrative trappings are gone. There’s no longer an exit to the next stage in a linear narrative sequence. There’s no trajectory, no pacing, no tonal variation – it’s a virtual paintball range for you and your band of online mates. The same space serves as the video game equivalent of both a movie scene and a tennis court. There’s actually something slightly haunted in how the space gets used both ways – the two modes reverberate across each other. The multiplayer space carries echoes of the narrative, and the story mode feels sort of hollow, or stagey, like you’ve seen behind the curtain, seen the set without dressing or actors.

I feel like it’s fairly standard for single player and multiplayer to be contained in those distinct sort of siloes, sometimes with overlap in reused environments. The single player mode tends to be narrative-focused, and the multiplayer tends to be more of an arena-type environment with limited narrative consequence. Similar examples can be found in games like Halo, Assassin’s Creed Brotherhood – I don’t know, I don’t play a lot of multiplayer games, but that’s my sense of the typical divide. Space Marine 2 subverts that expectation. Firstly, it’s not strictly divided into single player and multiplayer missions. We’d use those terms to describe each mode, for convenience, but co-op and the campaign are both accessible to two types of play. The ‘Campaign’ mode is nominally single player, but it lets your friends drop in to control the main character’s AI companions, and the three-player co-op missions will let you play with bots instead of real players. Second, both the campaign and co-op missions tie into the base narrative. The campaign focuses on the Space Marine Titus, and the co-op missions are secondary tasks that support his story. There’s a level of overlay: events from the co-op missions crop up during the campaign. You have vox calls that are cut off, and you can hear those calls from both sides. The mission to kill the Hive Tyrant and end the Tyranid invasion doesn’t even sit with Titus as the story’s protagonist – it’s palmed off to his secondary squad of co-op buddies. The campaign and the co-op modes are woven around each other as two halves of the same story. It’s almost more like Resident Evil, with Jill and Chris providing two views on the same events, or Leon and Claire in Resident Evil 2.

The underlying logic that joins co-op and campaign mode is that you’re all fighting on the same side. You’re either playing as Titus and his buddies or Titus’s secondary fetch squad. You’re all pulling in the same direction, and the canonical outcome of each mission is fixed in stone. That is, you might fail a mission, but you know what’s supposed to happen, and you can use that supposition as the jumping off point for the next part of the story. The third mode in Space Marine 2, the PvP mode, is your more traditional multiplayer combat mode – and it’s disconnected from immediate narrative consequence, because you never know which team is going to win. There’s no correct or canonical outcome. In that sense, you could actually argue that the three modes of Space Marine are better thought of as two modes – co-op and team-based multiplayer – with the co-op missions split into two streams, one for Titus and one for his fetch squad. That makes sense on a narrative level, but doesn’t really touch on how the co-op mode handles character progression.

So – and I should say as well, right, none of this is earth-shattering, it’s just an interesting little wrinkle in how the game handles its different modes. It’s interesting as a model, because it feels unusual, but it’s not, like, necessarily a deep insight, it just struck me as weird. So – while the campaign mode and the co-op mode both progress the same story, the campaign mode is a fairly straightforward hack and slash with a specific set of characters, while the co-op mode has elements of levelling up a customised character. The campaign mode will always have Titus, Chairon, and Gadriel, while the co-op mode has three characters from seven different archetypes with whatever gear and cosmetics they happen to have unlocked. Difficulty levels in the co-op mode are based on character levels: ‘Minimal’ threat is for first-level characters, while ‘Ruthless’ is for level fifteen-plus. There’s a whole different overlay around progression and repetition. If you replay the same level in co-op, you’re gathering points to upgrade your weapons and unlock new powers for your character. If you replay the same level in the campaign, you’re just playing for the sake of playing. It’s not that one’s better or worse, but they’re very different value sets, and they’re set next to each other with this weird juxtaposition. Campaign missions and co-op missions are meant to be played in parallel: you complete campaign missions and they unlock the related co-op encounters. That pairing is built in – but as you play through the game, the two modes grow further apart. By the end of the campaign, you might be level five on your co-op character, and you’ve unlocked a couple different upgrades and some cosmetic changes for your armour. Titus, by contrast, has none of those upgrades, and you can’t modify his armour at all. His guns are weaker, and his outfit’s plain. The co-op character feels more individualised – for me, I’d tried out a couple different classes before settling on one that I liked, and I played around with the colours and customisation options to build a character where I liked the colour scheme. The co-op character is my character, and Titus is Titus. I’m still trying to decide which one has more of a sense of individuality – which one’s more of a character.