So, the Steam servers are having some kind of conniption and Spess Mehren multiplayer is down, so I'll record what all I think
I'll be talking about multiplayer because there's not much to say about singleplayer and I've only played two chapters of it.
It's pretty cool. When you start out the customizer is locked (You unlock it at level 4, after three or four games) and you get a default skin. Spess Mehrens get smurfs, Chaos Mehrens get Chosen of Nemeroth, the warband featured in singleplayer. The chosen color scheme is pretty boring, dull gray and red. The customizer itself is pretty awesome although space marine customization is fucked up. They wanted to support the half-colors that some chapters have, and it makes the space marine customizer weird, you have to see it really.
On customization, you get five skins for each side, customizable to whatever degree you want. The Space Marines start out with generic Mk.VII armor and the Chaos Marines start out with generic Chaos armor and a second set for some reason, that's spiky and kind of cool for Nurgle mehrens. Other sets have to be unlocked by completing various challenges related to the style of the armor. Black Crusade armor pieces are obtained by winning games as chaos, Battle Damaged armor is obtained by killing people after you die as Space Marines, etc. Most of the armor sets are pretty cool, and you even get the Corvus (Beakie) armor which is cool.
Right now I have
Imperial Fists,
Blood Angels Death Company,
Black Templars,
Pre-heresy Thousand Sons, and
Salamanders; and
Sons of Malice,
Thousand Sons,
Death Guard,
Emperor's Children, and
The Cleaved. There's not much variation in them right now because I haven't unlocked a whole lot of the armor yet. Very strangely, the preset color schemes do not include Night Lords. Also, since I don't think I mentioned it, the armor sets and color schemes don't have to be used together. You can mix and match as much as you want and make garish, incoherent skins if you want.
Onto the actual gameplay, it's good but a little sparse right now. There's only two gameplay modes right now. Capture and Control is a capture point match where your score counts up depending on how many points you control, and annihilation is a team deathmatch where you race to score 41 kills. C&C games are always very one-sided. The losing team rarely has over a hundred points when the game ends, and it ends at 1000 points. Annihilation is usually pretty close. There are only five maps, sadly, and I've yet to see if C&C is so one-sided because of poor map balance, it'll take more games to figure it out.
Multiplayer balance is pretty decent. Some weapons are a little too strong right now (Lascannon) but for the most part it's balanced. The combat is a little slow-paced compared to games like Call of Duty, everyone has quite a bit of health and you can usually see exactly what you did and the opponent did that caused your death. One misstep will usually kill you.
Also, despite what that one guy was worrying about, there's no rock/paper/scissors balance. Every class is equally adept at killing every other class depending on the circumstances. Devastator melee is surprisingly very strong, and assaults really need to land behind them to win. Devastators in general feel like they're probably the strongest class by a small margin. At long range they'll beat anyone as long as they don't do anything dumb (Do not try to lock your weapon if someone can see you. You can be killed in the time it takes to lock your gun)
There's also co-op coming as free DLC in 30 days. It's apparently going to be like Gears of War's horde mode, which is kind of cool. You get to use your custom skins and classes and stuff.
It's pretty cool.
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Topic: Warhammer 40000: Space Marine (Read 26772 times)