With fresh eyes dripping with gore, I knew I had to revisit the pile of unplayed 40K games in my Steam library, and Space Marine was at the top. Space Marine is a fantastic, induldgent game. I don't think I've cackled so much reading a book. Paired with a sociopolitical culture that places loyalty, power, infinite capital gain at all costs, and total emotional repression at the fore, and you get galactic wars spanning millennia that are largely driven by greed and petty male bullshit. Men are made into Swiss cheese, melted, chopped, baked – the violence is so grotesque and indulgent that it just becomes comedic. Most games were just OK from what I gathered, so Warhammer games started to become white noise to me.Īnd like Redwall's pages-long feasts in which every dish is detailed from top to bottom, texture to smell to taste, the same word counts are applied to describing what happens to a man when he's pressed through metal grating or sliced from tip to toe by impossibly sharp bladed gauntlets. From that point, I would recognise whenever another 40K game was incoming, taking note of the leisure with which Games Workshop tossed the licence around.
I had no attachment to the source material, just the vague notion that what I was looking at was clearly a Starcraft rip-off (little did I know the opposite was actually true). My first experience with Warhammer 40K was about a decade ago when I picked up the Dawn of War RTS games in a Steam sale. I bounced off it way back in 2011, but even after reading one Warhammer 40K novel, it's a much more enjoyable game. So many of us skipped right over a classic, but if your journey was like mine, I totally understand why. It's why a game like Space Marine (Chaos Marine sequel ASAP please), once disregarded as some action figure shooter cash-in, hits so well even all these years later. There's old Gears-of-War's-chainsaw-executions-are-incredibly-nasty James, and James, born again, who considers flinging around the arterial muck found within dissenters of the Space Marines an absolute, genuine art. It's just pre-Warhammer 40K James and post-Warhammer 40K James now. Forget all those broken bones and all that kissing and crying. Forget puberty, forget wrapping college, teaching high school, and moving across the US for a PC Gamer internship.
Looking back, my life divides cleanly into two distinct halves.
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