Up for some Space Marine 2 tips? It's tougher than you think being a lumbering 2000 lb angel of death. You might hurl yourself into the fray, clad in power armour, chainsword in hand, but it takes a fair bit of finesse to master Space Marine 2's combat system, especially if you're playing on the higher difficulties of co-op.
For one thing, you have to learn how to parry and follow up enemy attacks with Gun Strikes—quick cinematic pistol shots you can unload into your foes. There's also the armour system and making sure you're executing enough enemies to keep yourself healthy in the thick of the fighting. And that's not mentioning the unique class abilities you can employ tactically during combat to the benefit of your squad.
It's a decent amount of depth for a game most probably expected to be pure power fantasy—though that is also an option if you crank down the difficulty. But if you want to feel challenged by the enemies of humanity, here are some tips and tricks to triumph.
The parry system in Space Marine 2 is fairly well explained—targets that show a blue circle when attacking can be parried, while orange circle attacks have to be dodged. If you perform a perfectly timed parry on a small enemy, you'll instantly kill it, while big enemies get staggered and you can follow up with a Gun Strike. The same is true if you perfectly time a dodge as well. What you might not realise is that you can often fit two Gun Strikes into the duration of the stun, letting you double tap a big enemy.
Certain melee attacks also knock enemies back and open them up to Gun Strikes, such as when you hold the melee attack input on the chainsword or when you stomp while carrying a heavy bolter. Since killing an enemy with a Gun Strike recovers armour—just like an execution does—this can be a great way of recovering it from the small enemies swarming you.
The main flaw with Space Marine 2's parry system is that if you don't execute a perfect parry, you'll often have to deal with follow up attacks from enemies that have no parry indicator at all. There are lots of attacks that simply don't have a blue parry circle, though that doesn't mean that they aren't parryable. Tyranid warriors are especially bad for following up on attacks you thought you parried with another, so be mindful. It also pays to watch out for ranged attacks, such as the slowly building green beam that shows a tyranid ranged enemy has zeroed in on you.
Though this isn't the case in Operations—every enemy grants a stingy single segment of armour there—in the campaign, executing different enemies grants a varied amount of armour based on their difficulty. Execute a basic tyranid grunt, for instance, and you'll get one segment, whereas a big enemy like a tyranid warrior grants two. Special enemies like ravenors or lictors (and some others you'll encounter later) refill your armour fully. You can also recover this armour if you kill an enemy with a Gun Strike, though since these aren't guaranteed to kill, good ol' executions are your best bet for staying alive in the thick of it.
Supply crates in Space Marine 2 are pretty unassuming, but if you smash the boxes with the aquila symbol on them—pictured above—you can get loads of extra ammo, as well as useful items like grenades and armour boosters. That last item refills your armour fully and gives you four armour segments overall no matter your class, so they're worth having. If you don't have a use for the items you find, remember that you can highlight them for your team by pressing T. Sharing is caring.
When you get damaged by enemies you might notice that a section of your health bar turns white. This represents contested health that you can temporarily recover by damaging enemies, Bloodborne-style. It's not often the most useful mechanic when you're getting swarmed by lots of tiny foes, but it does mean that if you keep swinging you can mitigate how much damage you take.
Similarly, you can heal Mortal Wounds you sustain in co-op or campaign. Essentially, you get a Mortal Wound if you get downed a certain number of times—which varies based on difficulty—and if you are incapacitated with a wound, you'll die. Provided other players are still alive in co-op, you'll respawn after a while, but if they're also dead or you're solo in campaign, it'll mean failure. To heal a Mortal Wound, simply use a medicae stim when you're already at full health.
There are some powerful items hidden in Space Marine 2's missions. Guardian relics are self-revival tools that you can find in both the campaign and Operations mode, while gene-seed and armoury data are specific to Operations. You won't be able to carry a guardian relic as well as gene-seed, but the latter will give you bonus XP if you extract from a mission carrying it—think of it like a tome in Vermintide or Darktide. Armoury data is even rarer and more important. You can extract these little floating Servo-Skulls to acquire more armoury data that you can use to unlock new tiers of each weapon for your co-op classes.
Throughout both the main campaign and in Operations, you'll be assaulted by large swarms of tyranids who'll try to climb up walls to get to your position. They'll start to pile-up at the bottom of the wall and will gradually build a big enough mound that they can reach you. One thing I've noticed is that the game seems to treat these mounds as single entities, i.e if you deal enough damage to the whole mass, it'll collapse, and all of the tyranids who were climbing will topple to the ground. Rather than blasting individual tyranids nearing the top, aim for the centre mass of the pile-up and watch as it crumples.
Though this doesn't apply to co-op, heavy weapons like the heavy bolter and multi-melta don't take primary weapon slots, so I'd recommend always grabbing them. The campaign gives you plenty of opportunities to change weapons during each level and often provides a selection based on the enemies you'll be fighting. You may be comfortable with the standard bolter, but it pays to experiment with your loadout a little to find the weapon that best suits your preferred playstyle.
If you open the menu during a mission, you'll get a list of melee combos for the weapon you're using. All of the melee weapons have alternate attacks based on whether you press or hold the attack input and whenabouts in the combo you do that. The power sword even has two different movesets based on whether you charge the blade or not by holding the attack button out of combat. If you want something heavy-hitting, both the power fist and thunder hammer can charge up before dealing a powerful blow, though beware of getting swarmed and taking damage while you do this.
There's both tyranid and chaos corruption in Space Marine 2 which gets applied by certain enemies or when you walk through corrupting AoE attacks like the stringy, green tyranid spores. Tyranid corruption turns your screen green and makes it hard to see anything beyond a few feet in front of you, while chaos corruption creates fake enemies to distract you, though you can tell them apart if you watch their behaviour closely.
