Space Hulk Returns in 2013

Independent studio Full Control, in association with Games Workshop, will be bringing the legendary Space Hulk to PC, Mac and iOS systems in 2013!

[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sepWI5pMGSw] (more…)

Space Marine gets Dreadnoughts!

THQ have announced that The Dreadnought DLC for Warhammer 40,000: Space Marine is due for release this week!

The Dreadnought DLC is the second premium content pack for Space Marine, consisting of a new multiplayer mode called Dreadnought Assault, three new multiplayer maps; Desolation, Dome Mechanicus and Chem Refinery, two new player skin packs: Iron Hands and Death Guard, and the usual extra achievements and trophies.  Dreadnought Assault is a team versus mode, where teams must control a capture point to be awarded with a Dreadnought, which one player can control to help score points for their team.. until the Dreadnought is destroyed and another spawn point appears.

As well as the premium DLC, all players will receive free content: the new multiplayer Capture and Control mode, where players will be challenged to capture and defend different locations around the map.

Space Marine’s previous DLC releases have included the premium Chaos Unleashed map pack, released in December 2011, and the free Exterminatus mode, released for PC and PS3 at the end of October, and for the Xbox 360 at the beginning of November.

In Exterminatus, players co-operatively battle through two scenarios; Assault on Hab Center Andreas, and Escape From Kalkys Facility, facing waves of enemies in each arena with extra in-game challenges providing extra lives or points.  Chaos Unleashed allowed players to take on the role of Chaos Space Marines in the previously Space Marine-only Exterminatus mode, as well as adding three more multiplayer maps: Habs Ablaze, Station Tertius and Aquila Caonyon, and a new Capture the Flag game mode.

Warhammer 40,000: Space Marine – Exterminatus!

Exterminatus is the new co-op survival mode for Warhammer 40,000: Space Marine, for up to four players to face wave after wave of Orks..

We’ve waited a while for this mode, hoping it would work better than versus did.. when both myself and a friend ended up with network issues on the PC.  In the meantime, I’ve played with randoms on the 360.. and though I’d rather play with friends, it was still good fun.

I preferred the Seige Ground mode, as it provided a common objective for the team.. playing with randoms tends to mean less useful communication, but players tend to group up on the capture points anyway.

On to Exterminatus, though..

We tried this with just three of us against the waves of Orks being dropped off around the map.  You can play as Tactical, Devastator or Assault, depending on whether you’ve unlocked them yet or not.. and if you’ve unlocked them, you can use different perks too.  I picked Assault because of the Jump Pack 🙂

Just to break things up, there are a few Challenges issued during play too.. such as getting a number of headshots within a time limit.  These award extra lives or increased score if met, so are worth going for.. if you notice them in the Ork-killing frenzy, that is!

There are only two maps.. although there are a number of arenas in each map, which you move through if you clear enough waves of enemies.

We also found that all four players are wanted.. the game does not send less Orks if there are only two players 😉

Space Marine Multiplayer

I completed the singleplayer last weekend, and have since attempted to play multiplayer on the PC with little success, thanks to the only friend with the game installed being unable to join online games.  We tried with a private game, but eventually this crashed, taking out the network here and putting us off trying again..

However, thanks to work I also have a copy on the 360, and this weekend I went for a few sessions of multiplayer with randoms on the 360.  Surprisingly, the random players I met during the weekend were decent, and the only abusive phrases used were as part of banter with each other. 🙂

I discovered that in Space Marine, I much prefer Seige Mode to Annihilation.. capturing points adds a bit more direction to the game, especially when random players aren’t looking to work together as well as friends usually do.  This also gave me another source of XP, and so I was able to unlock the Customiser to make my very own purple Space Marine!

Sadly there are only five maps at this point, so eventually it started to feel a bit repetitive.

An update is due in October, and as this will add co-op, it may see a bit more action.. so long as there is no recurrance of the network problem!

The Warhammer 40,000: Space Marine Race!

So Relic’s Warhammer 40,000: Space Marine has finally been released, allowing players to take the role of Captain Titus, a genetically modified superhuman clad in several tonnes of power armour..

Despite only really having Dawn of War II as a reference for the whole Warhammer scene, I’ve been looking forward to Space Marine for a while, and when it finally arrived there was no chance it wasn’t going to be played.  Tim and I decided to have a friendly race through the single player game, too 🙂

The story: Orks have invaded an Imperial Forge World, and Captain Titus is sent in with his Ultramarines to hold key locations until reinforcements arrive..

Your starting weapons are a bolter pistol and a combat knife.. and these make short work of the Orks you first encounter 🙂
Combat is a mixture of ranged and melee, but the melee is where the fun was to be had, especially with the combinations of different strikes and stuns sending the Orks flying 🙂

Health is regained by performing an Execute move; this becomes available when you have stunned an enemy.  This meant staying in the fight where you’d normally have to duck out of fire to let health regenerate.. and it transformed the smaller Orks into health pickups!  Stomping through the Orks let me take a very short lead over Tim, too!

It wasn’t long before we met the Imperial Guard, and they were rather happy to see us 🙂
They also had an Ork problem, which I was more than happy to help with!  At the end of the first run through the trenches, I came across my first Nob, who I found difficult compared to the previous carnage.

Repeated attempts on this enemy meant that Tim got ahead in our race.. and he stayed ahead while we were helping the Imperial Guard and their leader, 2nd Lieutenant Mira.. blowing some stuff up, killing some more Orks, and being given some nice new weapons; the Stalker Bolter and the Vengeance Launcher!

As the Orks had captured a gun emplacement, that was one of our targets.. this involved sticking explosives to one of the massive shells and pushing it into the loader, so that it would blow up the gun.  Following the shell up, we found the Orks had spotted and removed it..

Guarding Leandros back while he pushed it back in was a hard task as there were plenty of Squigs hidden in with the Orks, and they blew me up a few times while I was busy meleeing Orks!  Tim had also struggled with the Squigs, which had allowed me to catch up again 😀

After this we met Inquisitor Drogan, who turns out to have some amazing secret weapon.. and we end up carting the power source around for a while, which attracts the Orks.. the Warboss Grimskull wants it too!  He sent some of his boyz to take it, but I killed them off and proceeded to take the power source, which blew up and sent me down to the sewers, where I had to fight my way up to rejoin the Ultramarines.  I also unlocked the Melta Gun and the Lascannon, two fantastically powerful weapons, though the Melta Gun ended up being my favourite gun for up-close fiery death 🙂

We fought our way to the weapon with plans to turn it on the Orks, through hot turretty death thanks to a security system which couldn’t distinguish us from the green-skinned fungus.. but firing the weapon unleashed the forces of Chaos!

Inquisitor Drogan turned out to be a traitor, with the weapon having been designed to open a rift for the Chaos forces to come through!  He was rewarded with death, then the Orks joined the fight.. Grimskull still chasing the power source.  While fighting, Grimskull and Nemeroth fell over the edge, leaving us to fight the Bloodletters, big red demons who warped around and so weren’t good to shoot, but were rather susceptible to melee stuns 🙂

Next up was destroying the Spire and the Chaos Warp.. via the awesome Imperial Titan which we’d seen before.  On the way to it, I met Grimskull again..

Killing the Warboss wasn’t as hard as I would have expected, with the Melta Gun to destroy his pet Squigs and minions.. and when he was dead, the remaining Ork forces scattered, leaving just the Chaos enemies to kill on the way to the Titan.  The fight on the Titan was a little frustrating as the enemies were out of range of my Thunderhammer.. and Tim caught me up again >.<

After the Spire was destroyed, Nemeroth made another appearance, killing Sidonus and claiming the power source.. which he would use to become a Daemon Prince!

There was another session with a jump pack next.. I love that thing.. and I managed to misfire myself through a hole in the ground at one point, but overtook Tim again.. only to lose ground in the next section and end up behind again.

Tim completed the game just before I got to Nemeroth.. but we were both beaten by another friend who completed it all in one go.. he isn’t human 😉

I enjoyed the last fight despite the use of quicktime.. probably because they were the buttons as I would have been hitting anyway.
As for Captain Titus.. is he corrupted or not?  I guess we’ll have to wait and see if there’s a Space Marine 2 😉

ScampLAN

Instead of going to Multiplay’s messed up i43, we’ve gone for a smaller, friends-only LAN at home.. in our newly decorated lounge 😀

So far we’ve mostly played singleplayer games, with the guys nagging me to complete Crysis 2.. which I’ve now done, though I was shown up by Ali completing both Bulletstorm and Red Faction: Armageddon in two days!

The demo for Warhammer 40,000: Space Marine made an appearance too..

Yay for lots of dead Orks!  I found the first level harder than the second, with many retries of the last room.. the big Orks were a bit painful.  The second level was much easier as the Jump Pack meant that for quite a way, all I needed to do was land on enemies to kill them 🙂

This game is now on the wanted list.. along with The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim and Gears of War 3..

I’ve also tried out DC Universe Online, but I’m not going to rush to buy it.  Although what I played was quite fun, I think the appeal may run out after a while.. from what I’ve heard, there isn’t a lot to do at max level, and unless I had friends playing too, I can’t see that I’d want to run around doing the same thing too many times.  Maybe if the game turns up cheap..

We’ve also picked up the DLC for Borderlands, as it was cheap on Steam.. though we now have to get on with our game sometime!

New things at E3

I’ve been looking at some of the info on the games and tech, and there has been plenty to get my interest.

The Fallout series holds a special place in my heart, so after seeing that Fallout: New Vegas has been dated for October 22nd, I’ve mentally written off the end of October in terms of playing other games.  This is despite the announcement of an October 26th release date for Fable III, another game I’ve been looking forward to – it will have to wait until after Fallout 😉

Pre-E3, there were rumours about what Valve might be revealing, after they said they’d be revealing something big.  It looks like the big secret was the fact that Steam is to come to the PS3 – while that’s good news for console players, I was rather hoping for Episode 3.

Portal 2 is on the way, but this was hardly new for E3, though the trailer was quite nice.  I’m quite excited about the co-op mode, and find the idea of playing as a robot or turret rather amusing 🙂

In addition to the two Warhammer 40,000 games, Dark Millennium Online and Space Marine, which I mentioned in the last post, THQ have also announced Red Faction: Armageddon, follow-up to Red Faction: Guerilla.  There was also a very brief mention of Darksiders 2.  I have yet to complete Red Faction: Guerrilla or Darksiders – again, with the consoles..

Must try harder 😉

Call of Duty: Black Ops is another game in my wanted list, though not as high up as the previous games.  I enjoyed Modern Warfare 2, but beyond single player, I didn’t find myself playing it so much.
I tend to prefer playing with a few friends rather than strangers with their camping, mic-spamming, teabagging ways.  Though sometimes I still get the latter from friends.. ah well.

Kinect, formerly Natal, is being shown at E3 too.  Along with the child-oriented Kinectimals, there are a large number of fitness and sports type games planned to use the system.  While I love the tech, these titles are very close to titles I already have for the Wii and so what’s on offer here isn’t going to make me rush out to buy the system.
PlayStation Move had more games on offer, but again doesn’t really add much on from the Wii.

40k Nerdiness

I’ve been watching some of the videos coming out of E3 tonight.. things are looking interesting on the games front!

Warhammer 40,000: Dark Millennium Online, the long awaited MMO, is finally being talked about.  A friend was asking about this a good while back, with another interested too.  Makes all the difference when friends have your back.

Rather a teasing video, this one..
Demons, aliens and heretics, versus the Imperium of Man?  Damn right, there will be war 😉

It’s early on yet, but the graphics are already looking rather nice and I’m looking forward to seeing more.
I broke my usual rules, and included a screenshot from THQ’s site here.  If this is anything to go by.. wow 🙂

Again from THQ and Relic, we have Warhammer 40,000:Space Marine.  This one’s for the console, rather than the PC.

Watching this video, I see some similarities to Gears of War, another game I loved.
Take your huge, heavily-armoured brute and run him straight at the enemy: awesome!