Warhammer 40,000: Space Marine Review (5.5/10)

Warhammer 40,000: Space Marine tries its best to bring across some compelling setpieces, and is likely great fan service for those who spend most of their time at Games Workshop, but aside from those perks it's a fairly average hack-and-slasher. The visuals are impressive to an extent, but don't do anything to push the consoles (PS3, 360 and PC) to their limits, making it seem a wonder why the team didn't hold this back to the next generation and try a little harder to excite. The soundtrack, meanwhile, is repetitive guff, hardly exhilirating stuff that you'd want a war movie to set to. There isn't much to praise or detest in the convoluted plotline, simply because it only really consists of a few nicely-animated cutscenes that lead you to the next repetitive bout of slashing enemies to gain points and using 'executions' to hastily regain repeatedly lost health. It just feels like there's very little logic to this one, and worse still that very little effort has gone into the project in general. With the likes of Arkham City, Uncharted and Super Mario 3D Land on the way, I can only hope that this release signals the worst parts of the year in gaming being out of the way!