Finished Warhammer 40,000: Space Marine after buying it like a year ago. I got close to halfway through but stopped playing because of a bug affecting NVIDIA cards that made the game run in slow motion randomly regardless of framerate etc. Now that I upgraded my video card to an R9 280X, it turns out that AMD cards don't suffer from the problem, so I went back and finished it (had to start nearly from the beginning). Took about two evenings to finish.
The game is solid and fun, with fairly strong combat mechanics and a lot of weight and impact to weapons and attacks. Unlike a lot of modern shooters the health system is a real risk-reward thing that encourages you to either be cautious or dive into enemies depending on the situation. The gameplay does grow just slightly stale towards the end but it never overstays its welcome - this is a game where a perfect 8 hour campaign is exactly the right length. Compared to other third-person shooters these days, the game is definitely head and shoulders above them in terms of challenge and engagement (no cover system, swarms of enemies with attacks that can shred you really quickly, reliance on crowd control, etc. that makes it play a lot more like a classic shooter than you might expect).
There were a few annoying things in there. For one, checkpointing was sometimes quite poor and forced me to re-watch 30-60 seconds of boring elevator rides or run down empty hallways before getting back to the fight. There are a few segments where it feels like the game slows down unnecessarily and you do a lot of slow walking and waiting for scripted sequences to finish (though it's still a lot better than some other games). And, there are a couple big dumb boss fights, especially the final one, which is literally a big extended quick time event. Talk about a lame ending.
But, the game's completely serious take on the universe helped alleviate those complaints... the levels are massive in scale (even if much of it is just background stuff) and there is a stony-faced sort of realism to all the ridiculousness of the Warhammer universe, which was refreshing. I know that's sort of Warhammer's thing but I'm tired of self-aware games that can't tell a story without winking at the camera and going "yeah, we know this is dumb".
Don't regret getting it for $5 or $10 or whatever I picked it up for, and was worth the time certainly, but I'm not going to return to grind out achievements or anything like that. Back to finishing Avernum 4, and maybe Arkham City over the weekend now that it's dropped GfWL support.
worth a go on sale.
