Space Marine 2 difficulty settings – Campaign & Operations

✓ At a glance

• There are four difficulties at launch.
• Another difficulty is added in Season 1.
• Difficulty is largely resource based, making you manage our ammo and health better, which can dictate planning and strategies.
• Harder difficulties in Operations mean perfecting your build for your class and weapon playstyle.

Space Marine 2 has a lot of difficulty options, each with their own twists and challenges. These difficulties offer your standard tiers of easy, normal, hard and extreme type modes, with their own flavourful names. There are different difficulties too, depending on whether you’re playing Operations or the campaign to. It’s important to note this, as it means there are different challenges to overcome, depending on which mode you are playing. Here’s a closer look at what to expect from the Space Marine 2 difficulty settings and what to expect from them.

Difficulty Tier	Campaign	Operation
1	Easy	Minimal
2	Normal	Average
3	Hard	Substantial
4	Extreme	Ruthless

There are further difficulties coming post-launch to make things even harder, especially for Operations and the future Horde mode coming in Season 4.

How to change the difficulty 

Players can change the difficulty of the Space Marine 2. Simply select a campaign mission, and in the top left, you’ll find the option to change difficulty. It is related, depending on the controller or pc and mouse settings you use. From there, you can adjust the difficulty of the mission before starting it. 

You can also select the difficulty of the Operation in the lobby. Select the difficulty then proceed to the Thuderhawk and start your mission. You’ll then need to complete the operation or campaign mission to beat it. You can change missions and difficulty while on the battle barge if you return to the menu at any point, but it will reset your mission progress doing so.

How Space Marine 2’s difficulty settings work

For the most part, you have a range of four difficulties. In terms of the campaign, it is the standard experience you’re familiar with from other games like Halo, Gears of War, or another campaign-driven shooter. The harder you set the difficulty, the harder the enemies will be to defeat.

Now, if you intend on beating the campaign’s harder settings, you will need to be mindful of how the difficulty works. For the most part, it is largely about managing resources properly to survive. The guns you use each have their own ammo count, strength, range, RPM speeds, and more. This affects how you want to play with those weapons and when they are best to use them.

The other issue is planning healing. You largely don’t heal outside of using Medicae Stimms, which are pre-placed items on each map, often requiring some exploring to reach them. So, managing health, and knowing when to go into melee or dip out of cover is very important.

Learning the maps help players plan the resource and item picks up to make certain levels easier. For example, dont use the multi-melta or melta charge on mission 5 before the boss spawns to ensure victory, especially on hard and beyond.

Craig’s tip of the day

In addition, there are other factors like defeating bosses on the map. You may need to think about when to use your grenades, explosives, heavy weapons and other content to better to take care of bosses, or the swarming elites on the way. So, a lot of the campaign’s difficulty is based on planning your resources and learning where items are on the map to better strategise for the difficult setting you are playing on, especially for the hardest modes.

If you’re on normal, you can turn your brain off and have fun. There’s not so much challenge bar a few bits that gets a little spicy here or there. So, think about your loadout, your build’s strengths and weaknesses, and where to get ammo, stimms, and grenades to counter the upcoming threats to the game.

Operation Difficulty Settings

While on the subject of difficulty settings in Space Marine 2, you need to be aware that Operations work slightly differently. You have classes, and each class has access to specific weapons. These both level up the more you play them, granting perks and builds. This is important, as this will help you progress the harder modes in Operations. 

Operations work like the campaign difficulty too, with pre-placed ammo boxes, Medicae Stimms and more. So, you also need to get used to the maps and where to find items, while also grinding your favourite build on your class to get better perks and stat modifiers.

It’s also worth mentioning that the difficulty options for Operations will change basic things. Medicaes become less efficient, you get Mortal Wounds which are essentially lives, and respawn time gets longer. So, those hard and challenging moments get more challenging. They even have recommended level requirements to take on certain difficulties in Operation mode.

Operations are expected to get a 5th difficulty too come Season 1. This new difficulty will add even more challenges to min-max your build and learn the operations to succeed on them.  So, hopefully, this gives you an idea of what to expect from the difficulty in Space Marine 2.