Space Marine 2 tips and tricks to serve the Emperor

✓ At a glance

• Exploring maps are important for weapon pickups, builds, and supplies
• Understanding how to combat elites and fight swarms are important for progression.
• Avoid multiplayer until after completing the campaign, solo or coop.

With the launch of Space Marine 2, players can once again play as Titus, and work their way through the new threats to the Imperium. As you explore the game, you will find a lot of different features to interact with and ways to encounter the game. So, we’ve got a list of Space Marine 2 tips and tricks to aid you in beating the Tyranid threat.

Don’t do Operations or PvP until you finish the storyline

You’ll get warned about this in-game, but we figured we’d warn you here too. Playing the PvP and Operations reveals what happens in the main storyline. The PvP mode and operations are based on what happens during the campaign. If you’re someone who likes the storyline, we recommend playing the campaign first. 

If you’re not so bothered, then you can play any game mode in any order you want.

Explore the map

Exploring each level and area is an important tip for Space Marine 2. The reason for this is that there are a lot of hidden pathways and lootables. You may find data slates, which are the game collectables. You may also find a weapon pickup around the map. There are a lot of weapons, so you may find one that suits your playstyle.

The other benefit is that you will find useful items too. You may get Heavy weapons, which are akin to using the turrets in Halo campaigns. There are also ammo pickups frag and Krak grenade picksups. You can even find medicae items that you can use to stim pack your health up. These are very strong, especially on harder modes.

Supplies are important for harder difficulties

One of the noticeable things about Space Marine 2 is that even in normal mode, you can feel threatened with some carefree gameplay. This exacerbates dramatically when you play on the harder and even harder modes. Our best advice is to use your resources wisely and think about what guns you want to use to cover what weaknesses.

The other advice is that you need to use your ammo appropriately as the small ammo pickups around the map only offer small amounts of ammo. If you’re using low-ammo weapons, you can run out of weapons very quickly. It is also why you want to explore so you can find more grenades, ammo, and more importantly health stims as you may find your health bar faltering very easily.

Abilities and builds

In the campaign, you’ll find that Titus, how two allies, and then each of the classes in the online modes have abilities. These abilities reflect the sort of playstyle and utility preference each class or character has. It is wise that you build your character around the ability to so you can support the campaign character’s role or the multiplayer class’ design more appropriately.

For example, Titus’ Blood Frenzy ability is all about regening health in melee combat. So, you may want to think about which melee weapon you like fighting with the most. The list goes on for each character. It adds some complexity to the game with your coop playthroughs, or even going into online multiplayer.

Melee weapon movesets

Interestingly, the melee weapons in this game have different movesets. Opening the menu will show you the combos you can use for various moves with your melee weapon. The combat knife is more of a fast-paced playstyle, with longer combos, and a lunging attack. Meanwhile, the Chainsword is more about large swarm control with shoves, cleaves and AOE foot stomps. We recommend messing around with the weapons and checking their move sets out to get a feel for how each melee weapon plays.

Clear swarms before fighting elites

One of the most difficult things about Space Marine 2 is the swarming mechanics. Players will find that when elites spawn, they are often accompanied by swarming gaunts. Fighting an elite while also dealing with a swarm is a very quick way to lose our armour and health rapidly. We strongly advise dealing with the horde first. The grade launcher bolter, or regular grenades are very good for displacing hordes. Meltas are also very good for annihilating swarms and doing big damage to elite enemies moving with the pack

Plan your weapons carefully

While you might find that running a Melta and Plasma pistol is a very strong combo, you’ll notice you have almost no ammo. You also don’t want to be running double mid-range bolter as your close-range firepower will start lacking. So, we recommend running two very distinct weapon types in your campaign playthrough to get a better feel for managing different scenarios. Having some good ranged weapons for dealing with ranged gaunts and Neruothropes is handy. Having a good weapon for dealing with the Spores and Gargoyles is also good too. You can then fill your other weapon for nuking hordes or punching through the elites’ armour.