This is a charming game from a bygone era of console Gears-of-War-likes. It's very hammy, very shlocky, doesn't control great on Keyboard and Mouse, but it's notable for being basically the first good Warhammer 40k related action game, and its hamminess kind of lends itself to the 40k setting.
The gameplay itself is kind of horrible, and it's aged very poorly. Most notably the game is at odds with itself in how it's been designed vs how you're intended to play the game. To put it shortly, in order to recover health you need to kill enemies in execution animations that take away control over your character for several seconds, however you are NOT invulnerable while these animations are happening, and you can and frequently are killed while mid-animation. The game seems to want to encourage you to just plow headfirst into stacks of enemies and turn everything into a bloody blender, and has the mechanics to support it, but at the same time you can't really do that because of your lack of damage invulnerability and there being a bunch of bomb-Squigs that instakill you if you get close, and spawn constantly. This means you just kind of end up hanging back and shooting everything with your bolter, and the shooting mechanics are.... Dull.
Sum total I think it would have been worth it despite the gameplay shortcomings, because I liked Space Marine 2 and wanted to at least play through the first one, but I encountered a hard lock that stopped me from progressing past the first hour and a half of the game: There's a cutscene that just causes the game to crash no matter what I do, so it's impossible to actually finish the story, which is disappointing. I don't recommend anyone get this on a modern Windows 10 PC, because the game just... doesn't work. This isn't the game's fault (It's 15 years old) but I still recommend that people be aware of this and not waste their money.
