I find Space Marine 2’s combat to be pretty satisfying and engaging. It definitely isnt anywhere near Darktide’s level of combat (no game even comes close) but it is still pretty fun. It needs some tweaks though, like not being able to recover armor bars if there arent enemies within melee range, all while you get gunned down trying to get into melee range. Also the bolt guns are hilariously weak. The chip damage is also an issue like you said. Saber should be able to change these things pretty quickly, if they listen
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The closest I’ve gotten to Darktide was Dying Light 2 and that was still pretty bad and had a fraction of the ‘tech’ Darktide’s does. Darktide is definitely unique as far as melee combat goes for me.
SM2’s combat is about flashy murder with optional uber-hard mode for the seriousface people. It works, it’s a spectacle, and it’s fun.
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easy is when melta
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Speaking of the melta, they need to give these weapons like 3-4 more magazines MINIMUM. I picked up the melta for the first time the other day and instantly got rid of it after seeing its clip size. Holding a total of 15 shots? Are you joking?
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Yeah the armor recovery system needs a little tweaking then not recovering health at all outside of stims seems a little bit iffy. One mess up in a horde now your health is sitting at 25% the entire rest of the mission regardless of how good you play, unless you find a stim. I didn’t realize Space Marines thrived on stims to get stuff done
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This seems to be a second thread expressing these sentiments. Tide combat is hard to beat, but Fatshark could use some healthy competition.
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I actually like that i need to pay attention almost to every enemy on my screen in SM2 and almost constantly i’m under pressure screaming inside “oh shi oh shi” especially vs chaos, nids aren’t that hard. However i’m still leveling and playing on difficulty 3. Maybe things will change.
In DT currently i can just spam attack chains, dodge/slide and ultimate with half closed eyes.
The only thing in DT that can kill you is some disabler combo like trapper+flamer and only if you have no friends and unlucky on randoms. More even it rather happens when a run is so boring and easy, that i stop paying attention and i can feel my skill is degrading and braincells are dying in real time.
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You’re just bad at the game.
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for what its worth i finished the campaign on hardest difficulty from scratch (sure as hell died quite a bit) but i can´t even compare the “difficulty” between the two games.
darktide leaves you master of your destiny in every waking moment, you stand or fail because you fkked up based on skill that goes beyond simple reaction.
you can predict, prevent, anticipate, shape and act instead of “react”
reaction though seems to be a hard coded element of sm2´s combat mechanic, both in a way to refill your armor instead of toughness or killing enemies altogether.
it´s a quick time event if you boil it down and not even a “fair” one at that.
granted i only learned its inner details after i finished the campaing, window of opportunity is different between minor and major enemies (go figure).
still when the game boils down to “hard encounters” bosses dont feel rewarding, rather frustrating when you match the pavlov trigger on your end but the game goes and says “nah, i gonna fkk you up anyway, screw that dodge/parry”
yep different melee weapons give different options of parry up until the point where you merely block instead of parry, but without spoiler, the final boss has some bullsht leap over an incoming force wave mechanic you´ve seen endless times in the past 30 years of gaming.
only it sometimes hits you even if you character vaulted over it already in an arc that couldn´t have been higher.
just adding 3 qt events together making you play guitar hero 40k edition doesnt make for higher skill/difficulty, it makes for a learn that damn string already.
and not in a dark souls good way of telegraphing, animations sadly are to choppy/inconsistent for that.
i honestly planned on playing the game without UI elements, like i did with doom eternal or brutal doom for immersions sake.
but unlike the former games that tell you explicitly the window of opportunity, you´ll have a hard time figuring out when a nid is about to pounce you and you MUST dodge or when you CAN parry.
so you need the damn blue pill / red pill game and it takes a bit of its atmosphere to be honest.
now what sm2 does better is giving the grandeur and scope, the visuals and power armor goodness i came to love from 40k.
weapons though to a large portion have that “meh” feeling, ended up with the heavy bolter cause you know BOLTER.
there were encounters designed around the melta that was on offer where i had to switch, but after the first 2 waves of enemies the ammo was spent anyways so back to brrrrrt it was.
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Yep I wrote a thread saying the exact same thing a few days ago and I think some other similar threads have sprung up saying the same thing too.
Combat in DT Is chefs kiss compared to SM2.
A shame as I had really high hopes.
Also you don’t get to fight the Nids for anywhere near long enough in the game. Or they should at least reappear later down the line but they don’t. Funking boring a$$ chaos again. Geez when will Devs learn we are bored AF with chaos and want xenos!!
Yep v2 combat feels flat as heck compared to DT.
DT Is literally the best melee FPS game in existence IMO. Closest thing to VR without being VR 
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Imagine playing Darktide without blocking. With SM2 you have to parry/dodge.
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I have 2134 hours in Darktide.
Space Marine 2 is a superior game in every way (including from a 40K perspective) except the combat system in the SM2 campaign (I dislike the whole “quicktime event” mechanics things in SM2). The combat system in Darktide was developed and matured in the vermintide games, and I loved it for that reason, because it was well designed and fully matured. But that’s the ONLY thing Darktide had going for it over SM2. In every other way SM2 is a superior gaming experience.
The attention to story, environment detail, scale and scope, sound design (soundtrack in Darktide is good, but the SM2 one is on-par imo), game lore, the absence of bugs for a game at launch (I’ve seen TWO bugs in SM2 and each has happened ONCE). I have friends that have yet to experience even a single one yet. The game engine runs much better and more smoothly. Impressively so.
Darktide had levels that almost broke people’s computers at launch. Hab Dreyko slowdowns, anyone?
There are a few levels in a hive city in SM2, and it’s honestly made with much better visuals and a sense of scale in SM2. Seriously. Take a look at the skybox in most Darktide maps, again such as hab Dreyko or Enclavum Baross. Why are we inside of a giant box with lights on it? Why is there a giant box inside of a hive city, with buildings inside of the box? That makes zero logical sense. It looks like sh*t.
Then you look at the hive city maps of SM2 and there’s an open sky high above you, you are surrounded by enormous spires reaching far into the clouds.
The saddest part is there were a few vague hints of this in Darktide in the Excise Vault and Relay Station maps, but it’s like it never went anywhere development wise. Darktide just has this feeling of being rushed. Like they had some of the right ideas but decided to push the game before it was done, so we got stuff that all seems half-way done, and they’ve been sorta patching on it ever since instead of creating and fully developing a game and releasing it WHEN IT WAS DONE. I think the artists had the right ideas, but were pushed to just patch up whatever stuff they had worked on and then release it in an unfinished state.
Darktide had a lot of potential, but the sad truth is Fatshark seems to have never really committed to it. It’s just (or has now become) some half-assery platform designed to sell cosmetics. It’s pathetic. And it’s a shame. My friends stopped playing it long ago. Now that we’ve got another 40K coop game to play together, I won’t be returning to Darktide.
Bye!
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SM2 is the real hack and slash game. You just stand there hacking and slashing. It was never meant to be a co-op pvp/e game. It was supposed to be a campaign story movie game. But everyone gotta follow the Live Service Seasonal Updates/ Passes trend nowadays.
It’s why I’ll just watch people play and edits compiling cutscenes. You can tell from the getgo the combat would be lackluster compared to DT.
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Even with all the failed potential of Darktide you still put 2k hours into it. I can almost guarantee you won’t even put 500 into SM2. There just isn’t a fulfilling gameplay loop not to mention carrying weapons that only have a few magazines so you are forced to scour the levels for ammo boxes.
"What do you wanna be when you grow up Jimmy?
“I wanna be a Space Marine that spends 50% of his time running in circles looking for ammo!”
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Well that’s obviously your right to do so but I think you’re mad lol.
Playing SM2 made me appreciate Darktide HARD.
Apart from polish, DT Is a better game in every conievable way imo, and this is coming from someone who loves playing as SM and deeply wished they’d do a SM (and xeno) expansion of DT (unpopular opinion on these forums).
The combat in SM2 was so boring and repetitive that I was actually quite shocked. No way to block and parry doesn’t work if an animation is already playing…just felt…weak.
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It’s not only about ammount of spended hours. I have 2200 hours in DT, those hours were spoiled with gacha, server errors, timers on mission board, and other frustrating things.
SM2 has its problems, depending on how fast and if they will fix those problems and also how much content there will be the overall expirience can be better then in DT no matter the hours.
If you fail parry timing it works as block.
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It’s been said already but the Tide combat system has a lot of years on its neck. It’s had time to ripen into what it is today. On top of that, most everyone who is on this forum to any extent is likely intimately familiar with it. No one’s really unclear on or confused about how it works.
On the flipside, the SM2 combat system is new both in terms of how long it’s existed and in terms of how long players have had to familiarize themselves with how it works. The amount of people I see complaining about its melee system whilst simultaneously outing their own lack of understanding of how it works in the same breath is somewhat staggering. Very often the gripes people voice are not errors or flaws in the system but rather their own lack of understanding of that system that they project onto the game as being problems with the system itself. By no means do I think it’s perfect; there’s too much jank in player attacks and not enough control, enemies are generally slightly too tanky on most difficulties and so on and so forth. But let’s not forget that the game has been out for less than a week and hasn’t seen any patches other than release related stability fixes. We don’t really know what the SM2 devs approach will be to future tweaks to the combat and balance (assuming there will be any at all) so it’s premature to speculate on that at this point but it remains an objective fact that the Tide combat system is essentially a ripened fruit ready to be eaten and the SM2 combat system is a plant only just plopping out of its earth bound uterus.
Aside from combat comparisons, I can’t say I even understand how you come to the conclusions you have. For any comparison between the two to be fair, you have to judge them by their state at each one’s release and when you do that, there really is no contest. SM2 runs better and looks better. Not to mention the game is actually feature complete upon launch.
In any case, give it time. My guess is we’ll see some occasional balance updates to a variety of things from weapons to classes to enemies, but not to the extent that we see in DT and probably not as a ubiquitous part of every major patch. As ever, time will tell.
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Id be interested to get the opinions of some Space Marine 1 players as to how Space Marine 2 compares.
Like, how does it feel in comparison? The controls and attacks? The flow? Is it similar or completely different?
SM2 is clunkier for sure. It’s heavier and meatier and more technical and complex but it does feel like you’re not in control a bit too much of the time to me. SM1 was significantly faster and lighter and you felt a bit more in control. It was also a lot less punishing. As far as similarities they include the controls, the executions and the armor system, but beyond that they feel pretty different. With some refinement to deal with some of the clunkiness I’d be more willing to call it a flat improvement than I am right now.
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