The interface is disorganized, clunky, and unattractive. The textures, and especially the lighting and post-processing effects, look about half a decade out of date even on max settings. The oppressive, gothic environments are moody and atmospheric, but not particularly impressive to look at. What even multiplayer buddies can’t save you from is the fact that the whole thing is painfully lacking polish from floor to ceiling. Sometimes I wished I could tell my companions to take the day off and let me go solo through all 9 missions, considering how much of the work I was having to do myself anyway. In many tense battles, I found myself overwhelmed from both sides as I was trying to clear a path ahead, and my squadmates couldn’t cover our collective rear between the two them - despite having access to the same types of weaponry I had. It’s a lot harder to recommend playing in single-player mode because controls for giving orders to your battle-brothers are awkward and cumbersome (Mass Effect 2 did far better in 2010) and the oblivious AI seems unaware of anything approaching them from anywhere besides head-on.

There are no persistent unlocks that stick with you from one session to the next, though, which was a little disappointing. There’s an option to play with all of the available kit items and abilities for your class unlocked immediately, or you can choose to start with basic gear and earn the rest with XP over the course of a session. The different playable classes (strangely missing from single-player) allow for some more variety and specialized tactics, and focusing on team coordination can distract from some of the more threadbare elements of the Space Hulk’s cast and environments. The Emperor-praising action is at its best in four-player co-op.And the horde-blasting, Emperor-praising action is at its best when you jump into four-player co-op. It had me convinced that a first-person shooter was the ideal way to present this particular fantasy. It’s what playing as a Space Marine should feel like. Clunking around in Terminator armor while cleansing a hallway of dozens and dozens of enemies, using an autocannon of a caliber that is normally reserved for vehicles, and literally wading through the corpses of the dead toward an objective marker in the near distance that read simply: “Purge”, I was ecstatic.

To its credit, Deathwing offered me several brief moments of outright, fanboyish glee. And like realizing that stately king was an actor getting paid to wear goofy clothes on the weekends, it left me with a sense of disappointment. The first-person hall-crawling and Tyranid-zapping through a massive, abandoned ship graveyard works well on a basic level, but you don’t have to look very closely to see through the trappings to the shallow experience beneath. Space Hulk: Deathwing made me feel like one of Warhammer 40K’s elite Space Marines in the same way that the renaissance festival made me feel like a knight when I was called up onto a stage as a kid to be dubbed by a fake king.

Space hulk deathwing