by Gr1mmy

4.3.09

The game is set in the 41st century and is kind of a bleak universe. Apart from super cities and space ports its kind of a waste land of infested alien planets and war and lots of it! You play as the Force Commander of the Blood Ravens chapter. Other than you there are 4 other squad leaders. Tarkus leader of the regular space marine squad, Avitus leader of the Devastator squad, Cyrus leader of the Scout squad and Thaddeus leader of the Assault Marine squad. Although there are 4 squads to choose from you may only take three with you on a mission, this makes your decision very tough as you don't always know what you will be facing on your next mission.

 

The menu interface is easy to navigate and looks very nice, the game gives you access to the Windows Live system with you can either use your Xbox Live account to add to your gamerscore or if you don't have one you will unfortunatly have to go through the stupidly annoying Xbox site to make your account. However when you do all that you will be able to use the awesome matchmaking system which was used in Halo 3 so you will always find people to play.

The online mode only has 2 different game types which is kind of disapointing. Firstly there is Victory Points, where your team has to capture 3 different points on the map and hold them till you gain 500 points and win. The other mode is your simple Annihilate in which you have to destroy all your enemies bases to win. Despite being fun at times there is a bit of a problem with lag on the online, if other players settings are on very high it causes the match to lag.

The campaign mode is great. There's no bases, production queues or squad caps, its just you and your 3 squads get dropped onto a planet via a drop pod and you make your way to the objective and complete them. Unfortunatly thats pretty much there is to it. There is a skill building system in campaign which you get 2 points eveytime your squads level up, this fits in nicely with all the extra weapons and armor that also drops from bosses and sometimes from random enemies. Since i wanted to get the review done i went and did all of the main missions and skipped all the optional ones. This was a bad idea as i missed out lots of experiance points for my squads. After you do the final mission you can not continue with the extra missions which I thought was dumb of Relic. 

This game is good but I do think that they could at least fit another few online modes into it aswell to make it better.

7/10

Grimmy

- Gr1mmy