I have always liked the Dragon Age franchise: a dark fantasy RPG from the makers of Mass Effect, where you band a group of companions together to take on some vicious, evil, world-ending threat. It could never compete with the Mass Effect trilogy, but those games were some of the greatest ever made; but maybe, with enough time, Dragon Age could get to that level.

This year, the launch of Dragon Age: Veilguard showed that wasn’t true. Its dialogue was so bad — filled with virtue-signaling corporate HR exposition — that it went viral for all the wrong issues, and you couldn’t even ignore it and just enjoy the game because it wasn’t very good. The combat was dull and lazy, the characters were uninteresting, and the world felt boring.

I raise this as Warhammer 40,000 Spare Marines 2, another 2024 release, is the opposite of Veilguard. You play as a massive badass space marine with an enormous chainsaw and equally oversized rifle, and you shoot through various planets filled with hoards of disgusting alien beasts. And your stylish blue armor gets very bloody very quickly.

It’s a fundamentally simple game in the best way, with a light though compelling story and linear level designs, where you fight your way along a path, interrupted with various open spaces and boss battles. You don’t upgrade your tools and can’t make story choices; you just constantly push forward, slashing and shooting as you go — and you have to, as your health and shield recharge through execution-style finishing moves.

Poorly done, this could be a rather boring game, but it’s not; the combat flow is oh-so-satisfying, particularly when you start stringing attacks together, and the fights are perfectly balanced, riding the thin line between power-fantasy satisfaction and still being challenging. There were many moments when my character, Titus, was right on the brink of death and fought back from the gates, and that felt fantastic.

The only issues with the combat are range and enemy variety. For the former, the combat is heavily focused on taking out enemies up close and personal, but there are spitting bug enemies that hit you from a distance, and they’re a lot less entertaining to engage with. The gunplay there just isn’t as satisfying, and they will hit you while you’re attacking enemies at close range, meaning you either have to race past your other targets to take them out, then circle back, or try to hide from them, which is antithetical to the combat style otherwise.

The enemy variety issue comes down to this primarily being a hoard shooter, where you fight many swarms of mindless bugs and the occasional other enemy type. Slashing through them is still very fun, and the swarm mechanics are incredibly impressive — there are moments where there are hundreds of bugs rushing up walls towards you, and it’s equally daunting and repulsive — but it would have been fun to have a few missions where these are missing, and you battle fewer, smarter, tougher enemies, who have motivations behind them. That may come in expansions, though, and as I say, the core gameplay loop is so well done that all of this is pretty abstract. If you want to feel like a badass space marine, this provides that power fantasy better than any other.

Part of the pleasure of the game, too, is just how incredible the environments look. They’re huge, dramatic, beautifully designed settings with so much attention to detail. You don’t have to be into Warhammer to play the game, but fans of the series will love just how many little references there are. Despite the simple story and lack of narrative choice, every place feels like a fully fleshed-out, real universe with a story behind everything. These are the best locations in a video game since Cyberpunk 2077.

The campaign is satisfying, if short, but the long-term replayability comes in the Operations mode, where you play as a new character and upgrade them over a series of different levels, customizing their outfit, loadout, and colors. Each level is in the same location and battle as the main story missions, but a different part of the location, with different objectives. In another game, that could be lazy, but the world design is so damn impressive that you’re more than glad to return to them and see them from a different perspective — particularly when these fights narratively connect to the events of the story campaign.

It’s a simple game, but a damn satisfying, easily replayable one, with nothing to annoy you, and that’s more than enough for me.