Like a 10,000 year old super soldier, Warhammer 40,000: Space Marine has aged surprisingly well. The new Master Crafted Edition is a light touch of a remaster, and I think that was the right approach—the things that earned the game a permanent place in the nostalgic hearts of Warhammer fans nearly 14 years ago are just as endearing today as they were then.
I went back to the game last year while writing our Space Marine 2 review, and I was pleasantly surprised how fun it still is. It might be heresy to say it, but I actually found myself preferring the cleaner, pacier combat in the original to the sequel's more cluttered and sluggish fights.
But where it certainly didn't win the comparison was in its pretty dated visuals—it was very much a victim of an era where shooters were competing to see which could have the muddiest, most dull-brown textures. Where Master Crafted Edition shines most is in the way it's pepped up the game's look.
While it still isn't exactly a visual spectacle in the year 2025, upgraded textures make the whole game look sharper, and its setpieces more impressive. Character models are particularly improved—not just in their more detailed faces, but in more subtle elements, such as hero Titus' armour looking more convincingly scuffed and worn. Touches like that make the whole galaxy feel more lived in and authentic.
There are some slightly odd creative choices. Most noticeable is the orks—they've all received a new black and white colour scheme for their clothes and armour, seemingly marking them out as specifically from the tabletop game's Goff clan, where before they were just a generic horde.
It's not a bad tweak, necessarily—I can't say I was specifically attached to the brown leathers the orks were before—but it's just not clear what the point was. Was it a note from Games Workshop itself, hoping to tighten up the branding? Regardless, I haven't noticed any visual tweaks that would diminish the story at all or otherwise undermine the campaign experience, so it's a minor observation.
In terms of the action itself, the one big change is an overhauled control scheme. Particularly when playing on a controller, it feels designed to be as intuitive as possible for a modern action game fan—click in the left stick to sprint, right bumper to melee attack, A button to interact, etc.
Even as someone who played a fair bit with the original control scheme less than a year ago, I found myself instantly adapting to and enjoying the new one—and a much improved and less intrusive UI helps further sell the modern feel.
It's improved enough to feel great to return to despite its age.
If you really want that old school vibe, however, it's no trouble at all to switch back to the original scheme. So it's the best of both worlds.
In singleplayer, all these light but smart changes come together to create a noticeably enhanced experience without touching too much of what made Space Marine special in the first place. It's not elevated to new heights or anything—ultimately it's still a lovable slice of dumb, brutal action, not a masterpiece of game design—but it's improved enough to feel great to return to despite its age.
What I haven't been able to try out is the multiplayer. So far it's been impossible to queue into a single game of either the PvP mode or the co-op. That's not necessarily surprising—I've been playing before the game is actually out, so the playerbase is much smaller than it will be at launch. Still, it doesn't seem to be helped by how siloed online play is.
The five different PvP modes and one co-op mode are all separate options in the menu. When I first started playing, these were further subdivided into different map rotations, creating something like 18 different queues. There was no chance of finding anyone in all that.
Thankfully that ridiculous situation now seems to have been patched—there's just one queue per mode now, for six total. But what's really missing here is a quick match option—something that just throws you together into something with whoever else is online. A remaster of a 13 year old game is always going to be a bit of a niche prospect—dividing the playerbase even just into six queues seems like a recipe for empty lobbies within a week.
On the flipside, if you're anything like me, you're really just here to relive eight hours of explosive, gorey, silly singleplayer campaign, and for that purpose, Master Crafted Edition is ideal. It looks great, it feels great, and it doesn't try to fix anything that wasn't broken—exactly the kind of remaster you want for a cult classic.
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