The curse of horde shooter balance: Fans take to Steam in protest as Space Marine 2 gets unpopular patch—devs promise course correction within the week

A trooper with a flamethrower burns corpses — (Image credit: Focus)

If covering Helldivers 2 this year has taught me anything, it's that balancing a horde shooter is monstrously hard—starting with an unpopular major balance patch that dented the Railgun, it wasn't until this month that, after a big overhaul, Arrowhead started hitting the mark again. So to see Space Marine 2 now running into the same problems has given me an unpleasant sense of intergalactic déjà vu.

Late last week, Saber Interactive released a patch retooling the difficulty for Operations, which are the game's multiplayer mode—on the plus side, there's a new Operation for players to enjoy, praise the emperor, as well as a new difficulty mode. Issue being, that difficulty mode's unpopular for a couple of reasons.

Named "Lethality", this difficulty makes Ammo Crate refills limited per player, and severely nerfs your armour regen if you aren't close to your mates. While these things do technically make the game harder, artificial resource scarcity in a game about mowing down hordes of enemies isn't great, and the game's classes are designed to operate at different ranges. The Sniper, for instance, is meant to… y'know, snipe.

Looking at the community response, the main issue seems to be a similar one to Helldivers 2—in that these attempts to ramp up the difficulty completely clothesline playstyles and narrow players into a specific set of meta-appropriate boxes, else they suffer annoying damage sponges:

An image of the Steam Reviews for Space Marine 2. — (Image credit: Steam)

Luckily, Saber Interactive seems to have recognised there's a problem. As written on the publisher Focus Entertainment's X account: "We closely read your feedback regarding the latest patch … we're actively working on another one including balancing fixes. It should release next week." That'll likely be Thursday, if the studio's release schedule is to be followed, though there's the possibility it pushes it sooner.

Honestly, seeing history repeat itself with yet another horde shooter game is a head-scratcher. If Helldivers 2 has shown me anything, it's that trying to balance your game about mowing down aliens by making players feel constrained, rather than powerful? It'll only end in tears. Especially in a Space Marine game, where you're meant to be playing a genetically-modified super soldier with three lungs—being a little OP is part of the fantasy. Here's hoping Saber Interactive can course-correct without the months of drama Arrowhead suffered.

Harvey's history with games started when he first begged his parents for a World of Warcraft subscription aged 12, though he's since been cursed with Final Fantasy 14-brain and a huge crush on G'raha Tia. He made his start as a freelancer, writing for websites like Techradar, The Escapist, Dicebreaker, The Gamer, Into the Spine—and of course, PC Gamer. He'll sink his teeth into anything that looks interesting, though he has a soft spot for RPGs, soulslikes, roguelikes, deckbuilders, MMOs, and weird indie titles. He also plays a shelf load of TTRPGs in his offline time. Don't ask him what his favourite system is, he has too many.