So what if we didn’t post last week. You’ll get over it. I buried the lead on this one, so bear with me.
"Meh."
Tim Burton’s Batman was the movie that comic book readers had been waiting for.
It was dark and gloomy: it had some of the best scenic design in a film since Metropolis. The music was great: it had Prince on the soundtrack(as any good movie should) and featured Danny Elfman’s incredible theme that would define the titular character for my generation.
Unfortunately, set design and music do not a good movie make. Although the film succeeded in thrusting mainstream America into the modern age of comics, the biggest factor that made Batman a success was the fact that Batman was in it. At the time, no one had seen such a grim representation of what the live-action super hero world might look like(Swamp Thing and The Punisher do not count). Audiences and long time fans took what they could get. By today’s standards a mere 20 years later, it’s not as great as it seemed.
Warhammer 40,000: Space Marine unfortunately suffers from a similar problem, and I suspect it will feel somewhat dated when the next 40k game comes out. After 20+ years of throwing dice and way too many strategy adaptations, Warhammer 40,000 fans were desperate for a chance to be a space marine. They were even tantalized by the mediocre Fire Warrior, a first-person shooter based on the Tau, one of the many alien species that battle the space marines in the 40k universe.
What fans got after all these years may have briefly whet their appetites. Make no mistake, it’s a polished product, but for someone who’s played a lot of action games, it’s kind of just another shades-of-grey shooter.
