14 DAY TRIAL // Just as everyone is thinking about the release of the fantasy themed Warhammer Online: Age of Reckoning and while strategy fans are hearing more about the 2009 release of Warhammer 40,000: Dawn of War 2, this short video found its way to the Internet not too long ago:
The video is said to be from a game called Warhammer 40,000: Space Marine which is set in the Warhammer universe and plays basically like every shooter you've seen since Doom was launched. The nine and a half minutes of the video show a Space Marine which manages to take out a host of Chaos spawn.
The commentator seems to be a developer on the game, a guy that explains why the team has chosen to make combat “up-close, personal, visceral melee experience” while also saying that “we have range combat in the game, and it's fun and important, but properly used, it's really a means to end in order to get up close to the enemy, where the player has a tactical advantage. We call this intimate brutality”. Anyone that uses the concept “intimate brutality” must be a Warhammer developer as far as I am concerned.
The Internet rumor mill suggests that this game, which is set to launch when the under the radar Warhammer 40,000 MMO launches, is in development for the PC, the PlayStation 3 and the Xbox 360 and the clip is probably showing the Xbox 360 version of the game in action.
THQ has said nothing related to such a game and has refused, so far, to comment on the leaked video.
We might be facing a very elaborate hoax but, unless THQ comes out and says that this is a video from a canceled project, I will believe that a Warhammer 40,000 shooter is in development and I'll spend a whole lot of time thinking about the ways in which this game could be great.