Relic producer reflects on critical reception of Space Marine

By Andrew Groen

Space Marine producer Andy Lang told Eurogamer today that Relic wasn’t surprised by review scoresHe went on to acknowledge some of the games shortcomings, and said that they felt scores in the 75 to 80 range were probably warranted. Not to say the game was bad, rather that he felt the game was good, not utterly amazing. Which is kind of a breath of fresh air in the games industry. Usually developers are shackled to PR reps who lash them 50 times if they say anything less than hyperbolic about their game.

“Was it our best work?” he said. “It was our best console work. I’m pretty humble; I don’t look at [criticism] and get all upset. I thought most of the reviews were fairly on the mark with what they had to say; the character design does get a bit repetitive and certain parts of it, just how the game plays – we didn’t have time to really polish that stuff to where we wanted to get to. There wasn’t anything that was oh-my-god shocking in the game.”

“We’re not super surprised by [the scores]. Of course we’d always like to have higher scores, but with our feature-set and coming out late in the console cycle – it’s really hard to have that feature-rich game. We did our best to deliver that blockbuster experience. And the scores landed where they landed.”

“It was a new experience for many of us on the team,” he recalled, “but we did bring in a lot of new talent that have worked on these games before to flesh it out. And Relic’s pedigree of pushing for quality that we’ve done in RTS titles – we really tried to bring that level of polish to a third-person game. With regards to the strategy genre, we’re on our fifth, sixth iterations; with this genre we’re just starting out.”

Thanks, Eurogamer!