Space Marine "Rips Off" Gears of War

[Negatempest]

Ooo!oooo!ooo! Let me play the comparison game too!

Sonic 2 and Super Mario Bros 3.

Platformer: Check
Jump on enemies to kill them: Check
2 players: Check
Power-ups: Check
Unique lvls: Check!
Hidden Collectables: Check.

My god...Mario and Sonic games play very similarly too...

Streets of Rage 2 and Final Fight

Different characters: Check
Guy in blue jeans and white shirt: Check
Saving a city: Check
Beat-em up: Check
Similar controls: Check
AoE attacks: Check

Oh my god...these games play the same too.


Sarcasm aside. Always judge a game by it's own merits. Does it play smoothly? Are the controls responsive? Are the enemies varied? Is the plot interesting? Are you having fun?

Sometimes you gotta take your head out of your own butt and judge for yourself and not what others have judged for you.

 

[Not PvP Flagged]

I played GoW for a few months, and tried the demo for Space Marine. To me they did feel familar, but no, I don't feel that Space Marine is a clone of GoW.

 

[Zantos]

It says it's a Gears clone and makes one comparison to it. If you looks, he even adds a little TLDR next to the score as to why it got the score it did, which seems pretty fair.

The OP seems to be fixating on a single part of the review, whereas I think all the points he made are reasonably justified. Most of the review does appear to be not that it's too much like another game, but that it isn't enough like Warhammer. Which is a pretty valid point when it's a Warhammer game.

 

[BoredDragon]

I don't see the "rip-off"-ness of Space Marines either, at least from the demo. For one there's no cover system so it's not exactly a tactical shooter. There's also no regenerating health, you have to smash it out of the faces of your enemies which is completely awesome

 

[BoredDragon]

It doesn't even say that in the article.

"Gears clone" does definitely appear in there. I think that's most of what the OP and others were upset about.

Some are agreeing with him but I don't feel like Edwin's opinion is all that respectable. How is it worth getting into a hate-rant about him?

because ranting is fun?

 

[Nihdrum]

Except Space Marines aren't gay

Why would there be no gay space marines? Space marines need love too you know?

No actually, they don't. Engineered super soldiers!

 

[ZZoMBiE13]

Maybe I'm missing something, but I don't remember my playthroughs of Gears of War involving charging into crowds of enemies with massive melee weapons and slaughtering them wholesale.

No offense, but if that's true, you played Gears of War the wrong way my friend. You can play it prairie dogging the whole time if you like, but Gears shines brightest when you play it as an up close and personal melee Chainsaw-O-Rama. Which is how I played both of them. Taking every opportunity to Roadie Run up to the Locust and deliver a Chainsaw Colonoscopy. It's the ONLY way to Gears in my book.

Tried that, they would shoot me, then I'd be dead and that wasn't very compelling or cinematic, so I stuck to crouching behind a wall until everything died.

Well, to each their own I suppose. I guess I should add to my original post that I always play Gears with my best friend. It's easier to play as a psycho Chainsaw on legs when you've got solid backup to keep picking your dead ass up off the ground.

 

[Kristoffer Thomassen]

I think the important thing here is that since release, I have been reveling in the glory of liberating orks from their physiology in a way I never thought possible.

And will continue to do so.

I agree with some of the guys points, although some of his criticism is like.. ehem
"All RTS clone each other as they have a resource system" (c)
You know, like that.

call of duty is just a duke nukem 3d clone.

hell you can even say doom 1 is a duke nukem 3d clone

 

[cthulhlu]

warhammer invented EVERYTHING! space marines in giant armor? 40k did it! the zerg? crappy rip off's of the tyranids! green orks? Warhammer! orks with tusks? Warhammer!
damn near everything in scifi was made by warhammer!

 

[commodore96]

Honestly the demo felt like a dynasty warriors style of play to me because you are cutting through countless peons, and the only hard part are the generals (or nobs in this case). Aesthetically it did not remind me of gears at all, so I'm not feeling that either. His complaint of the d-pad weapon switch is like complaining the right trigger is the shoot button.

 

[Rack]

If Space Marine is a rip off of Gears of War then Gears of War is a rip off of Space Invaders. Both include 3rd person shooting after all.

 

[Diddy_Mao]

In the interest of full disclosure let me preface this by stating that I am an admitted Warhammer 40K fan

To be fair, Gears of War is currently the big elephant in the room that any game like this is going to eventually have to face and Space Marine does borrow quite a bit from GoW's interface...then again I seem to recall more than one person make a lot of the same comparisons about the Ghostbusters game so take from that what you will.

For my money I think the games play very differently.
Although I've heard that you CAN play Gears of war as an CQC slasher using your lancer as your primary weapon of choice, the game didn't really seem to be designed for it. The enemy seemed to be content with the cover/return fire method and for the most part that's how I played.

Space Marine allows you to get some pot shots in from cover or while the Orkish hordes are advancing but that's ultimately like fighting a Tank with a Toothpick, eventually you're up to your Gene-Seed in a bloodthirsty Orkish WAAAGH and the only thing to do is carve into it with your melee weapon of choice.

To a fan of the franchise this game is a lot of fun and I sincerely hope that some of the non-fans who pick up this title will be intrigued enough to look further into what it has to offer.
With that said, at the end of the day a 7/10 is hardly a damning indictment of Space Marine's incompetence.
Despite 40k's popularity your average video game player is probably not too familiar with it and approaching this game on it's own merits rather than those of a 40K fan I'd probably give it a similar score. It's a competent action/shooter with a fun story, an enjoyable setting and a unique visual style...but other than it's approach to combat healing it doesn't bring anything new to the table in terms of game play.

 

[Skops]

Gears is a cover based TPS (third person shooter), Space Marine is a third person hack'n slash with the option to soften the mob up with gunfire before you literally eviserate them all.

I see nothing the same except the camera angle and they both shoot guns. The main focus is changed.

 

[rcs619]

Uh, yeah... it does exactly that.

Sure, WH40K obviously beat GoW to the whole grunty-men-with-no-personailty-killing-aliens-while-dressed-as-trucks thing. But the gameplay? Yeah, it's blatantly obvious that they were looking over Epic's shoulder.

Whether you consider that a bad thing or not is another matter. Games grabbing ideas from one another is hardly new. Hell, the whole industry basically runs on inspiration/plagiarism.

Pretty much. I mean, Gears of War stole its whole cover-system from Kill.Switch, which came out on the PS2 (That's the first cover-heavy TPS I remember, anyways).

Some points in the review are valid, other seem nit-picky.

"The weapons are mostly to blame: they're agreeably chunky but also unadventurous."

Its Warhammer 40k, the weapons have been around for 20 years. Any 40k fan can name the arsenal before a game comes out. Not to mention the bolter is a .75cal micro-rocket launcher. Its not like you're shooting a SMG or something. This is the first game that's actually got the bolter right, in my opinion.

I think the biggest issue with the review is its length. Its an absolutely tiny review, and it has about a third of it devoted to one big paragraph about how Space Marine is a poor clone of Gears.

The whole "this game is a clone" argument really gets old. All TPS's are a GoW clone. All FPS's are Halo or CoD clones. It really serves to undercut a game's merits when the only observations you make are to say "So and so did this, but better". Especially since Space Marine isn't trying to be a GoW clone. The ONLY resemblance it has is that it happens to be an over-the-shoulder shooter. It has no cover mechanic (and with how much the enemies spam grenades and rockets, cover would be BAD), and you only regain health by killing harder. Its not a cover-based TPS, its an action-game with TPS elements.

As for the multiplayer, yeah, its fun but not great. Honestly though, who plays a 40k game for the multiplayer? Its about the single-player ride and actually getting to experience the 40k universe. MP is a nice touch, but hardly necissary.

Honestly, considering its for OXM, I can't help but wonder how much the upcoming release of GoWIII might be affecting this review. I mean, really, do you want a multiplatform TPS to get a good review weeks before the next game in one of Xbox's big exclusive franchises comes out?

Sure, 7/10 isn't a bad score by any means, but it really felt like the whole point of this review was "Yeah, its not terrible... But Gears of War is better and you should save your money for that".

 

[Simeon Ivanov]

Except Space Marines aren't gay

Why would there be no gay space marines? Space marines need love too you know?

I was joking. You know, because people say Marcus and Dom are butt-buddies

 

[Jennacide]

U mad bro?

Seriously though, the reviewer gave it a 7/10 and all his points were more than valid. Could you point me to the place where he said, literally, that its a "gears ripoff"? Maybe im missing it. Because all I can find is this:

At its simplest, Space Marine is a Gears clone with a hair-raising health system which sees you healing by performing execution kills. Given how flagrantly Relic apes the Epic juggernaut elsewhere - weapons are swapped via the same D-pad system - being unable to stick to cover feels unnatural at first, but you soon acclimatise. New cannons and a Fury mode unlock at half-hourly intervals as you progress through corridors and arenas, nabbing Servo Skulls (Warhammer's audio diary of choice) to flesh out the plot's few secrets.

Which is... Well... PERFECTLY VALID AND COMPLETELY FUCKING RIGHT.

You're funny. They open with calling it a clone, and then give only one reason how the game "apes the Epic juggernaut" by having weapon select on the d-pad. It's not a cover based game. It has way more movement and is heavily sided to melee combat. The only thing you could claim is that it steals Gears visual style, which is bullshit since it's the artstyle of Warhammer 40k and was around long before Gears.

 

[Tiger Sora]

That image sums up my thoughts. You can whine and ***** all you want, but we will never care.

And it's not like gears isn't using elements from other games. Cover based shooting has been done before I'm sure.

 

[WhiteandNeardy99]

When I first played the demo my reaction was very much the same in as much as I thought this is like playing Gears of War. But to be honest most games now borrow from each other and some do blatantly 'rip off' other games but a games story is a huge factor that has to grab a player far more than how a game just looks, plays or 'feels'.

 

[ChaosReaver]

Now, I hate to be the naysayer here... BUT:

While Space Marines certainly came up with the whole "big menacing man ripping everything apart" thing before Gears of War, the gameplay style of third person shooting was refined by Gears of War before Space Marines. I think this is what most people are bitching about, really.

Then how come FPS games aren't compared to Doom or other early First Person Shooters? It's a petty thing to complain/avoid a game about. Not that I'm saying you are.


To everyone else: I've played the game (beaten it too), and having played both GoW and Wh40k:SM, I can safe say that they're play style isn't the same. Your health doesn't recover over time, unless you're really low, in which case it will go back up to a degree but will stop at a certain point. If you play the Inquisitor demo level, and only the Inquistor demo level, yes, you will get that GoW feeling. If you play the Battlements level (the one with the jump pack) the game instantly takes on an entirely different feel. The first level of the actual game has you starting off with nothing more than your basic bolt pistol and combat knife. If the reviewer really had a problem with using the d pad to switch weapons, what else could the developers have done? Gears isn't the first game to do this, and it won't be the last. That's just a petty thing to gripe about.

Multiplayer is very balanced, a level 1 guy can go head to head against a level 41 guy due to the copy equipment load outs. I will agree that melee at times can be clunky and awkward though.

To be frank though, a lot of the charm will probably be lost on those unfamiliar with the 40k universe (which is obvious by the amount of times Space Marine is called a GOW clone). But it's still a lot of fun, and a great way to waste time.

 

[MrLumber]

snip

Besides that, maybe you SHOULD play Space Marine and Gears Of War before you even start making posts like that. Im assuming you havent played both, because if you had the obvious similarities in gameplay would be familiar to you. I can sling around valid as much as I like because my opinion is just that - I have played both Gears and Space Marine, and read the review. Someone who has likely never played Gears, never played Space Marine and didnt bother reading the review but still feels the need to hate because its the cool thing to do on the other hand... Not so much.

(Last sentence not directed at you, but its the vibe im getting from 90% of the thread).

Real quick, I never actually said YOUR arguments are invalid. My point was that the reviewer actually never made any genuine comparisons between the two games outside of the D-pad association and minor bit about how 'at its heart its a GoW clone' bit. So its not really an established conclusion as he doesn't provide any arguments for which to make his statement valid.

Interestingly, this blatantly contradicts the OP's original statement in claiming that the review was nothing more than the reviewer stating that its a Gears clone.

Anyway, people always interpret things that best suit their interests. For whatever reason that seems to be they get offended or upset.

People are weird >.>