Random berk said:
Yokai said:
Random berk said:
Finally, I don't know who voiced those space marines, but they all make Marcus Fenix sound as if he was voiced by Sir Ian McKellen.
Well, Titus, the one with no helmet or beard, is voiced by Mark Strong [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mark_Strong]. And somehow he still sounds bland as fuck. I think it's the fact that he plays an Ultramarine, and they are required by law to have no character whatsoever.
I suppose it figures, when they're based on tiny little plastic toys. Though you'd think if they were too lazy to come up with a character for them, they'd just have left them silent. That might actually have been better, if they did it like Dead Space.
I'm going to go ahead and try to explain this assuming you don't know much about 40k. If you do, feel free to ignore most of the post.
See, the problem is not that they're based on toys, because the other "chapters" of Space Marines are full of character. There are the Blood Angels, who have to deal with a mutation that causes them to go berserk, the Space Wolves, who are loud and cheerful and like drinking and partying as much as fighting, the Dark Angels, who are deeply paranoid and secretive as various high-ranking members of their chapter betrayed them in the past, the White Scars, who use Mongol-style raiding as their main method of attack, except on motorcycles with guns instead of horses, etc. etc. the list goes on. There are literally hundreds of chapters to choose from, and most of the backstory has been competently written so that they come across as genuinely interesting.
The Ultramarines, on the other hand, are the basic chapter, the ones without any quirks or personality, and the same Roman theme as the government they serve. Because of this, Games Workshop has them as the poster boys of the 40k universe, and every time they apply the franchise to a new type of media, they want the Ultramarines to star front and center. The first (and only) official 40k movie featured the Ultramarines and basically no one else, and nobody bought it because all the characters suffered from the same lack of personality you see here. Fortunately, Relic did manage to avoid this with Dawn of War, and they actually went in and invented a chapter that was interesting enough, with mysterious origins and the goal of gathering as much information as possible about their past.
But here was the big-budget action game release, so they want to start with the basics before moving into any actual new territory. Which would be fine, except the basics are massively uninteresting and do seem, as Yahtzee put it last week, kind of juvenile. The movie and the game leave out all the good stuff and you're left with the same macho crap you've seen in every other game ever.
Anyway, there's my long and redundant rant on why the Ultramarines give a poor first impression of an otherwise original and wonderfully over-the-top setting.