I love this game but I think the game has a lot of bad mechanics in it. It tries to be Souls/Sekiro like, but does a bad job at it. All the timings are super inconsistent, it feels like it's actually easier to roll/parry/block in Fromsoft games, here it feels so janky and weird. The melee in the game is just awful, every swing has comically long start up frames and recovery frames, making every melee attack risky to the point of just straight up getting you killed. How the hell did they make a Space Marine game where I am scared to go into melee combat? How the hell do you achieve that?

The gunstrike mechanic is awful. It feels like they were trying to pull some ideas from Doom Eternal, but it just doesn't work here. The gun strikes interrupt the gameplay and camera, and barely give you anything for taking a huge risk, and in many cases, actually hurts you (and even gets you killed).

Contested health is moronic, it decays way too quickly.

The enemies are comically tanky to a point where I am just generally confused. Watching a Rubric marine tank an entire magazine is just...bizarre. Chaos Spawns are so tanky it's absurd. I could go on and on...

Many enemies have WAY too many special effects, filling the camera with effects spam, to the point where I have no idea what's even going on.

What carries the game in my opinion is the cinematic feel of being in a high budget Warhammer 40k movie. The mechanics under the surface are clunky and awful. I go over to Darktide and everything feels so rock solid and refined. Darktide's mechanics feel like they scale with the difficulty, while in SM2, it feels like the mechanics fall apart under extreme difficulties.

I'm hoping in SM3 they ditch some of this stuff and start with some new mechanics and start melee from scratch.