After Warhammer 40,000: Space Marine 2’s latest patch made pretty much everything about the PvE Operations mode harder, one heroic player has done the Emperor proud by coming up with the game’s ultimate cheese.
Space Marine 2 Update 4.0 added a new PvE map and with it the terrifying Tyranid Hierophant Bio-Titan, which ordinarily must be tackled by a squad of three players working together to down this enormous xenos monstrosity.
After leaving the final elevator room and entering the map's boss fight area, players are meant to activate a central terminal to link their sidearm with ultra powerful fortress lascannons — powerful enough to down even a Bio-Titan.
You then use your sidearm as a targeting system for the cannons, aiming at the Bio-Titan as the guns get to work. After one barrage the cannons are out of juice, so you have to recharge them by spinning nearby energy stations, which in turn spawns the Tyranid horde. Meanwhile, the Bio-Titan will bombard your position with high-damage artillery fire.
Once the cannons are recharged, you need to activate the central terminal to link your sidearm once again, aim, and let the cannons fire. You need to repeat this process a number of times to bring the Bio-Titan down. It’s a stressful boss fight with a lot going on; the Tyranids can easily overwhelm your squad, even on the easier difficulties, and the Bio-Titan itself can effectively one-shot you if you hang about the same area for too long. Crank the mission up to Lethal — the new, hardest difficulty added with Update 4.0 — and you’re in for a world of hurt.
Or are you? One Space Marine 2 player has worked out a way to solo the Bio-Titan even on Lethal difficulty, exposing a flaw in the design of the mission that the developers at Saber Interactive may want to patch out at some point (once they’re done addressing the backlash to Update 4.0, perhaps).
It all started with redditor RedditOakley’s discovery that it is possible to deal damage to the Bio-Titan when it walks past the Space Marines just after they step out of the final elevator room but, crucially, before activating the terminal (this imposing moment was used to reveal the Bio-Titan in promotional videos). This (tiny) damage is reflected when the Bio-Titan’s health bar displays, and then you do all that fortress cannon stuff we mentioned before.
RedditOakley theorized that it would thus be possible to continue to damage and eventually kill the Bio-Titan using Space Marine weapons and without having to go through the cannon activation process, and that theory turned out to be true. The only question was, from where would you safely shoot the Bio-Titan down? After all, in Space Marine 2 ammo is scarce; infinite ammo resources are ammo crates and loadout pods only; and the swarm can quickly become too much to handle.
The answer is the elevator room itself, which, if you never activate the terminal, is a safe haven of sorts (although you won’t see the Bio-Titan’s health bar). “I fired up a solo Minimal [the easiest difficulty] run and progressed to where the door opens and you meet the titan,” RedditOakley explained. “We have the ammo crate next to the elevator and a loadout pod available, the door to those never closes as the room is used to spawn enemy waves.
“The titan itself will walk around the battlefield, and often stay close to where you're standing. This is the range where it is possible to shoot and damage it with your guns. The titan will even lob acid globes at you here after a while.
“So that's what I did. I just kept shooting, and shooting and shooting, clearing the waves and [tougher] extremis that came along the way. I didn't have any way of seeing my progress as the health bar isn't visible in this area, so all I could do was keep shooting and praying.
“Then eventually a red hit marker showed up and the end cutscene appeared.”
In their post, RedditOakley issued the Space Marine 2 community a challenge: kill the Bio-Titan using Space Marine guns only on the hardest difficulty, Lethal. Of course, someone answered the call: redditor xD3viLzx, who used the Sniper class and the Las Fusil to slowly — and I mean slowly — solo the Bio-Titan on Lethal.
As you can tell from the footage of the run, xD3viLzx popped in and out of the elevator room to snipe at the Bio-Titan, returning to grab ammo from the loadout pod when needed. Whittling down the Bio-Titan’s health in this way took 45 minutes, rinsing and repeating while occasionally avoiding a barrage from the Tyranid itself and dealing with waves of enemies. It’s a monotonous cheese, for sure, but an effective one. Upon the final blow the mission ended properly, the victory recorded as it would if the Bio-Titan were killed as Saber intended, and the appropriate rewards dished out.
It should be noted that this cheese isn't a win button. xD3viLzx still had to make it to the mission’s final area in one piece on Lethal solo, which for me is a more impressive feat than the Bio-Titan cheese itself. xD3viLzx’s perfect parry was on point, but there were a few hairy moments in the run when the AI-controlled teammates saved the day with a revive. Still, the cheese makes the hardest part of the mission relatively trivial. You just need time and the patience of a saint; the entire run took one hour and 14 minutes.
So, will Saber cut this cheese out the game? It’s promised a patch this week to address balance concerns sparked by Update 4.0’s heavy nerfs. Perhaps the poor old Bio-Titan will get a buff of its own.
IGN has plenty more on Space Marine 2, including a deep-dive on the game’s burgeoning modding scene and accompanying complications. Last month, Saber Chief Creative Officer Tim Willits told IGN how the breakout success of Space Marine 2 had “changed everything” for the company. And eagle-eyed fans have spotted the Space Marine chapter now all-but confirmed to get a cosmetic pack after the Dark Angels, and even an unannounced new Thousand Sons enemy type.
Wesley is the UK News Editor for IGN. Find him on Twitter at @wyp100. You can reach Wesley at wesley_yinpoole@ign.com or confidentially at wyp100@proton.me.
