After Warhammer 40,000: Space Marine 2’s latest patch made pretty much everything about the PvE Operations mode more difficult, one heroic player has made the Emperor proud by coming up with the game’s ultimate cheese.
Space Marine 2 Update 4.0 has added a new PvE map and with it the fearsome Tyranid Hierophant Bio-Titan, which would normally require a team of three players working together to defeat this massive xenos monstrosity.
After exiting the final elevator room and entering the boss battle area on the map, players are supposed to activate a central terminal to connect their sidearm to ultra-powerful fortress lascannons – powerful enough to take down even a Bio-Titan.
You then use your sidearm as a targeting system for the cannons, aiming at the Bio-Titan while the weapons go to work. After one barrage the cannons are empty, so you have to recharge them by running nearby energy stations, which in turn spawn the Tyranid horde. Meanwhile, the Bio-Titan will bombard your position with high-damage artillery fire.
Once the cannons are charged, you’ll need to activate the central terminal to reconnect your sidearm, aim, and fire the cannons. You will need to repeat this process several times to take down the Bio-Titan. It’s a stressful boss fight with a lot going on; the Tyranids can easily overwhelm your team even on the easier difficulties, and the Bio-Titan itself can effectively one-shot you if you linger in the same area for too long. Step up the mission to Lethal – the new, hardest difficulty added with Update 4.0 – and you’re in for a world of pain.
Or are you? One Space Marine 2 player has figured out a way to solo the Bio-Titan even on Lethal difficulty, exposing a flaw in the mission design that the developers at Saber Interactive may want to address at some point patching (once they’re ready to address the response to Update 4.0, perhaps).
It all started with redditor RedditOakley’s discovery that it is possible to cause damage to the Bio-Titan as it walks past the Space Marines just after they step out of the final elevator room, but, crucially, before the terminal was activated (this impressive moment was used to unveil the Bio-Titan in promotional videos). This (minor) damage is reflected when Bio-Titan’s health bar shows up, and then you do all that fortress cannon stuff we mentioned earlier.
RedditOakley theorized that it would thus be possible to continue damaging and eventually killing 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: where would you safely shoot the Bio-Titan from? After all, ammunition is scarce in Space Marine 2; infinite ammo sources are only ammo crates and equipment pods; and the swarm can quickly become too large 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 Bio-Titan’s health bar). “I started a solo Minimal [the easiest difficulty] run and walk to where the door opens and you meet the titan,” RedditOakley explained. “We have the ammo crate next to the elevator and an equipment pod available, the door of which never closes because the room is used to spawn enemy waves.
“The titan itself will walk across the battlefield, often staying close to where you stand. This is the range where you can shoot and damage it with your weapons. The titan will even throw acid balls 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 had no way to see my progress since the health bar isn’t visible in this area, so all I could do was keep shooting and praying.
“Then finally a red hit marker appeared and the ending cutscene appeared.”
In their post, RedditOakley gave the Space Marine 2 community a challenge: kill the Bio-Titan using Space Marine weapons 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 see from the footage of the run, xD3viLzx jumped in and out of the elevator room to snipe at the Bio-Titan, returning to retrieve ammo from the equipment pod when necessary. Reducing the Bio-Titan’s health in this way took 45 minutes, rinse and repeat, while occasionally avoiding a barrage from the Tyranid itself and dealing with waves of enemies. It is certainly a monotonous cheese, but an effective one. After the final blow, the mission ended properly, the victory was recorded as it would be if the Bio-Titan were killed as Saber intended, and the appropriate rewards were given out.
It should be noted that this cheese is not a win button. xD3viLzx still had to reach the final area of the mission in one piece on Lethal solo, which to me is a more impressive feat than the Bio-Titan cheese itself. xD3viLzx’s perfect parry was good, but there were a few hairy moments during the run when the AI-controlled teammates saved the day with a revival. Still, the cheese makes the hardest part of the mission relatively trivial. All you need is time and the patience of a saint; the entire run lasted one hour and 14 minutes.
So, will Saber remove this cheese from the game? A patch has been promised this week to address balancing issues caused by Update 4.0’s heavy nerfs. Maybe the poor old Bio-Titan will get a buff of his own.
IGN has plenty more on Space Marine 2, including a deep dive into the game’s burgeoning modding scene and its complications. Last month, Saber Chief Creative Officer Tim Willits told IGN how the breakthrough success of Space Marine 2 had “changed everything” for the company. And eKeen-eyed fans have almost seen the Space Marine chapter now, but have confirmed they’ll be getting a cosmetic pack after the Dark Angelsand even an unannounced new enemy type Thousand Sons.
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.
