Warhammer 40,000: Space Marine Previews, Trailer

Now that THQ has officially announced Warhammer 40,000: Space Marine, both IGN and Eurogamer have taken the wraps off of their first impressions pieces.

A snip from IGN's article:
Slicing through your enemies and progressing through the game will in some way unlock new armor and improve your statistics. Perhaps we'll see something similar to Relic's item drop system in Dawn of War II, where the occasional enemy and boss encountered in the battle would yield goodies. Or perhaps it'll just be a system where you're awarded with experience or points to boost your statistics after completing a mission. We don't know yet, as it sounds like all that type of thing is still being determined internally at the studio. We did get to see in the video a brief look at a character equip screen, which featured a few slots for inputting weapons, armor, and items, as well as progress bars for different statistics.

How exactly the game controls is another thing still under development. We asked whether it'd be a system where there were light and heavy attacks with modifiers for special abilities, or whether specific buttons would be tied to specific limbs, but we'll have to wait and see. Hopping into vehicles might be another option for your Space Marine. We can say we saw a Titan a gigantic mechanized walker, strolling around toward the end of the video as an Ork warboss charged a group of Space Marines while a shockwave from a massive explosion in the background caused everything to shake and shudder.

And a snip from Eurogamer's article:
One thing Space Marine will have in common with DOWII though is the latter's newfound love of wargear, and that's where the RPG elements come in. "Definitely we're going to have progression and customisation be a big part of the game," says McFarlane. "So you're going to be able to upgrade your armour and weapons and gain powerful abilities."

Probing the footage Relic's showing, one screen sticks out: a portrait of a marine with three attribute bars, a level count, and various other notes. But Dunn is quick to close that off to immediate interpretation. "The whole purpose of that is just to point out the idea that there are RPG elements," he says. "The design is not complete at this point, so which attributes are being upgraded and which pieces of wargear you're going to have aren't [set], but the idea is that through the canon, through the universe, the idea of the space marines and upgrading their armour and their weapons and the customisation of the gear for your character is really important within that universe, and that's something that's really important to this game as well." Whether you start off with a character and then mould him, or roll your own character, is unknown.

IGN is also hosting a new "battle" trailer if you want a firsthand glimpse of the game.