Space Marine 2's huge Obelisk Update adds a long-awaited new mission, reworked melee combat, bonus XP, and goat-bird-wizards hurtling towards you on living flying saucers

Like Titus crashing through a swarm of gaunts, Space Marine 2 is showing no signs of slowing down. Patch 5.0, the "Obelisk Update", is a doozy, adding new content, reworking core systems, and giving players even more incentive to murder the enemies of mankind by the thousands.

The headliner is a new Operation, appropriately called Obelisk. Taking place during the final mission of the story campaign, it charges your team with flipping one of those big magical thingies to help Titus save the day. It's cool to see this one added—it was actually a slightly weird omission before, as the story mission heavily hints at a parallel co-op mission that until now wasn't there. Now all's right with the (daemon) world, and more multiplayer content to blast through is always welcome.

Ready to harry you on that journey, as well as any other mission featuring the Thousand Sons, is a new enemy type: the Tzaangor Enlightened. These guys are sort of the wizard cavalry of the Tzaangor, but instead of horses they ride living metal discs. Don't ask me how that works—that's Warhammer, baby—but in-game you can expect flying attackers that can ruin your day both at range and in melee.

There are also major changes being made to the feel of melee combat. Saber Interactive reckons that right now there's too much focus on parrying and counter-attacking with gun strike, and not enough on old-fashioned beatdowns. The solution? Melee damage is going up across the board, and blocking now grants you a stacking buff to your next attack. At three stacks, it'll even deal a blast of AoE damage and restore an armour segment.

Beyond just making the lives of every Bulwark player substantially better, this does sound like a clever change. I've certainly found it frustrating how parry-focused the action can be—in the story mode, where the focus is always on you anyway and enemy numbers tend to be smaller, it's not so bad, but in Operations it often felt like I had to cheese the parry system to stay alive.

I also get to say every online gamer's two favourite words: "More XP!" The new Extermination Bonus aims to reward players for fighting their way through waves of enemies rather than trying to skip them or rush ahead. At the end of a mission, you'll be graded based on how many of the spawned enemies you actually killed, with higher percentages granting a big XP boost.

There's also a raft of bug fixes, quality-of-life improvements, and the ability to customise the colour of your helmet lenses. And on the paid content side of things, the new season pass offers a Rhino-load of Dark Angels-themed cosmetics, including a stylish robed look for Bulwarks that sports some of the most brilliantly ridiculous helmet-wings I've ever seen.

The Obelisk Update is out now, so you can jump in and try out the new stuff right away. And on the horizon, it looks like in the next patch and the patch after you can expect further balancing of ranged weapons, with weapon perks and the grenade launcher particularly under the microscope.

For the full list of changes, check out the official blog.