How To Fix and Bypass Freeze on Intro Cutscene in Space Marine 2

Any self-respecting Warhammer 40,000 and Ultramarine enthusiasts wouldn’t want to miss out on Saber Interactive’s gory hack-and-slash game. Our review calls it “an exceptional piece of art,” and “a genuine thrill” for series fans. Unfortunately, older hardware will struggle to run this game as we experienced ourselves. But save your incense and prayers to Omnissiah for later. For PC gamers who encountered a freezing intro cutscene in Space Marine 2, we have two methods to bypass or fix the issue.

1. Upgrade Your Gaming Storage to SSD

Regrettably, the easiest way to fix and bypass freeze on the intro cutscene in Space Marine 2 is by getting an SSD. A Solid State Drive or SSD can access and write data much faster than the standard HDD storage, Hard Disk Drive. This is because an HDD uses spinning disks to read and write head data while in contrast, SSD uses flash memory.

We assume this is caused by Saber Interactive’s World War Z engine taking many storage resources to load hundreds of Tyranids swarms coming your way. If you check the game’s system requirements on Steam, it’s written that Space Marine 2 needs SSD even for the minimum settings:

Additional Notes: SSD required. 30 FPS in 1920×1080 with “Low” preset.

However, if you cannot afford an SSD right now, there is another way to bypass the cutscene freeze on the Space Marine 2 intro cinematic.

2. Quickly Pause and Skip the Intro Cutscene

The next best thing to do is to skip the whole cinematic. However, once the intro has started and your framerate starts chugging along, it’s going to be hard to do it. Instead, this is what you want to do:

1. Start a “New Game.”
2. After the intro text and the screen turns black, quickly press the Start button or Escape key to pause the game.
3. Wait until the “Joining Server” and “Loading Resources” progress bars are finished. It should take more than 5 minutes, we suggest leaving your PC to grab something to bite.
4. After the loading bars are gone, you should see the “Skip” button at the bottom-left side of your screen. Skip the cutscene and get into the tutorial gameplay right away.

Sure, you’ll be missing out on a cool 4-minute-long pre-rendered cutscene of a group of Deathwatches fighting off some Tyranids. But it’s better than not being able to play the game — and you can watch the cutscene on YouTube anyway. Now, once you’ve finished the tutorial, you should be able to start customizing your Ultramarine’s looks into that of different Chapters.