Warhammer 40,000: Space Marine 2 made a bold move: It didn't force progressive politics into its narrative. Despite a three-day window to play an early release (at a whopping $90), fans still flocked to get physical copies of Saber Interactive's latest release. Buying physical copies of games has become a returning trend for gamers who fear updates or patches will ruin the original, non-woke versions of games they love; see Tomb Raider or Stellar Blade. With Walmart, Best Buy, and GameStop all selling out of physical copies, digital download was the only option left for this review — at the same price, of course. After approximately six hours of gameplay, Space Marine 2 delivered an experience that fans of the original narrative will be thankful for; it's seemingly devoid of any real-world politics. The game provides an enjoyable but sometimes hand-injuring experience while delivering on its promise of awe-inspiring hordes. Empty walls Playing on PS5, it's hard not to notice a significant amount of clunkiness in the controls. Compared to titles like Chivalry 2 or Doom Eternal — which is actually a next-gen upgrade — stringing together moves felt sluggish. This was definitely not expected from a game of this generation, especially one with so much hype. Understandably, some of this movement can be attributed to the physical weight of the characters and their armor, but not all of it. There were also some running glitches and sliding with the character, but this can probably be patched out. But this is level-one stuff that one doesn't expect to encounter at this retail price. Invisible walls were definitely not expected, either. Some parts of the game felt entirely too linear and reminiscent of PS3/Xbox 360-era titles. The gamer will find himself attempting to jump on platforms within his reach and asking why he can't trample a plant. If you want to fall to your death, shouldn't you be able to? Wear your gloves Image courtesy of Focus Entertainment Press Kit The second-highest difficulty will bring some finger pain. Switching between hundreds of enemies and, at times, single firing will test even the greatest Metal Gear Solid-tested fingers. These hack-and-slash controls will have you pressing buttons a lot, but it's not as flashy and fast as the aforementioned Doom Eternal, during which users need to remind themselves to blink. At the same time, the controls were underwhelming. Sometimes you are so blinded by shots and exploding bubbles of acid from afar that there is no other choice but to run in order to simply figure out what is going on. The weapon controls made it hard to move while pinpointing enemies, as the mechanics are generally over the shoulder. It feels like the user is encouraged to no-scope, yet it isn't easy to do so on most occasions. Again, a certain level of this is acceptable due to the nature of the protagonist, but it gets annoying. Adding to this headache was the inability to pick up ammo by walking over or near it. The press-and-hold technique is painstaking, especially when being attacked from all angles. The user can only carry one primary weapon, one sidearm, a melee, and three grenades. This feels extremely limited, especially given that Space Marines are seemingly eight feet tall and carry 2,000 pounds. Forgotten wokeness Image courtesy of Focus Entertainment Press Kit 'There are no female Custodes in Space Marine 2.' Before its release, fans were cautious about the game possibly including recent changes to the decades-old story. While it's hard to grasp how much fans truly disliked the retcon of the lore, some of the recent stories are worth noting. As That Park Place reported in May, lore was rewritten to ensure inclusivity to females, removing the words "sons" and "men" from older texts. Adding women into the lore through a rewriting continued in July, when Games Workshop, creators of the Warhammer figures, explained a new "revelation" that "Custodians can be any gender.” This came with a new female character in the animated series "The Tithes." However, none of the newly rewritten content appeared to have made it into Space Marine 2, leading fans to rejoice over the new title. DEI Detected's Kabrutus seemingly gave the game a passing grade, saying on X, "Just to make it clear: There are no female Custodes in Space Marine 2." Clearly the game has resonated. Space Marine 2 launched out of the gates, peaking at over 186,000 concurrent players on Steam alone in its first week. With gamers paying close attention to which games promote progressive politics, Space Marine 2 seems to have taken that into consideration. With Concord's collapse and Star Wars Outlaws' oncoming death, it may be in developers' best interest to avoid out-of-game politics. Like Blaze News? Bypass the censors, sign up for our newsletters, and get stories like this direct to your inbox. Sign up here!

Artist R. Kikuo Johnson's recent New Yorker cover tells no lies: Affluent American white women do frequently pay other, non-white women to look after their children. And these women are often mothers themselves, sending the money they make back home to the Caribbean or the Philippines or Latin America to support children they rarely, if ever, see. What 'lesson,' if any, can we take from the savage murders of these two children? The Krim family's nightmarish ordeal is not a 'systemic' outcome but a singular, irreducible horror. Any young professional in a left-leaning city like New York or Los Angeles (in other words, the typical New Yorker reader) is well aware of this awkward, vaguely shame-inducing reality. It is what it is. Not much you can do about it if you want to keep your reliable and affordable child care. Blanca's choice We've been living with this contradiction for a while now. A decade ago, the Economic Hardship Reporting Project asked "Who Takes Care of the Nanny's Kids?", offering a glimpse of Manhattan caregiver life that pairs perfectly with Johnson's illustration. Author Alissa Quart's primary focus is on the struggles of an immigrant from Paraguay named Blanca. Raised in extreme poverty, she often went hungry as a child and began working at the age of 8. Despite this, she managed to earn a nursing degree and a job that paid enough to support herself and her mother. But then she had her son, Guido. It was for his sake she realized she needed to leave her family behind and take her chances in America. Quart is very skilled at depicting the cruel irony of this sacrifice. She notes the obviously maternal pride Blanca takes in the 2-year-old she looks after, "a chubby toddler with thick little legs" about the same age Guido was when she left him ten years ago. It's poignant but also a bit patronizing. Quart clearly assumes her subject's suffering is inevitable, and in her rush to make us agree, she glosses over any choice Blanca might have had in the matter. Blanca's grueling, seven-day work weeks fund a solid if precarious middle-class life for her son at home, but Quart paints her as a helpless victim rather than a rational economic actor. Even if this is so, just who is at fault? Certainly not the leadership of Paraguay, even though Blanca repeatedly tells Quart, "Where I am from, there is no middle [class].” On the contrary, the onus is on America to fix the problem. Americans, after all, are the ones demanding all the child care. And what of the specific Americans who employ Blanca? Quart doesn't quite accuse them of exploiting her, but she's not eager to credit them with offering her opportunity, either. We never hear from any of these parents in Quart's article, any more than we see any of them on the New Yorker cover. 'YT' people Our culture's pervasive obsession with "white supremacy" and "white privilege" makes it easy enough to to fill in the blanks. As one X account replied to the New Yorker's post: WOMEN of color taking care of yt pples kids while trying help their families & put their own kids through college. I’m guessing those kids mama is at a yoga class somewhere & dad is on a “business trip” w his assistant/mistress. If patience for this kind of rhetoric is dwindling lately, it's because more and more people are starting to notice that those who cry white privilege invariably exhibit a toxic self-regard of their own — something we might call non-white entitlement. Non-white entitlement undermines social cohesion every bit as much as straight-up racism. It poisons our conversations about crime, immigration, and education. And on occasion it has added deadly tension to the already fraught relationship between mother and foreign-born caregiver. An unspeakable crime Before she slit 2-year-old Leo Krim's throat and stabbed his 6-year-old sister Lulu more than 20 times, Yoselyn Ortega had a story very much like Blanca's. One of seven children born to a grocer and his wife in the Dominican Republic, Ortega started working at her father's store at age 7. As a young adult she emigrated to America, as did most of her siblings. Like Blanca, she left behind a son to whom she sent money. But Ortega differed from Blanca in important ways as well. She'd suffered from bouts of depression since she was a teenager, and as an adult she found it difficult to find her footing in her adopted country. She bounced from apartment to apartment in New York, often staying with family and friends, and worked a variety of factory jobs. When Kevin and Marina Krim offered the then 49-year-old Ortega a job looking after their two children (Marina was pregnant with their third) in 2010, it promised some much-needed financial stability. By all accounts, Ortega was a doting caregiver and a reliable employee. The Krims, in turn, did their best to treat her well. When her teenaged son Jesus Frias moved to New York and enrolled in an expensive private school, they offered Ortega extra cleaning work to deal with the financial strain. They also paid for Ortega to return to the Dominican Republic on two occasions to deal with family emergencies and offered part-time work to Frias and to Ortega's sister Daisy. And yet by fall of 2012, Ortega began to change, becoming sullen and resentful. On the evening of October 25, Marina Krim returned to her Upper West Side apartment with her 3-year-old daughter, Nessie, who had had a swim lesson just blocks away. Ortega, who had Leo and Lulu, had failed to show up with them at Lulu's ballet lesson earlier that day Marina entered the dark apartment, calling her children's names and heading toward a sliver of light coming from the bathroom door. There she saw unspeakable horror: the bloodied, savaged bodies of Leo and Lucia in the bathtub, their nanny sitting on the floor next to it, still holding the kitchen knife she'd used to slaughter them. When Nessie began to scream, Ortega locked eyes with Krim and began to slash her own wrists and stab herself in the neck. Conspiracy of deception At her trial, the defense argued that Ortega was insane, bolstered by her friends' and family's testimony that she had suffered from hallucinations of a demonic "black man." While Ortega would later complain about her mental illness to defense psychiatrists, in the immediate aftermath of her crime, she seemed to indicate more prosaic motivations. Rendered temporarily mute by her self-inflicted wounds, Ortega nonetheless managed to communicate her grievances about the Krims with an alphabet board: "I had to do everything and take care of the kids," she mouthed. The attack seemed to be premeditated; Ortega had assembled various documents and family mementos and left them for her sister at their shared apartment that morning. Prosecutors also wondered why no person close to Ortega thought to notify her employers about this allegedly alarming behavior. Moreover, none of them mentioned these hallucinations until months after the killings. When asked why she didn't bring up Ortega's erratic behavior during initial police interviews, her neighbor Jennifer Renoso said, “I didn’t want to be involved in any of this. I was pregnant; I had my own problems.” A similar conspiracy of deception is what brought Ortega and the Krims together in the first place. Ortega's sister Cecilia was caring for a child who attended preschool with Lucia Krim. She approached Marina Krim, then well into her third pregnancy, and asked her if she was looking for a nanny. She recommended Yoselyn. When Krim asked Yoselyn for references, she gave her the names of two women who turned out to be her nieces. One of them, Yaquelin Severino, emailed Krim an effusive letter detailing the two years Ortega had looked after her toddler son; when asked how she knew Yoselyn, Severino said she had been referred by another nanny. But it was all lies. Ortega had no child-care experience; in fact, family testified that the responsibility of taking care of Frias after so many years apart put a lot of emotional strain on her. Severino had no children at the time; for her "son" she used the name of her husband. No remorse Marina Krim did not spare Ortega's enablers in the statement she made at her former nanny's sentencing hearing in May 2018: Any shred of dignity the defendant’s family had after the murders has been destroyed. Over the last five and a half years, the defendant has not showed an ounce of remorse. Not a single one of her family members has ever reached out to my family to say, “I’m sorry for your loss.” Communication between people has never been easier, yet we have heard nothing from this family. No letter. No email. Nothing. Not a single one of them has said — I'm sorry. Ortega was given life in prison without parole. She, along with those who testified on her behalf, has faded into obscurity. The Krims have had two more children and run a charitable foundation in honor of Leo and Lulu. What "lesson," if any, can we take from the murders of these two children? The Krim family's nightmarish ordeal is not a "systemic" outcome but a singular, irreducible horror. And yet the New Yorker cover — with the jeering comments about "white mothers" it seemed to inspire — couldn't help but remind some of us of poor Marina Krim, who made the terrible mistake of entrusting her children to the wrong stranger. She was acutely aware that her nanny, too, had a child of her own, and seems to have done her best to empathize and help when she could. And wasn't she helping simply by offering her a job? A mother's sacrifice The young man in the cap and gown on the New Yorker cover has vindicated his mother's sacrifices. So too has Jesus Frias. At the time of the trial, he was also on the brink of adulthood, about to graduate college and applying to medical schools. When testifying, he exuded the confidence of a young man with a bright future, smiling at the jury and seeming to enjoy the spotlight. He went on to pursue a Ph.D. in biology and has recently started a post-doctoral position researching treatments for muscular dystrophy. Maybe it was just callow youth or an unwillingness to face the truth that led him to refer to his mother's crime as an "accident." But it's hard not to see in this callousness a little of the dismissive, mocking anger that today greets any attempts to speak of American citizenship as a privilege that must be earned. What do they owe any of us, we who so obviously have more? Why should they believe our pearl-clutching over "culture" and "shared values" is anything more than a cynical excuse to pull the ladder up after us? This kind of thinking makes sense, given that many Americans themselves think of citizenship as membership in a kind of economic opportunity zone for self-styled citizens of the world. These days, America is less an ideal than it is a vast collection of resources. So who are the original exploiters to complain about being exploited a little in return? Fair enough. But a more troubling question remains: Can America and all it still has to offer survive when its people no longer consider themselves Americans? We may get our answer sooner than we expect.

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