Dawn of War 2 is not an RTS. Well, it is, but it’s not. As you have probably heard, the base building mechanics found in every game of this genre since its birth are not present in this game. As it did me, this may have some of you who delight in such complex building routines as found in say, Supreme Commander, scoffing in disgust, perhaps even turning away without any further investigation into whether this game would be of any interest to you. I love Supreme Commander. When I found out the second one was going to eliminate the resource bonus for proper placement of gathering structures, I became angry. I still am angry and I highly doubt the sequel’s ability to match its predecessor, what I consider to be the greatest RTS of all time, in complexity and strategy. I loved the first Dawn of War too, for different reasons than Supreme Commander. I loved it for the great number of races and the atmosphere of the Warhammer 40K universe and when I heard about the sequel’s departure from the tried and true mechanics of hierarchical structure building, I was filled with the same dread I now feel for Supreme Commander 2. In fact, I didn’t even bat an eye when Dawn of War 2 was released. However, jonesing for a new game and seeing Steam’s 50% off sale a few weekends ago, put the hook in me and so I gave in and purchased it. The single player game is a vast departure from a traditional RTS, much more so than the multiplayer. The two modes are starkly different. The single player campaign has a format where different objectives on various maps across several different planets are selected at the player’s discretion. From this “big picture” screen, the player chooses what units and what equipment will be taken on any given mission. This will be familiar to anyone who slogged through the campaigns in Dawn of War’s expansions, Dark Crusade and Soulstorm. However, once the mission is selected and your squad dropped into the map, the similarities to those previous games ends. Hybrid games are often described by journalists as melds of whatever titles they most closely resemble, so here goes: DoW2 single player is like a combination of Dawn of War and Diablo 2. Loot - there’s tons of it, and different weapons, armour, power granting standards, explosives and even teleport and jump packs are all randomly spawned when enemies die. Treasure is also awarded at the end of each mission. Much of the fun in the game is accumulating items, picking through them and deciding how best to equip them. Each leader of the six squads available has various slots that you fill with equipment, allowing you to decide what tactical niche each squad will fit. For instance, your Dreadnought can focus on melee or mass damage, or your tactical squad can concentrate on melee, anti- infantry or anti-vehicle or even a mix, depending on what abilities are used. Making the game even more akin to a Diablo-clone, the game doles out experience depending on how many objectives you complete, how many foes you destroy, how fast a mission is completed and the overall survival rate of your men for each mission. These experience points are used to purchase ability points, upgrading each squad leader in their various characteristics: Health, Ranged, Melee and Energy. Once a certain number of points are allocated to a certain attribute, an ability unique to that leader is gained. Because during the full course of the campaign, you can only completely fill a couple of characteristics. Replay is inviting to see what it is like to use abilities not gained in the previous campaign, though, honestly, due to the repetition of the missions and being wholly satisfied with the paths I took regarding my abilities, going through the campaign again did not appeal to me. The fun is in fighting new units and in the loot, and especially for me, fighting the bosses. At the end of certain campaign missions, a “boss” character is faced. I have always been fond of bosses, being an avid console gamer as well, (I don’t care what system a game is on, if it’s a good game, I want to play it) bosses have always appealed to me and the way DoW2 melds classic console bosses with the tactical gameplay of an RTS is sweet ambrosia to me. Each race you face has several bosses, and they all have different, repeating attack patterns and special abilities, the most potent of which are unleashed as the boss’s health gets low. Attack patterns lay out on the ground, so you can move your squads out of the way, and each fight takes place in an arena of natural environs and buildings, allowing you to take cover and place squads inside buildings to provide covering fire. Of course, you can place any squad you can find into any building. Cover, like in the first DoW is still a big deal, but moving through missions as fast as I could, I found myself not wanting to bother using this interesting feature as much as perhaps the developers wished me to. Destructibility of cover, including buildings, is total and you even have to be careful of how you move your hulking Dreadnought through terrain, as he easily destroys most cover just by walking through it. The Dreadnought is probably the most useful unit in the campaign, and once he’s acquired, you’ll probably use him all the time. You can only take four squads on each given mission, so you have read the mission objectives before deciding on who to bring, though really, there are only a few missions where bringing the wrong setup will wind up in inevitable disaster. Although wise squad choosing definitely does have an impact on difficulty. Besides the Dreadnought, there is, of course, the Force Commander, who yes, gains the orbital bombardment ability later in the game; the Assault squad, with their famous jump packs and melee skills; the Scout squad, specializing in either long range sniping or close range mass damage; the incredibly useful Tactical squad, who depending on how you customize them, can do really anything; and finally the Devastator squad, whose specialty lies with whatever heavy weapons you equip them. If you are wondering why I didn’t list a Terminator squad, it is because all but two of the groups listed can become Terminators once Terminator armour is found at the end of some late game missions. Of course, you’ll only get a max of two sets. “Okay kids; raise your hand if you want to be a Terminator.” Picture them all standing on their tippy toes, fingers stretched skyward as far as possible, as if whosever hand is highest in the air will be the chosen one. “I wanna be a Tewminatoe!” I did enjoy the campaign, and though repetitive at times, all the different choices involved in character, oh, I mean SQUAD customization and the nonlinear routes through the mission maps as well as cool boss fights made it sweet. Relic just announced an update patch for the game that adds an additional gameplay mode but unless an entirely new campaign is added for a different race, this game’s longevity won’t be increased as far as I am concerned. I know there is a huge online community of hotkey savants tearing up the internet with this game right now, but for me, multiplayer DOW2 just doesn’t do it. I am too in love with the cumulative experience of starting with nothing but a few bucks and a patch of dirt, building a massive base from the ground up and smashing into my opponent’s army an hour later in a titanic bloodbath of mixed unit types and pincer maneuvers. I don’t mind a good old fashioned ragequit inducing rush either. Neither of this is happening in the multiplayer mode. It’s almost like a few years into development, the entire design team decided they were tired of working on the game, so they quit before a tech and building tree was realized. Although, given Starcraft 2’s release date at the time, it’s doubtful they actually did that, and besides, the bare bones building system allows for a very unique multiplayer RTS that really is different from everything else out there. You have one base, and you’ll charge around a small map, perhaps, or perhaps not, upgrading unit types while you make mad dashes for three different resource types, all the while mounting distracting and harassing assaults, retreating and pushing forward from three different skirmishes at a time. For the expert twitchkeys of some RTS communities, I can see how the experience must be orgasmic. And it’s usually over in less than twenty minutes. The races play pretty differently too. You can be the Space Marines and all the enemies they fight from the campaign mode: The Orks, Eldar and Tyranid, though you’ll have to spend some time offline learning them, as there they have no tutorials. The Tyranid are my personal favorite as they have great swarm tactics, being harassers of the highest order, and there is nothing like sneaking my Lictor past enemy lines to capture a victory point, energy or requisition outpost. Or should I say there WAS nothing like it as now, if I want my RTS fix, I’ll be back on GPGnet. Dawn of War 2 is a brave move by a very innovative and impressively prestigious developer, and it shows. It’s gorgeous, different and it works. The campaign mode is a fun, but for a traditional RTSer and lover of HUGE strategy games like Total Annihilation and Supreme Commander, the multiplayer has almost no appeal to me. But if dropping all the foreplay of base building and getting right to the hot sweaty mess of combat that lasts 14 minutes appeals to you, then I would say definitely pick this one up. -jr SCORE: 6.5 Good and a half

PC Game Review: Dawn of War 2

Dawn of War 2 is not an RTS. Well, it is, but it’s not. As you have probably heard, the base building mechanics found in every game of this genre since its birth are not present in this game. As it did me, this may have some of you who delight in such complex building routines as found in say, Supreme Commander, scoffing in disgust, perhaps even turning away without any further investigation into whether this game would be of any interest to you. I love Supreme Commander. When I found out the second one was going to eliminate the resource bonus for proper placement of gathering structures, I became angry. I still am angry and I highly doubt the sequel’s ability to match its predecessor, what I consider to be the greatest RTS of all time, in complexity and strategy. I loved the first Dawn of War too, for different reasons than Supreme Commander. I loved it for the great number of races and the atmosphere of the Warhammer 40K universe and when I heard about the sequel’s departure from the tried and true mechanics of hierarchical structure building, I was filled with the same dread I now feel for Supreme Commander 2. In fact, I didn’t even bat an eye when Dawn of War 2 was released. However, jonesing for a new game and seeing Steam’s 50% off sale a few weekends ago, put the hook in me and so I gave in and purchased it.

The single player game is a vast departure from a traditional RTS, much more so than the multiplayer. The two modes are starkly different. The single player campaign has a format where different objectives on various maps across several different planets are selected at the player’s discretion. From this “big picture” screen, the player chooses what units and what equipment will be taken on any given mission. This will be familiar to anyone who slogged through the campaigns in Dawn of War’s expansions, Dark Crusade and Soulstorm. However, once the mission is selected and your squad dropped into the map, the similarities to those previous games ends.

Hybrid games are often described by journalists as melds of whatever titles they most closely resemble, so here goes: DoW2 single player is like a combination of Dawn of War and Diablo 2. Loot - there’s tons of it, and different weapons, armour, power granting standards, explosives and even teleport and jump packs are all randomly spawned when enemies die. Treasure is also awarded at the end of each mission. Much of the fun in the game is accumulating items, picking through them and deciding how best to equip them. Each leader of the six squads available has various slots that you fill with equipment, allowing you to decide what tactical niche each squad will fit. For instance, your Dreadnought can focus on melee or mass damage, or your tactical squad can concentrate on melee, anti- infantry or anti-vehicle or even a mix, depending on what abilities are used.

Making the game even more akin to a Diablo-clone, the game doles out experience depending on how many objectives you complete, how many foes you destroy, how fast a mission is completed and the overall survival rate of your men for each mission. These experience points are used to purchase ability points, upgrading each squad leader in their various characteristics: Health, Ranged, Melee and Energy. Once a certain number of points are allocated to a certain attribute, an ability unique to that leader is gained. Because during the full course of the campaign, you can only completely fill a couple of characteristics. Replay is inviting to see what it is like to use abilities not gained in the previous campaign, though, honestly, due to the repetition of the missions and being wholly satisfied with the paths I took regarding my abilities, going through the campaign again did not appeal to me. The fun is in fighting new units and in the loot, and especially for me, fighting the bosses.

At the end of certain campaign missions, a “boss” character is faced. I have always been fond of bosses, being an avid console gamer as well, (I don’t care what system a game is on, if it’s a good game, I want to play it) bosses have always appealed to me and the way DoW2 melds classic console bosses with the tactical gameplay of an RTS is sweet ambrosia to me. Each race you face has several bosses, and they all have different, repeating attack patterns and special abilities, the most potent of which are unleashed as the boss’s health gets low. Attack patterns lay out on the ground, so you can move your squads out of the way, and each fight takes place in an arena of natural environs and buildings, allowing you to take cover and place squads inside buildings to provide covering fire.

Of course, you can place any squad you can find into any building. Cover, like in the first DoW is still a big deal, but moving through missions as fast as I could, I found myself not wanting to bother using this interesting feature as much as perhaps the developers wished me to. Destructibility of cover, including buildings, is total and you even have to be careful of how you move your hulking Dreadnought through terrain, as he easily destroys most cover just by walking through it.

The Dreadnought is probably the most useful unit in the campaign, and once he’s acquired, you’ll probably use him all the time. You can only take four squads on each given mission, so you have read the mission objectives before deciding on who to bring, though really, there are only a few missions where bringing the wrong setup will wind up in inevitable disaster. Although wise squad choosing definitely does have an impact on difficulty. Besides the Dreadnought, there is, of course, the Force Commander, who yes, gains the orbital bombardment ability later in the game; the Assault squad, with their famous jump packs and melee skills; the Scout squad, specializing in either long range sniping or close range mass damage; the incredibly useful Tactical squad, who depending on how you customize them, can do really anything; and finally the Devastator squad, whose specialty lies with whatever heavy weapons you equip them. If you are wondering why I didn’t list a Terminator squad, it is because all but two of the groups listed can become Terminators once Terminator armour is found at the end of some late game missions. Of course, you’ll only get a max of two sets. “Okay kids; raise your hand if you want to be a Terminator.” Picture them all standing on their tippy toes, fingers stretched skyward as far as possible, as if whosever hand is highest in the air will be the chosen one. “I wanna be a Tewminatoe!”

I did enjoy the campaign, and though repetitive at times, all the different choices involved in character, oh, I mean SQUAD customization and the nonlinear routes through the mission maps as well as cool boss fights made it sweet. Relic just announced an update patch for the game that adds an additional gameplay mode but unless an entirely new campaign is added for a different race, this game’s longevity won’t be increased as far as I am concerned.

I know there is a huge online community of hotkey savants tearing up the internet with this game right now, but for me, multiplayer DOW2 just doesn’t do it. I am too in love with the cumulative experience of starting with nothing but a few bucks and a patch of dirt, building a massive base from the ground up and smashing into my opponent’s army an hour later in a titanic bloodbath of mixed unit types and pincer maneuvers. I don’t mind a good old fashioned ragequit inducing rush either. Neither of this is happening in the multiplayer mode. It’s almost like a few years into development, the entire design team decided they were tired of working on the game, so they quit before a tech and building tree was realized. Although, given Starcraft 2’s release date at the time, it’s doubtful they actually did that, and besides, the bare bones building system allows for a very unique multiplayer RTS that really is different from everything else out there. You have one base, and you’ll charge around a small map, perhaps, or perhaps not, upgrading unit types while you make mad dashes for three different resource types, all the while mounting distracting and harassing assaults, retreating and pushing forward from three different skirmishes at a time. For the expert twitchkeys of some RTS communities, I can see how the experience must be orgasmic. And it’s usually over in less than twenty minutes. The races play pretty differently too. You can be the Space Marines and all the enemies they fight from the campaign mode: The Orks, Eldar and Tyranid, though you’ll have to spend some time offline learning them, as there they have no tutorials. The Tyranid are my personal favorite as they have great swarm tactics, being harassers of the highest order, and there is nothing like sneaking my Lictor past enemy lines to capture a victory point, energy or requisition outpost. Or should I say there WAS nothing like it as now, if I want my RTS fix, I’ll be back on GPGnet.

Dawn of War 2 is a brave move by a very innovative and impressively prestigious developer, and it shows. It’s gorgeous, different and it works. The campaign mode is a fun, but for a traditional RTSer and lover of HUGE strategy games like Total Annihilation and Supreme Commander, the multiplayer has almost no appeal to me. But if dropping all the foreplay of base building and getting right to the hot sweaty mess of combat that lasts 14 minutes appeals to you, then I would say definitely pick this one up.

-jr

SCORE: 6.5 Good and a half