I tend to be an old school true school homeboy pwnmaster at RTS games. I feel that I have the attention span for the basebuilding and resource management necessary in the typical empire-builder, and as a result crush whatever enemies confront me. The nuances of large scale combat similarly come naturaly to me, as I see that I have brought far too many units to the battlefield, resulting in inefficient but supreme overkill. Superweapons are little comfort (for my enemies) , for as a huge fan of mutually assured destruction I tend to annihilate rather than proliferate. My foes, however, have no such skill and gleefully put down their umbrellas while i rain nukes/vacuum imploders/virus bombs onto their (poorly built) bases. Strangely, I also seem to have something of an affinity for small-scale strategy. In Team Fortress 2 and Call of Duty 4, I have a sort of mental heads-up display, denoting enemy team positions, flanking routes, the opposing team members to watch out for and such, and do my best to help with team organisation (no easy task in the wilds of a public server). I can also shoot a scout in the face from across the map while the gimp that is playing the scout, most likely pigeonRAPER is in full double jump/run in no particular direction mode.With this in mind, coupled with a gargantuan love of the Warhammer 40000 universe, I hotly anticipated Relic's newly released
Dawn of War II. Here was promised a new Dawn of RTS gaming, an improved game engine for the epic original game, i honestly believed that the mass combat that occurs every minute in the 40K universe could be translated to this new release and to make it even better it was to include nids . Upon completing the
Steam download, I promptly loaded up. Watching the opening movie, the anticipation grew. Presented with the main menu, with its display of a Space Marine, with the classic chainsword in hand, surveying the field before him, I felt a little pang of joy, an unfamiliar sensation for my grim mind. The game told me that i needed to create an online account - fantastic i will be able to use my xbox account hoora..... NO. It wouldn't accept the account, so i tried to make another. FAIL. I exited the game and went online to manually make a new account, which required me to make a new e-mail address. PAIN IN THE ASS. Content with my new account i loaded up the game again, and watched the intro video AGAIN because i couldn't skip it. Then tried to retrieve my newly made account. FAILURE. So i left the game again and repeated the above steps and watched the into video again and it still didn't work. WHY, i prayed to the god emperor... but no answer. I finaly created the account SanguineWarrior and clicked on retrieve account details i then went and played madden, came back several hours later and it worked, that's right WORKED.
Well, i hope you can understand that i wasn't having good first impressions with this game. Then came the single player. Dissapointed that the campaign only let me go humanities finest and not the Eldar , Orks or Tyranids but i wasn't too bothered.
Then came naming my commander, I named him Deus Encarmine, the angel reborn for the pain he would inflict on the enemies of the Emperor. And so, with a
Deathadder for my chainsword, I dropped into the battlefield.First of all, the game plays very nicely. As promised, basebuilding is all but nonexistent. You select the squads to drop onto the field before combat and they are who arrive. Occasionally you must build turrets or capture structures, but there is no actual unit production. The squads available to you are based around a named squad leader. These leaders level up as they are used in combat, with each having different specialisations- a versatile Tactical Squad, heavy-weapons wielding Devastators, Assault Marines with jetpacks and close combat weaponry, and stealthy Scouts. Only 4 of these can be taken on missions, including the commander, giving something of a tactical element before the battle even begins in your choice of squads. Personally, I usually have the tactical squad attack while the Devastators set up, before jumping the Assault Marines into the fracas, along with the commander, but there is a huge amount of choice in tactics used. Such as run into the fray, then run out of the fray, then run back into the fray and retreat again. It goes on a bit but that is the only tactic. These squads gain experience and level up as they are used in combat, allowing them to gain new traits and abilities, but the real point of interest is wargear. Wargear is equipment obtained through missions. Your choice of wargear is what really generates attachment to the units, and what can give an edge in combat. You will regularly have to choose between different items, depending on what role you allocate to each squad, and on the mission objectives. Frequently, I pore over the wargear selection screen, allocating the kit for maximum effectiveness; some items of wargear are unique, and as such offer some sort of bonus along with a little backstory regarding the reason you should be excited about carrying this relic into battle. This is particularly intersting for a fanboy like myself, but I'm sure will hold some degree of interest for a novice to the world. The campaign is lengthy ( lengthily repetitive ) - I have put in over 1 hour playtime since release, and am still hitting my head off the wall because it sucks so bad. Story is as per usual as far as these games are concerned, obviously particularly appealing to fans of Warhammer 40000, but not unintelligible to other individuals either. Interestingly, as is becoming common with RTS games, cooperative campaign is available.
Multiplayer impressions coming soon...
Multiplayer is awful
1. The game is horrendously imbalanced and patches don't seem to fix it
2. The RTS genre has been stripped down to pure combat, not that it is always a bad thing but when the combat involves who can get the first tier three unit i.e Carnifex on the field the game becomes somewhat CRAP.
3. As most hardcore RTS gamers will be aware there are 3 basic strategies you can employ - Rushing, Turtling and Booming
Rushing involves spamming troops very quickly and overwhelming your opponents within a few minutes.
Turtling involves building a large amount of base defences to prevent Rushers
Booming involves purely focussing on economy to be at a massive advantage late in the game
Now you can't rush due to two very irritating turrets that always accompany you into battle and kill all tier 1 or 2 units instantly.
You can't turtle due to the fact that you can't build base defences
You can't effectively boom as resource gathering has been vastly simplified in order to focus on combat.
With these three strategies made obsolete to usher in a new age of RTS gaming i hear you wondering what strategy could be effective in such a combat based game, well now i will tell you.
You engage the enemy shoot a bit and then run away to your base, heal up and attack the enemy again. Now with this purely combat orientated game there seems to be a large amount of pussyfooting around the maps and no real engagements of over two units from either side. In other words the game does not sate ones thirst for bloody combat. Instead is sates ones thirst for gouging out their own eyes.
4. The only game type that is ever played is victory points. This involves capturing critical locations which in turn lowers your opponents points bar, when this bar reaches 0 the game ends. Now this game mode sounds like it could be very tactical. You capture points and then set up firing positions to cover the approaches to the point to ensure that it remains yours. However, this is not how people play online, they capture points then run away and then they expect you to capture the point and run away so they can swoop back in and recapture it just to run away. In other words, in this solely combat based game not much combat ever actually takes place.
5. I hear what you are saying, "If the multiplayer sucks so bad then why not just play single player?" Luckily for you i will answer that question, you could probably beat the insane AI by staring at the screen long enough for the computer AI to realise that it sucks so bad and concede defeat.
I have rambled but i just wanted to get the point across that Dawn of War 2 is crap.
