Dawn of War II is a very different game to the original. Gone are the base building and resource gathering conventions of RTS past, and in their place is a Company of Heroes-style cover system, endlessly-detailed RPG stats and a unit count that barely grows into double figures. It's a bold change, but is it one for the better?
In the single-player game you lead the Empire's Space Marines as commander as they defend their home world in a non-linear battle across three worlds against Orks, the Eldar and - new for the sequel - the bug-like Tyranids.
In a drastic shift to the small-scale unit-count, you'll control at most four squads (with six to choose from), each with their own unique abilities and strengths. That's right - no resource management, no base building and no endlessly pumping out soldiers and sending them into the grinder. Just your laser gun and chainsword-toting band of brothers.
Securing capture points and killing key enemies is still the order of the day, but overall it's a more personal, character-based take on Relic's RTS formula, where how you manage your infrastructure is succeeded by how you manage your units and their combat abilities - more like an action/strategy game.
Your cronies consist of Avitus and his Devastator marine squad, carrying big guns and perfect for leading any assault. Cyrus and his sniper-ready scout squad are ready to cloak into stealth mode and sneak behind enemy lines, while a jumpjet-enabled Assault squad, grenade-toting tactical marines and you, the hard as nuts commander make up the rest of the troop.
Micromanaging your small band of heroes - who automatically hold bundles more character than Dawn of War 1's faceless marines - and putting them in the right places is vital to succeeding. The bulky Devastator squad for example is useful for barricading in buildings and laying down devastating suppressing fire, while scouts stealth ahead to demo-charge any enemy blockades unharmed and the near-invincible commander jumps in head-first with his chainsword to attract all the damage.
At its height this is a satisfying and certainly more strategic experience than the first game. You can of course approach missions with the traditional run and gun Command & Conquer approach - and you'll probably win eventually - but 'select all, kill' doesn't work anywhere near as effectively as being clever about your skirmishes. Part of the reason for this is the cover system, which works and feels similar to Relic's previous hit, Company of Heroes.
Moving your mouse pointer behind a barricade or wall will display a selection of coloured dots depending on how sufficient the protection is. Green dots mean heavy cover, yellow shows medium protection and white indicates none at all. It's not flawless; often on-screen cover menu item won't assign protection to the entire squad, and you'll have one man standing on his own by the side of a wall like a lemon, but most of the time it works well.
Multiplayer aficionados will of course ignore single-player altogether, but even that's had its fair share of changes.
Resources are back, working in exactly the same fashion as Company of Heroes with captured power nodes and others bringing in the goods. Base building has also returned but at its most barebones, i.e. there is a base and you can train blokes in it.
This leaves the focus once again squarely on combat, which makes for a much faster-paced, visually-spectacular but ultimately, short lived experience compared to the first game.
Upgrades are now attached to your units so you don't have to go all the way back to your base to give them new toys, while the increased number of soldiers on screen still require the heavy micromanagement of the four single-player squads, which can make competing online quite demanding.
With base buildings hardly worth thinking about, multiplayer skirmishes (bizarrely only available in 1v1 and 3v3 maps) rarely last longer than 15 minutes. They're an action-packed, explosion-filled and strategically deep 15 minutes, but those looking for a meaty afternoon's strategy-off are likely to feel short changed.
So far, so Company of Heroes then. But the key to Dawn of War is its heavy use of role-playing elements. Killing enemy troops and blowing up buildings will accumulate XP for your various squads, while boss characters drop rare loot for your characters to equip.
At the end of each mission you can upgrade your levelled-up characters by boosting their various stats, equipping them with looted items and generally going all Final Fantasy about things. It's a compelling and exciting twist on the already character-focused nature of the solo campaign, but it doesn't end up a complete success.
While some equipment - such as teleporter support for your commander - is very useful, most of the time weapon upgrades don't seem to make much difference in combat. Stat progression too doesn't seem to provide much variety for your squads. After all, even though you're offered the choice to make your weak-armoured scout squad machine gun experts, anything other than investing in stealth stats is suicide.
It's a nice addition but it's not as good as it should've been. The biggest hiccup we have with the single-player game though is that the main campaign's structure eventually verges heavily into repetition. Mission deployments can be handled in any order you wish but each carries a similar structure; Ork slaughter-fests followed by a boss fight, 'defend this' setups, or a mix of the two.
These few mission types are repeated again and again, with only boss and enemy types changing around - even the same maps and locations are revisited often. To be fair some of the revisits to old maps are optional, but fighting an army of Eldar isn't very different in gameplay terms from fighting Orks, and you're bound to get bored before the end.
Co-Op play improves the campaign experience as with the squads divided between two players (each can pick two) you've suddenly got far less to split your attention between - and more time to spend on strategy. Missions are identical and much easier thanks to your combined brainpower, but with going solo eventually descending into repetition, grabbing a mate is arguably the best way to play DoWII.
Not all of Dawn of War II's bold changes pay off and fans of traditional RTS games might feel left out. But we're glad it made them because at the single-player game's peaks, its a highly strategic and very satisfying experience.
I'm quite disappointed this one didn't rate higher, but the review itself sounds fair.
At the same time, I've not found a RTS title yet that isn't repetitive in some way. It's always "base > infantry > vehicles > win" no matter which franchise you're playing :)
I enjoyed the multipayer beta though and really like the smaller, more intense battles. I still think I'll be picking up a copy.
Lite RPG elements instead of base building and deeper strategy, like lines of support, etc is just a move away from strategy to action.
Whether strategy, roleplaying or adventure, everything is moving toward mindless action. No brain required.
Looks like I am going to have to join the 10 million plus DOSBox users and go back to my X-Com's and Civilization II's..... A time when strategy meant strategy and roleplaying meant deep roleplaying.
sorry but this is not dawn of war..... this is games workshop actualy having a say in the games development which is why this game WILL fail completly! GW have not released a half desent video game in fe*kin years!
This is not dawn of war it's 3 words!... Bag Of Sh*t!
In my mind, the biggest dissapointment was the story. If for the simple reason that there wasn't really a bad guy.
Let me explain and apologies for the long post. :wink:
A good bad guy is someone who can get in your head, talk to you, belittle you, and hurt you and your companions on a personal level. Making it all the more sweeter when you eventually defeat them.
In DoW2, the bad guys where obviously meant to be the Tyranids. Orcs can never be good bad guys because they're just too comical and the Eldar don't qualify because they are technically a good race.
So we were left with the Tyranids, a mindless race of aliens whose only taunting ability is whether they go "Grrrr" or "Rarrr".
The only salvation for this race is that of the "Hive Mind" who is controlling this invasion. Potentially an intelligent creature who could satisfy the role of the 'true' bad guy, the puppet master.
*SPOILER ALERT!!!*
However all we got was two veins in the dirt and a quick death. No 'brain bug', no strangly human looking female queen. (Note: see starship troopers and GoW 2).
This story line was (and I'm hesitant to say this) basically a rip off of Starcraft (I know, I know warhammer came first, blah blah blah), and quite frankly Blizzard did it better.
Hell the 'Overmind' (overmind/hivemind) could actually talk and interact with you.
Without a good story, the missions were all rinse and repeat, aside from the final mission of the game which actually possessed a modicum of originality, and I'm afraid 1 mission just does not cut it in what is potentially a 20 hour game of doing the same two missions over and over and over again.
Think of the ending to Starcraft and then compare that with the ending to DoW2 and you might understand the lack of 'Epicness' in the latter.
If Games Workshop did get involved with the games design process then they really need to get back to what the can actually do well. Computer Game design is clearly not one of their strong points.
Please understand. I am not comparing the gameplay elements of the two games, as they are by and large incomparable. I am only comparing the story lines because those, at least the premice, are practically identical.
Space Marine/Terran worlds invaded by a horde of creatures known as the Tyranids/Zerg, while an advanced race called the Eldar/Protoss try to elimate the threat, all the while not caring who gets in the way.
DoW was a better game and I hope Relic learn from this.
Tbh super GW have yet to learn how to make a good game lol the most shamefull to date was Fire Warrior..
DoW was the best RTS to date from any game universe next to Supcom (Supreme Commander) this was only due to THQ telling workshop to sod off and leave them to do there thing...and thanks to THQ doing that DoW1 was awesome!
This time around GW have added to the franchise agreement that they get a creative say in the games design! (ie: the heavy push on objective based missions) not take and hold style and all out "kill um all" and Base Building and management.. in DoW2 thats kinda been thrown outta the window for the objective based missions, however this is from my experance with the Beta!
Mass battles will never happen in DoW2 and with how this games designed which is if you know the 40K universe is totaly against the whole universe all together lol shame tbh.....a damn shame!
The thing I don't get is that if the game was truly designed with the table top version in mind, then why can you only have 4 space marines in a squad.
Typical unit composition is 4 space marines and a sergeant, plus the option to add up to 5 more marines if you so choose.
Also the Apocalypse ruleset caters for mass battles. It's such a shame that they didn't think to follow that kind of scale.
It would have been awesome...
In my mind this game feels more like a spinoff, rather than a true sequel.
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Deep, action-packed combat
