For the Emperor!

It's Dawn of War, Jim, but not as we know it.

So Dawn of War 2 hit games shops all over the country on Friday and I managed to hold out until Monday to buy it. For those of you unfamiliar with the franchise, it's set in the world of Games Workshop's Warhammer 40K. Developed by Relic, the masterful team behind Dawn of War 1 and WW2 strategy masterpiece, Company of Heroes, DoW2 uses an updated version of the Essence engine from CoH, optimised for dual core DX10 systems. The game requires you to install Steam if you dont have it already and encourages you to get a gamertag from Live, so you can get Xbox-style achievements. Yes folks, I now have Gamerpoints. For shame!

So, trivialities out of the way, let's begin our adventure into Campaign mode. The first thing I noticed about the Campaign was that I didn't get a choice of which race to play. Having just recently finished DoW:Dark Crusade and DoW:Soulstorm, I had gotten used to the idea of having 7 races to pick from but here it was Blood Ravens Space Marines or quit to desktop. Fair enough, says I. Marines were my favourite in the first game anyway. After picking a name for my Force Commander (pick wisely as you will regret calling yourself Geneseed McBigballs when you have to see it over and over and over), you are taken into your first mission immediately. So, Force Commander Proteus (I've played Chaos Gate, I know they're all called Latin names...) and his accompanying tactical squad land on the battlefield and straight away it feels familiar. More polished graphics, for sure. I turned the settings up to full then tuned them down until it stopped warning me my system would have trouble. The landscapes are pretty nice, especially when you zoom right in. Details and animations are good and thankfully there seems to be enough of a range of them that you dont have 5 men performing what appears to be some kind of esoteric synchronised shrugging dance. Scratch the surface though, and the blood and guts of this game have changed in a big way. First of all, there's no resource collection. Now, I dont mean that in the same way you could say there is no resource collection in DoW, where you take a point and it will build up resources for you to buy stuff. There literally are no resources to collect. You dont "buy" structures or units. You dont "buy" upgrades within the mission. Instead you simply have your squads, each with a named squad leader. If a squad member is killed then you get him back by retreating to your nearest "relay" (think checkpoint) and a replacement teleports in. If your squad leader is incapacitated then another squad leader can revive him (in true Gears of War teabagging fashion by standing nearby and waving your arms in the air like some kind of steel-encased Obi Wan Kenobi). This feels really strange at first and you cant help but think to yourself, where the hell do I get more men, damnit!?

You move around and fight just like in CoH, with terrain features offering either no, light or heavy cover depending on what it is. Your troops are relatively smart and will jockey their position to make the best use of available cover, retreating behind walls or sandbags and the like when they catch sight of incoming enemies. Each unit has a few special abilities which are powered by energy and you have to constantly be micro managing this to get the most effectiveness out of your troops. This would be an unholy pain in the ass if it was DoW. But it's not. It's DoW2 and you get, count em, 4 squads of men maximum per battle. And we're not talking 10-strong steel legions raining explosive jacketed slugs of death. Oh no. The tactical squad is 4 men. The Assault and Devastator squads number 3 a piece and your Force Commander is all by himself. Generally in each mission you have 11 men, tops. The key to this working is the new wargear and experience system. Each squad leader character gains XP over the course of the Campaign with which he can boost one of four stats. Health, Melee, Ranged and Energy, would be the basic titles. Like in Mass Effect, hitting a threshold in a particular stat grants new abilities and unlocks access to different weapons or to additional equipment slots. Each point invested in a stat also boosts your associated skills, such as melee skill or ranged damage. It's actually a very fun process to level up, choosing what's the best direction for your squad leader based on the way you like to employ him and his squad in the battle. My only observation on this would be that against some enemies, they have structures which spawn enemies seemingly indefinitely until you destroy the structure. This would indicate that it's possible to "milk" these bottomless udders of XP for as long as you could stomach it but I haven't tested if the time/reward ratio is worth it. The other new(ish) addition is Wargear. In the last two instalments you could pimp your force commander with wargear but here every squad leader has a number of slots which can hold wargear of various descriptions. Weapons, armour, grenades, orbital beacons, medpacks, purity seals etc. It's very VERY much like WoW in this respect. Even down to the fact that basic loots are white text, uncommon are green and rare are blue (haven't seen any purples after 8 hours of gameplay but you know they'll be there...) Each piece of kit further enhances your stats or grants special abilities to the bearer. This loot "drops" from killing standard enemies (sometimes) and from the "boss" fights (always). I'm not sure if there are loot tables or if the drops are predefined. I have a feeling it may be the former. The bosses are good fun to fight and generally have one or two tricks up their sleeve that make the battle a bit more interesting than just mass select and click attack.

Which is not to say that the regular gameplay is anything like the drag-select and zerg that has been the bane of RTS games since, well, since forever. Try that here and you will be torn apart faster than Richard Gere's rectum at the hamster equivalent of Crufts. Each squad has to be individually manoeuvred into position, then the enemy teased into attacking you on your terms while you micro-manage your special abilities to maximise your firepower. As soon as each individual burst of combat is over, your troops regenerate health and energy very quickly so it becomes a series of small skirmishes that you have to carefully manage to be as efficient as possible. You do have some tricks that are limited use, such as grenades and medpacks but these can be topped up by breaking supply crates that litter the maps. I've never ran out of anything yet but I am only playing on default difficulty (2 of 4, I think).

It's really not like DoW at all, to be honest. It's more like a bastard half-breed of Diablo 2, and Company of Heroes set in the 40k universe, with elements of World of Warcraft thrown in. Hmmm. Win?

After a battle you are debriefed and given bonus experience based on 3 key areas: Fury (what % of enemies in the level you killed), Resilience (how many of your squad leaders were incapacitated at any point in the mission) and Speed (how quickly you completed the mission, which for me is always the lowest rating unless it's a computer attacks you type mission). If you score highly enough you can gain bonus deployments on that campaign day (in other words you get to do another mission before the day ticks over, which usually entails some bad shit happening somewhere or other, so it's a worthwhile goal to achieve these bonus deployments).

On the interplanetary scale, there are a number of worlds with available missions on them and after the initial couple you are free to choose the order in which you do these. Tactical considerations come into play here too though as some missions have a date by which they must be done and some missions lower the Tyranid Infestation level of the planet which I can only imagine to be bad if you leave it to build up for too long.

There is a continuous story thread going on as you play which seems so far to be much more solid than the dubiously loosely associated fluffy bits which proliferate the Campaign modes of Soulstorm and Dark Crusade.

I haven't ventured into the peril-fraught world of multiplayer matches yet. I understand you can play as Marines, Eldar, Orks or Tyranids in multiplayer, so I'll be giving that a try once I've played a bit more. It will be interesting to see how the other races deal with the 4 squad limit, or the fact that when fighting Tyranids and Eldar they seem to have buildings. I did notice there is an interesting Co-op multiplayer mode where two players can each take control of 2 squads in campaign mode (I'm looking at you Mr Oakley...)

In the future I can see expansions with other races which if you offered me right now I'd bite your hand off. This game is helluva fun, not many games can keep me playing for 8 hours straight and have me only switching off when I'm bordering on unconsciousness and a few hours away from my alarm going off for work. It's only been one day of playing but I'd recommend it to anyone with even a passing interest in RTS games. To me it's made some real innovations to the genre and is almost guaranteed to be a smash hit. If nothing else, it will sate your RTS appetite until Blizzard's Starcraft juggernaut rolls onto the scene. Relic ftw! 9/10