The Blood Ravens are back in DoW2, bigger, badder, and madder than ever.
Relic Entertainment has always been a very solid development house, but its outstanding effort at re-inventing RTS with Dawn of War put it on the map as a seriously innovative player. The company did one better again, taking everything it learnt about balance and gameplay in DoW, added a new Physics engine, and stunned the world with the even better Company of Heroes. Now, the second Dawn of War title is upon us, and Relic seems to have trapped lightning in a bottle for a third time.
Dawn of War II returns the Blood Ravens chapter of Space Marines to center stage, this time engaged in a grim battle to secure their very existence. The sector housing their recruiting worlds is under attack from a host of foes - the elegant but deadly Eldar, the vicious Ork hordes, and the most terrifying threat of all... the Tyranids, monsters from beyond our galaxy that have only one thought.
Devour all life.
The Warhammer 40,000 universe has had tens of thousands of words written about it, across wargames, tabletop roleplaying titles, and even novels. And yet the writers of DoWII have done a wonderful job of drip-feeding all the background and information that a player may need as the game opens, as indeed as it progresses towards the single player campaign's end. This is done with short descriptions of places and characters during loading screens, but a lot of the flavour of 40k comes across via the named characters you'll be controlling through each battle.
This time, gone are the endless hordes of squads and units churned out from barracks and similar structures you need to build. Instead, you can only control four units at any one time, chosen from a pool of six or so units. Each squad is small, too - the largest only has four marines in it - but this allows those units to be far more important, more heroic on the field of battle.
At the end of a typical fight, for instance, as you're going through loot, you'll often be privy to a conversation between squad leaders - not only do you get their own background in this manner, but as they discuss past battles and what they know of the enemy, so too are you educated. What particularly impressive is that even 40k nerds (and there might be one or two in the office) are not going to be annoyed or disappointed - this is the grim dark future that we know and love, and it's been very well-treated by Relic.
The strategic game has had some serious work done on it, too. Expansions for the previous game introduced a campaign map allowing players to plot out who they fought and what ground they wanted; in DoWII you've got an entire sector of worlds to fight for. As the campaign progresses new missions open up to advance the narrative, but you'll also need to defend captured installations and deal with ongoing hotspots. If you lose a mission - and all your squad leaders are hors de combat - you'll be picked up by an emergency extraction. The consequences of that loss might be losing key battlefield intelligence (you get information on each upcoming battle depending on the amount of Comms Arrays you hold in the sector), or that a key NPC may come back again even stronger. What's more, these defence missions and random incursions have a time limit - towards the end of the game, you may have four or more missions you need to complete, but only three days in which to do it. It makes for a tense strategic game, with some real tough decisions - choosing what province or installation to loose.
Issue: 107 | December, 2009