I’m quite picky when it comes to RTS games. They all require you to manage lots of units and the controls to do so are always limiting. If I’m going to manage an army I need to be able to see loads of the map so I can plan, and be able to select individual sections of that army easily. Of course, my beloved Supreme Commander does this quite beautifully, but everything else doesn’t. Except, and quite obviously with the big blue text slapped at the top of this post, Dawn of War II.
The immediate difference with DoWII is that you don’t have a whole army to control, you just have 4 squads. This means that instead of having your focus spread over, say, 100 units, it’s just concentrated on basically 4. This then means you can get your teeth into all the subtle details of these units and micro-manage them – ultimately making for a RTS experience that I have been crying out for since all those other RTS did missions where you just have a handful of units and you have to get them from a to b.
The characters so far have been…ok. To be honest most of them are typical Very Hard Men with the one exception of the Dark Stealthy Assassin. Actually, yeah, the characterisation is pretty poor, but that seems to be typical of every RTS ever and it’s not that poor that I’m skipping through cut scenes. The plot is about on par with the characters running the typical goodies fight baddies only to find the baddies are fighting bigger baddies that now want to fight you. It’s been done to death, but it’s a decent enough way to link up the missions and again, it’s never offensive.
I may be saying nothing but ‘this is average’ at the minute, but I haven’t actually talked much about the bit where you get to play yet, and that constantly far surpasses average. It’s great. As I said earlier, when you go into a mission you have 4 squads which you choose from 5 available (6 eventually I think). Each squad has a captain and then 2 other guys, with 1 exception; your Hero character. This guy is a squad all by himself – he’s massive and is equipped with a huge Chainsaw Sword of Doom and can plain charge into groups to send them flaining into the air, then start chopping them up when they land. Your other squads are an assault squad eqipped with machine guns and grenades; a heavy weapons squad with massive machine guns, rocket launchers and artillery; a scout squad which can cloak and use demo packs to level buildings along with sniper rifles for picking off high value targets; and finally a melee assault squad with jump packs and chainsaw swords able to rocket jump into packs of bads and start chopping.
While it’s all well and good saying “you get this, this and this”, it’s how you combine all this stuff which makes DoW beautiful. For example, you set up the heavy weapons guys and send the scouts off to blow a building. When the scouts start getting chased off for causing a ruckus all you have to do is run them into the line of the heavy weapons, and they just churn up the pursuers. Another example could be getting your standard assault squad to lob some grenades into a pack of bads and once they go off its perfect opportunity for your melee assault squad to rocket jump in and start carving stuff up. With these 5 squads to choose from there is an unbelievable amount of ways to combine them, and that’s without all the extra combinations of equipment.
As you go through the campaign you units gain XP and pick up drops. Drops can be new armour, weapons, or accessories like med kits; and you spend your XP on upgrading stuff like ranged combat ability and stamina. Factor all these things in and you have a near infinite amount of combinations for your guys to work together with. I mean, my commander got a short range teleporting device god dam it – that one thing on it’s own changed so many tactics and I’ve got god-knows how many unlocks still to get. The important thing to bear in mind here is though, that no matter how complicated the options might be and what you want to do with them, your execution will be just fine. It might all sound intimidating but the controls are there to pull it off. They almost make it seem easy. It’s the same thing that supreme commander does, and any RTS should do – anything that you need to know or access is easy and fast to get to, and that’s all you should ever want.
That’s all I’m going to say on it for now, but this is by no means conclusive. All this really is is a mind splurge on it, and I’ve barely scratched the surface of what DoW has to offer. More soon hopefully, especially when I actually touch Co-op and standard multiplayer.
You make the Dawn of War 2 singleplayer campaign sound rather interesting, I’d better give it a go sometime soon. All I’ve played thus far has been 3v3 multiplayer. And … let’s just say there’s no RTS I play more than DoW 2 nowadays. Teambased multiplayer matches are awesome. You should definitely try it!
The new patch (now in beta) promises to shake things up quite a bit. Doubling the amount of multiplayer maps, adding a map editor and rebalancing every faction. So there’s no better time than now to get into the multiplayer. Any DoW 2 player can join the beta through Steam, so you can go straight into the freshly rebalanced multiplayer game if you join in now.
If you can co-op online I’m up for trying it as well Craig, I’ve been meaning to go back and retry with different equipment combinations than I previously had.
I just recently uninstalled Supreme Commander, that game was a beast that didn’t run too well on my machine when there were a lot of units and that’s basically every mission. I also didn’t like it that there was no auto save when the map was extended, having to restart all the way from the beginning pissed me off a few times as I did not manually save myself. DoWII is an interesting strategy game that borrows heavily off of CoH and that’s not surprising since both games are made by the same people along with them using an advanced version of the CoH game engine for DoWII. I enjoy the contrast to most but I guess I’m a traditional RTS guy more so that would eat up Starcraft or any C&C game.
I’ll be up for co-op yeah. Not really played it since I wrote this post either – been distracted completely.