Whee! Dawn of War II has been released at last, and I’ve already reviewed it over here. Naturally we’ll be providing with an even more taut and cogent RPS opinion later in the week, but if you really must have a numeral attached to the game, then that’s your link. Still in a quandary? Then perhaps you should watch the Eldar action trailer, which we’ve conveniently embedded after the jump.
Are you going to purchase Dawn of War II?
Related Stories:
It could have been great, but instead of telling a story like the original DoW did it’s the same 5 maps all over again. In other words, singleplayer really sucks.
I really like the singleplayer. One of the best since Starcraft imo. :O
@Tworak: That will change. The thing about starcraft was that every map was unique and in most of them the devs had put something cool to do… like nicking battleships, or finding prisoners or something like that. In this, the vast majority of the maps eventually seem to be simplistic defend missions or seek and destroy on the same goddamn maps. If anyone remembers how crap and repetitive the dark crusade campaign was: it seems that Relic didn’t learn anything from that shitty excuse-for-a-multiplayer-tutorial at all. Still, the loadout screen is fun to tinker with. And I still <3 my assault squad.
It took me about 10-11 hours to tear through the (SM only) single-player game, and, contrary to the micro emphasis of the multiplayer, it’s annoyingly simple, due to the absence of any unit production, only having four units at a time, and because the optimal tactic at any given time is to keep your guys pretty close together in one big mass.
It’s not a tactical challenge, it’s not a strategic challenge, it’s not a twitch challenge.
But, hey, multiplayer’s where the replay is, right?
Except the biggest disappointment is the paucity of multiplayer maps, compared to the beta/demo. I think it’s something like one new 1:1 map, and one new 3:3 map. No 2:2 or 4:4 support at all.
They took an artistic risk, and that’s to be applauded, but I want a little more meat on the bone.
Noc: thanks. I checked with some friends too. That’s fine in itself but I couldn’t get over all the othe dumbed down stuff in the game and as such I’ve decided DOWII is not for me.
Conquests: I’m not suggesting that the game as it is would be better if the single change that was made was that the enemies tried to reclaim positions or nodes since yes, the maps are linear. I am suggesting that a game that is supposedly about tactics and strategy were more about tactics and strategy. How that could be achieved is a besides the point. From my experience DOWII is shallow in what I expect are usually the selling points of the genre of RTS games.
No. I play RTS games for the singleplayer campaign. Dawn of War II leaves 75% of the game out of said campaign and general consensus on it suggests that it’s a bit tedious and drawn out to boot. If they release additional DLC campaigns or an expansion that uses the other races as well, then maybe.
Darn, apparently I am one of the unlucky ones to have the unfortunate configuration causing crashes halfway through any mission. The unfortunate configuration you ask? Oh, that would be having a 32-bit windows OS. Hope they fix this on the quick, I’d like to get past the 3rd mission for sure.
Also, not sure if this is part of the fact that I have only crashed out of the game, but can I skip that cutscene or what? Perhaps I need to actually get through a mission and then exit it without a crash. Perhaps then…
Oh yes, the cutscenes: something is seriously wrong with the singleplayer campaign when you see the SAME “omg big scary alien” cutscene a second time….
This happens more than once.
I’ll probably end up buying it despite no interest in the game prior to release. Now that I hear it follows the CoH model I’d really like to play it, as I’ve been wanting to play CoH but simply couldn’t muster the interest due to the WW2 setting.
I’m sad death isn’t permanent like in Myth, but then Myth will probably never happen again in the commercial sphere as it was just plain hard. And with the current trend being “easy with hard difficulty levels” as opposed to the old ways of “hard with easy difficulty levels,” I just don’t think we’ll ever see a game like it again.
Seriously, Myth was such an unforgiving game. I had never played anything like it, and probably never will again. Annihilated in every level at least 5 times before barely scraping through, then finally getting to the point where you find a good tactic and are able to get through with nary a scratch. Good stuff.