By Jim Rossignol on February 20th, 2009 at 9:12 am.
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?
In fact, I already own it. I went the long mile and even went down my local shop to pick it up. I was surprised and pleased at the inclusion of a tech tree chart – surprised because the simplicity of the tech doesn’t necessarily require a tree, and pleased because despite it’s near uselessness, it’s good tech tree.
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Eventually, wholeheartedly YES!
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Definitely buying this as both Relics history and the beta conviced me it would be a marvelous multiplayer game. I do think the oppinion that not having basebuilding in multiplayer takes away to much strategy to be an odd one. Personally I believe that this is more than made up for by the wargear (both on hero and units) upgrades. Most importantly however is that reducing base building (this is something that company of heroes did right as well) allows you to spend more of your time focusing on the battles.
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Pre-ordered a couple weeks back to muck about with the beta early, and I’m looking forward to getting home and playing co-op with a friend.
From what I’ve played of it, I’m enjoying it thoroughly – stripping most of the irritating macro/base/economy management and focusing the players on certain points around the map means it’s great fun, particularly in 3v3 with a couple of friends.
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Picked it up on the way to work* this morning. I still don’t understand why it’s £10 more expensive on Steam than at retail. A couple of quid extra I can deal with, for the convenience, but this is rather silly.
*I lie. I made a 20 minute detour before work to pick it up. What does that say about me?
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It doesn’t work with my soundcard and they deleted my tech support thread after asking for more info (and getting it). So no.
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Relic tech support don’t tend to be pricks. Try again.
I’m somewhat excited to play this, but lets be straight to the point, this is not as good as coh to me, they’ve already bested themselves. Add to this that the beta didn’t even boot on my lower end pc, meaning its less scalable than coh which ran great.
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Okay maybe this is a stupid question to all your Warhammer fanatics, but does it seem to you that Star Craft basically ripped most of its settings out of W40K? Terrans have bulky space marines with mechs, zerg are basically reskinned tyranids, and the protoss look damned close to Eldar. Is Games Workshop just extremely generous that they didn’t sue? :P
Well, just had to get that off my chest. This game looks so fresh and interesting, I must have it. Thanks for the coverage so far.
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Anybody else noticed that the gameplay is essentially identical to Massive Entertainment’s Ground Control 2 and World in Conflict?
Not saying that’s a BAD thing, just that if Relic are going to claim to have taken RTS games in a new direction, they should give credit where credit’s due.
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Ohh Jonas, that’s a massive can of worms you’re trying to prise open there. It’s best just to pretend you didn’t write that and continue on like nothing happened, as said can is 50 m tall and full of Mongolian Death Worms. Or Tallarian Death Worms.
Despite having early access I managed to completely miss the entire beta of DoW2, mainly because I was in rural China at the time. Is there a demo I could try instead? Before I was kind of enthusiastic, but these days I’m a bit meh about the whole concept, so I’d really like to try it and see if it will rekindle something.
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Jonas I heard they originally had a deal to make a 40k game and then it was cancel or something. They decided that they would change the races enough to avoid copyright infringement. I have no validity for these claims however.
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I’l;l buy this eventually, but I’m really trying to make myself catch up on other stuff before buying more new PC games. This will either mean I don’t buy anything for ages or just not happen, and it’ll all end in a spree of reckless, wanton, bank balance-wrecking game-buying.
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Jim, you’ve not played spellforce? You avatar has a full range of rpg options. And can be backed by a base building formed army. Its worth playing. Rts rpg isn’t new.
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Blizzard ripped everything from GW, GW took a loot from Tolkien.
I think Blizzard did asked for a GW license for the first warcraft but didn’t get it…
So yeah blizzard did steal a lot from GW… But somehow I think relic got close to the tabletop, especially in SP as you have to do with what you are given, no base, only action. The multi is also interesting, you get a base true but it remains really basic. The choice is not on which building to build next and when do you move to tech2, but more on what unit do you choose to bring to the battle. To me this way more interesting that base building because you are kept almost all the time in the action!
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@nightcat, Blizzard originally made Warcraft on the understanding that it would be attached to the Warhammer Fantasy IP, GW then changed their minds. Starcraft was not made under the same circumstances but the look and feel is obviously ‘inspired’ by 40k.
Back on topic: I’ll not be buying DOW2 til the issue of how easy it is to mod is cleared up and its a helluva lot cheaper. £34.99 is an awful lot of money to spend on a game which I simply won’t use the multiplayer of.
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Will pick up my reserved copy on the way home from work tonight.
Looks quite promising tbh. Wonder what kind of impact those Limited Edition Wargear packs will have, since I got the Sniper version.
(LE was the same price in pre-order as the normal one anyway.)
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played the beta as much as my busy schedule allowed. I love the multiplayer experience. Even after having played it so much I have so many plans for combos and tactics I havent had time to try out. can’t wait for my work day to finish.
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Nah, won’t be getting it. Squad Commander games aren’t my cup of tea. It’s a shame really since i would have liked to see an official inclusion of tyranids in the first DoW.
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I would buy it, except for some reason steam doesn’t have a “buy” button for me. It’s probably because I live in israel, though this is the first time I’ve had discrimination for online releases :/
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Re: The GW/Blizzard thing. You know, everyone says this online but there’s not one available quote from anyone involved in either company to support it. I’m not quite sure why people believe it automatically.
KG
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Just got it, steam AND windows live?! What the hell?! WHY!? I hate live, why must I install/use that crap?! *cries*
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Mandrill
http://www.gamestracker.com/
Very good resource for finding games at reasonable prices DoW 2 is just £22, a considerable saving.
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And now Relic stole from Blizzard back…
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Grrr – got a copy this morning but am away all weekend doing social stuff with girlfriend so won’t get to play it until maybe Sunday night. Hate it when social stuff interferes with my playing a much anticipated game (sad, sad man that I am).
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Possibly not; I’m not a huge fan of the beta. I miss the base building actually, and I like turtling in RTS games. As much as I like Company of Heroes, I think I’ll give this a miss.
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I think I’ll buy this in four years when it has two expansion packs that I can buy in a bundle for exactly 7,5 euro.
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Really wanted to get this game, especially for the Co-Op, but seeing as the wife doesn’t like WH4K, i.e. no co-op for me (*cries*) I probably won’t :(
GFWL, wtf? WHY!?
It’s a special shame, seeing as I’ve always found WH40K to be the verdant meadow to SC’s tepid swamp.
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Yes, I’ll be buying this….when I get a rig capable of running it, that is. Despite hating the actual board-game-and-miniatures thing, I love Space Marines, I love the WH40K universe and I have had fun in massive quantities with DoW that probably shouldn’t be allowed in polite societies. Oh, and hurrah for Marines with personalities! I’ll be naming mine Jools and Jops and possibly Ubik at the first opportunity, then crying over their graves when I get them killed…
(yes, it still hurts….*sobs*)
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What is this Games For Windows Live, that you speak of? I can make guesses of an educated sort, but know not what precisely as direct experience of it has so far remained outside my sphere.
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I imagine Starcraft Game is like a War40K the movie, the game, the movie, the lorecraft book, the game. Since War40K The Game is like Starcraft Lore, the comic book, the movie, the platform game, the move, the game.
I don’t really feel *any* of the WAR40K games (other than the boring Space Hulk serie) are near to WAR40K lore than to “generic space marines” lore. To make a WAR40K game, you have to distand yourself from the “generic space marines” lore, with elements from WAR40K that are unique to WAR40K. That is the chaos gods, the deformation of reality by these evil creatures, wars with zillions of deads daily, gigacreatures, gigaarmsy, gigabattles, a very horrible veyr dark style, etc
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Didn’t like the beta much.. for one, I missed base building (I’m such a turtle…), for two, GFWL is a piece of crap.
Turning GFWL mic volume to 0 turns the general windows volume control slider to 0…. great design, there. Also no push to talk function that I could find. Also needlessly complicated inviting of friends to your game. Also COMPLETELY USELESS RUBBISH.
So, there. I won’t be buying it, unless I hear absolutely stellar things about the single player.
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In one word. WAR40K is gothic. Is not neoclassic, pop, new age, bauhaus, greek, etrusk, zen, afro,etc… is gothic. If your WAR40K game is not gothic. You fail.
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That’s a lot of words, Tei, not one.
And please, please, PLEASE, when you finish this game, WE DO NOT WANT YOU TO TELL US HOW IT ENDS. Harry Potter and Fallout 3 where enough.
Thank you.
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@rocketman71: I was too joung back then (and stupid). I am more wise now. Anyway let me fix my comment: “gothic” is 1 word.
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To save your progress you must be logged in?!?!?!? FUCK YOU LIVE!
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@Mandril: PLay.com sold it to me for £22.99.. A bargain compared to Game and HMV which were trying to pry 34.99 out of greasy little hands.
As for the game, I’ve only played the first few missions of the campaign and, already, i’m enjoying it. I played the Beta and that was fun, more tactical than the original. I’m going to spending a lot of time in this game over the next few weeks.
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RE: Blizz/GW, Andy Chambers working on SC2. Look him up.
In relation to DoW2, I’ll definetly play it.
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How did Harry Potter end?
Myself and my friends pre-ordered it and I got it running just before midnight last night and played right through until 3am. I’d heard a lot of people were being forced to install it from STEAM (i.e. download it) rather than from the disc. Thankfully this seemed to have been resolved in that hour of AIM fury.
I love the single player campaign. It feels like Final Liberation in a way, with the campaign map and finite resources. The Wargear is lots of fun and adds a very great deal to the gameplay. The lack of base building is no detractor, the focus on the units and characters more than makes up for it and the cover system is great.
I can’t wait to try the co-op and multiplayer.
My major gripe is GFWL being a pain to work with over Hamachi (having to work around it via the registry) and the lack of support for my surround sound. I have to switch my system to stereo or it lags the sound horribley in game. Both are a nuisance but far from game breaking.
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RE: “wot” KG wrote; that’s exactly why I said it’s a big ol’ can of worms, there’s just so much talk around the subject but no substance. Such discussion usually ends up quite messy too, so I’m sorry for contributing more to it.
So DoW2 is another Steam and GfWL game? Wonderful. Is there anybody out there that actually likes GfWL, and if so could they explain to me what the benefits of having DoW2 associated with GfWL would be?
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I like the bits of GfWL that I used in the DoW2 beta. But I don’t really see the point of having it along with Steam.
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And just reason could there be to force me to sign into that shite for the single player game? On a side note I am enjoying the actual game.
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I’m with Azradesh here, there is no sensible reason why I need to be online to play the single player, nevermind signing into GFWL. I have the same problem with GTAIV. I know this has been looked at here with Fallout3 as well. I’ll try to stop thinking about it as it infuriates me.
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Oops, I left out the “what” between “just” and “reason”
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After a while the honeymoon period ends and you realise 95% of the campaign is killing the same bosstypes on only a few different multiplayer maps that are used over and over and over … you get the idea : )
While production values are generally great I find this constant reuse of multiplayer maps extremely lazy, even insulting in a vague way.
Most of the fluff feel is also gone : while your men may sometimes say something 40k’ish (such is the fate of the enemies of man !!), mostly it’s just bland audio stuff that could’ve fitted into any number of rts games. Gone are the excellent quips you could hear in the original dow, seemingly lifted straight from various 40k codices.
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i’d rather have GfWL than Steam. At least it’s optional (in Fallout 3 it was) and doesn’t forces you to be online to play it. Steam is just plain needless DRM. I don’t know why everyone is always giving BJ’s to steam, i hope it dies an horrible death someday (and then you won’t have your games that you spent loads of cash on)
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Having read the review, I don’t think I will be buying it.
I have enough really-quite-good RTSes. Being the sequel a game so enormously compelling, I was hoping this game was going to represent a ‘this is the way forward’ sort of moment.
GfWL seals the deal, of course. If MS really insist on pushing a service of this calibre into games released on their platform, I’d rather they just employed someone to punch me in the back of the head every time I load one.
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@Syneval
“While production values are generally great I find this constant reuse of multiplayer maps extremely lazy, even insulting in a vague way.”
It may feels insulting, and theres a Theory about this very design style:
Singleplayer is just a way to “train newbies”, so are ready to play multiplayer (the big leagues). So If you play singleplayer, you are a newbie, or scared to play The Real Thing.
The campaing is the tutorial of multiplayer. You are not supposed to have fun with the campaing, just learn to play.
The way you describe the camping, maybe follows that theory.
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Is there any way I can get it without having to use Steam? The Direct 2 Drive edition? My Steam is dead.
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Are you going to purchase Dawn of War II?
Oh I wanted too. I enjoyed the beta which THQ seemed fit to release worldwide, but then they went and decided to regionally restrict sale of the game. Guess they didn’t want my money after all. So no. I’m not buying it, because THQ won’t let me.
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RuySan: You don’t have to be online to use steam, and the ability to redownload your games at any time catapults it from “uselss” to “indispensable” imo (your milage may vary, depending on how good you are at organising your game DVDs and boxes. Me? Not very. Hence steam)
But why do you wish me to lose my games? Can’t you just be happy for me? :(
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@RuySan
It’s not optional, and you can’t play offline at all. It requires you to login to Live to play the single player game. Oh and it has Steam as well. Yes Steam is DRM but at least you can play offline (when it works :P) and without a disk. But for this you MUST login to Live or you can not play the game at all in any way. Why, why, why have a game that has steam and live and needs you to use both?!
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Hmm, this game had passed completely under my radar, but now I will seriously consider getting it. More RPG (though light), more story and more characters is always a plus for me.
RuySan: You must have had a different experience than most with GFWL…
In Gears of War PC (it was on sale for next to nothing, I wanted to see what the hoopla was all about), the install of the game ends with an error due to GFWL, and the automatic update of GFWL fails repeatedly in different ways and must be manually restarted many times over. I think it took me an hour from start of install until I could start playing the game.
Also, you have to be constantly logged in to GFWL or you can’t save your progress in GoW at all. If your network connection dies, you will have to stop playing and wait for it to work again – if you choose to continue playing you will have to replay the same sections next time you start.
And finally, it was so ineptly made that if the game crashes while saving a checkpoint, your single save game on the remote GFWL server risks getting corrupted, and you will have to restart the whole game from the beginning again! Happened to me 75% through the game…
> don’t know why everyone is always giving BJ’s to steam
Because it makes a huge collection of new and classic PC games conveniently available maybe?
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@Azradesh
Fallout could be played without logging to Live. I had the choice. If you wanted achievments you had to be online. Steam, even if its offline, it’s still stupid DRM. When i but something, i like it to be ready to be used at anytime. Like a book or a DVD. Who can predict for certain that in 10 years Valve is still around or hasn’t been bought by another company?
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Can’t quite resist linking this:
http://xkcd.com/546/
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@Tei :
unfortunately that theory doesn’t pan out : the campaign units are completely different in strength, abilities etc compared to the multiplayer element. Relic has just been very lazy when it comes to the singleplayer maps.
I can however follow their reasoning for releasing the multiplayer aspect with only a few maps, and add more later after having analyzed the player feedback.
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@Lars
I do find GfWL, completely useless, and i would prefer it to not exist at all. But like i said, my experience with Fallout 3 was harmless. Maybe it varies from game to game.
What i don’t like is this new tendency of forcing steam on people. If people want to buy games there, fine. But i prefer retail, so i’m annoyed that i have to have this extra app taking space on my computer, and having the game startup last a little longer.
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Maybe is posible to install a snifer, like Ethereal, and analize the communication from your computer to the GFWL servers, and use some programmable proxy to mimick that communication, so the game become playable offline. But I doubt will be this easy, and I suspect I will cypher the communication in a way to stop people from using linux routers to hack the achievements and things of his consoles, and will share the same protocol. Anyway theres no harm to install ethereal and save few minutes of TCP to see what it shows…
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“Steam, even if its offline, it’s still stupid DRM. When i but something, i like it to be ready to be used at anytime. Like a book or a DVD. Who can predict for certain that in 10 years Valve is still around or hasn’t been bought by another company?”
Aha. That old chestnut.
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@RuySan
Fair enough. I DO share your worry that Steam will die one day and take a big chunk of our “gaming cultural heritage” with it, despite their assurances that they will somehow have the time and resources to make and publish a patch if they go under.
I’m also angry at publishers who regionally restrict online sales (see Bansama’s comment). Take Ubisoft for instance. I’ve wanted to play the classic Beyond Good and Evil for a long time and was overjoyed it was coming to steam, and cheaply too. But no, “Ubisoft games are not available on Steam in Europe”. :(
You know, now that I’ve thought about this… if DOW2 has GFWL AND Steam, I’ll probably pass on it.
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@RuySan
Yes Fallout 3 can be played that way, I know, I have it. I’m not talking about Fallout 3, I’m talking about Dawn of War II. They did the right thing for Fallout 3, I’ve no idea why they went back to the same system they used in Gears of War on the PC.
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@RuySan
Fallout3 has no multiplayer aspect so it can’t be compared with other GFWL titles on the PC. When it IS utilised by FO3 it proves itself to be utterly broken: http://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2009/01/27/fallout-3-new-content-adventures-in-gfwl/
GFWL has proven to be nothing other than an impediment to me, in DoW2 and GTAIV. I don’t need ANY of it’s services. I’ve been playing DoW quite happily with several friends in several countries using Hamachi but now will have to registry crack to get that working again only to face a 30ms maximum latency thanks to GFWL. WHY? what is the sense of this?
GFWL is an unnecessary layer of obfuscation.
Getting back on topic, I hear that the Tyranid mission and their impact on the campaign map are very exciting. I can’t wait to get home and work my way through the rest of the single-player.
MUCH later tonight will be experiments with co-op and multiplayer skirmishes… if we can get the multiplater to work, that is. YAY
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“It’s not optional, and you can’t play offline at all. It requires you to login to Live to play the single player game.”
Whaaat? F**k THAT! Guess I’m not buying this game after all, then. :(
God, PC gaming circa 2008/9 sucks balls sometimes.
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Bought it. playing the singleplayer right now.
Loving it so far
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{small voice}I kinda like GFWL, but I think that’s because {even smaller voice}I’m an achievements whore{/even smaller voice}{/small voice}
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Nah. Sorry, but if I want Diablo I’ll play Diablo games, if I want tactics games I’ll play tactics games and if I want RTS I’ll play RTS. I’m depressed rather than excited by trends toward what one person (here?) excellently dubbed Real-Time Babysitting.
Kudos to them for identifying a problem and blazing new trail to try to solve it. The lead designer’s interview with Tom Chick is fascinating and…pugnacious. I hope they pick up more new customers than they lose, but in they process they’ve lost my interest. Fortunately I’m not one of their core anyway; I picked up DoW somewhere along the way because I liked some bits of it, but I haven’t been really into a Relic game since Homeworld and sort of Homeworld 2.
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@Paul
:D There are achievements on STEAM already
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I’ve liked GFWL ever since I signed in and realised it had my 360 achievments in it. There. I’ve said it.
And I’ve managed to fix Steam, it appears, so will be playing this later.
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Hi Jim,
I found it interesting that you chose to focus mainly on the single player campaign, so that your commentary on multiplayer was relatively brief. Especially since it sounds like they’re two completely different games.
Then again, anyone with a passing interest in the multiplayer component could have participated in the beta over the last month or so, so I can’t complain too loudly…
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Already have it, that beta alone was worth the cash already.
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Amazon delivered mine to my work this afternoon. I will most certainly be cracking GFWL right out of it as I’m about to move house and will probably lose my internet connection for a few weeks.
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I played the beta a bunch but I’m passing on this one. I tend to focus on the competitive aspect of games whether I mean to or not, and I don’t have a lot of faith in Relic’s balancing.
In a single beta patch they took Eldar from a little OP if you had good micro to really tough to get any wins if you had really good micro skills. In the same patch Orks got a bunch of nerfs cause people said they were OP, but then after the patch Tyranids turned into being OP to the point of being a joke. They also did across the board damage drops for EVERYONE, and made huge changes to how the entire economy system works.
Balancing an RTS takes some time and finesse, and Relic changing the economy system and reversing the balance of the races does not win my vote of confidence. I don’t wanna spend $50 on a game that could play completely differently 6 months later. And way too high a percentage of the Eldar units are gun platforms..boorrinngg. Where mah harlequins and wraithguard at.
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Well, after dragging my computer to work today to actually install the thing (and a bunch of other updates and games that require online activation), then home again….
I seem to be able to play the SP campaign fine… LIVE seems to work fine offline, as does steam… im able to stop and start as I wish, and im unlocking achievements – although it appears my access to the collectors edition stuff has been cut off.
Im not saying im happy with the system, just that its possible to work within it.
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Mine also arrived from Amazon today. I did my duty as a playtester but I can’t say I enjoyed the game itself. I can only assume I bought it out of habit, as I play the original and CoH online with friends.
Hopefully it won’t be too long until a mod comes out which lets you delete turrets.
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I want to wait until the Steam price becomes more reasonable.
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You know, I’ve been waiting on this until I knew what the Europeans thought of it.
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I played the beta a lot with friends, and it was excellent when it worked. The ‘when’ is the operative word here.
It was (is) flakey as hell, with 70% of the games I played ending with either someone crashing out, or the whole game locking up. Hard reboots galore!
If you have a AMD CPU apparently they didn’t think to test those!
Not to mention the dodgy matchmaking which would occasionally just leave you waiting for hours if you let it.
The claim is that all was going to be fixed for release, but I’ll wait for the MP demo to confirm this first.
It’ll probably take a couple of patches.
Also I’m in no rush so I’ll probably wait for a sale.
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Oh, Play.com. You jokers, you! Hah. Hahaha.
AHAHAHA.
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Already arrived, there’s no turning back now! Unless, um, I return it to Play.
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Pre-ordered. Amazon Prime. £22.99. Steelbook. Arrived today.
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Preordered it on Amazon, it’s on its way in the mail.
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From the beta I could see that there was a good game here and I had some enjoyable games with it. However, the matchmaking was absolutely appalling in that it never would select the right level of player for me to take on. In 1v1 games I was initially put up against fairly easy opponents. After a few games this quickly flipped to the complete opposite and I was taking on level 14 players. One time this even happened on my first attempt to use Eldar. 3v3s had a similar problem which was exacerbated with randoms not playing as a team (think playing L4D with randoms but even worse.)
Single player looked interesting, but the review hints that it quickly becomes repetitive. Lack of requiring different strategies is really disheartening, and I expect that this may follow through to the multiplayer in some ways too.
I’m not so bothered by taking away the importance of base building, but I feel that Company of Heroes struck the better balance, both with the base themselves and the defensive build options on offer. The fact that points had to be linked is also something that I preferred, as DOW2 you seem to be darting around after the points and with fewer units it becomes a nuisance. Instead, COH had a shifting front-line where the combat took place.
I expect it will be a bargain bin buy for me.
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I don’t think i am going to buy it, Relic has moved into a determined direction with this game, which is more far away of my tastes.
Pity, two of my favorites games are from them: Homeworld an CoH.
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My net scrubbed out on me last night so I was unable to register my key code, which was a bit of crap. Today I should be able to play it, otherwise it will continue to sit uselessly on my shelf beckoning to me.
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Doesn’t feel like 40K to me, and I wasn’t impressed by the beta. Think I’ll wait for the inevitable expansions and possibly pick it up when it hits gold edition.
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Just to clarify – you don’t have to be connected to the internet for single player, you can create an offline profile (appears I can’t connect to GFWL through my uni firewall). Lacks achievements, but it works.
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The single player campaign thus far (my guy is level 16 now) is quite enjoyable- I’m very fond of the random loot drops, although less so of variability in resupply drops- I get bored if i can’t use det packs on mobs. And the repeated incursions on the same crappy diamond map are putting me off the game. There’s always a boss at the end, which is fine. What’s less fine is the boss summoning 500 smaller beasties in a style that while quintessentially Tyranid is not really cricket, when the big guy himself decides to turn invisible and invincible every 5 seconds while summoning more little bastards and laughing off the hits like I do in the early parts of the level :(
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*doh?* The question on the point is: Why dont use Relic the same online-/ key- / buddysystem like in Company of Heroes? Works very well (when the master servers are stable). I don´t understand the change to GfW (Steam is fine for me).
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I’ve been playing it for two days. It feels fun at first then you realize their design philosophy here:
Keep everything that is fun and easy to get into about a tactical game.
This means: suppressing fire, rallies, enemies breaking morale when overpowered, orbital strikes, lots of fancy buff options at all times.
It also means: take every tactical repercussion out: line of fire (seriously, your commander rushes in close range in the line of fire and none of his dudes hit him a single bit? What, are bolters coded to avoid Blood Angel Red? Someone with actual WH40K lore knowledge tell me if this is how the tabletop game is also played), morale of your dudes never breaks (SPACE MARINES! RR! FEARLESS!! RR!!! Again, tabletop lore, what’s the call? I can at least understand if this is the case) and countless other little things that would make sense being there but are left out to make the game easier.
It seems like an uncomplicated single player game. Enemies don’t tactically expand. They’re just mobs waiting to be aggroed. They don’t attempt to recapture nodes. There are no enemy commanders besides ‘end bosses’. (What sort of commander doesn’t enter the field until all his units are dead?!)This isn’t a strategy game really.
What I felt playing it was that it’s fun to see everything go explodey and stuff, but it also is cheap that I don’t actually have to formulate tactics and I don’t get any repercussions for bad tactics. It’s just a loadout min-maxing thing primarily and the rest is click click click until everything dies.
More bad design options: when you lose a map, you don’t lose the game, you keep the level ups and do the map again. This isn’t even explained away some some token technobabble oh we extracted you on the brink of death with our warp teleporters, try again. You just respawn at the ship.
So, besides multiplayer which I haven’t played, the single player seems to be broken. It’s fun to watch and somewhat fun to play in the beginning few hours, but it’s not a deep game and it doesn’t reward tactics. If a WH40K game isn’t deep and tactical, what good is it?
Also, since I might not have played the tabletop version of the game but I’ve been around people that have for a decade and I’ve also read a lot of comics and white dwarfs and stuff about it, is it just me or is the aesthetic style completely misrepresented here? The better illustrations on codexes and comics and mags of the WH40K universe were pretty horrifying and baroque and generally foreboding. The game actually looks very friendly and the units are cute more than anything.
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Steam: €49.99
Random Belgian Retailer: €44.99
Play.com: €29.99
Steam is so ridiculously overpriced I don’t get why *anyone* would buy from it.
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Preordered, downloaded, played, loved. Does seem a little sparse, but I’m holding Relic to their promises of TF2-style content releases.
Not exactly surprised by the negative comments, though I can’t imagine myself sharing any of the sentiments. We all knew months ago that this game would be divisive. Tiny little problems nag at me from time to time, but the fact is that I can’t remember precisely what they are at the moment. I’m having a little too much of that… whatsit. Starts with an F?
Matter of fact, I’m gonna go back to it right now.
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BarkingDog> That dangerously reminds me of stupid WoW dungeons, with console-style boss tactics.
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Didn’t like the beta at all so skipping it, despite having DoW and COH with all the expansion packs. The gameplay change is a change too far.
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Helm>
“It seems like an uncomplicated single player game. Enemies don’t tactically expand. They’re just mobs waiting to be aggroed. They don’t attempt to recapture nodes. There are no enemy commanders besides ‘end bosses’. (What sort of commander doesn’t enter the field until all his units are dead?!)This isn’t a strategy game really.”
This doesn’t make any sense. The missions in DoW2 singleplayer campaign show a linear progress, not cyclic or circular or however one may define a multiplayer map. IT’s simply not what they wanted for the SP, probably (end of HELM’s answer) because in that case single player would have felt like a boring useless tutorial for the multiplayer campaigns, and that’s NEVER GOOD, cause it diminishes the beauty of a story and a unique non-competitive interaction
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Give me a Turn Based 40k game where I can recreate my Tyranid army and actually go turn based and I’m all there. Maybe I’m just a dullard, but RTS doesn’t allow my slow brain the same joy I get from moving my little figures around when it’s my turn…
A Pity too. I’ve heard great things about this. I may pick it up just for the SP campaign, but I can’t see myself really MPing it up at all, lest I want to just get destroyed over and over until I’m so frustrated I have to buy another mouse.
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Hmm, I mostly agree with Jim’s review, but the biggest gripe i have with the game so far is still the fact that Space Marines no longer have English accents.
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DoW2 lost me as a customer due to the awfulness of GFWL and the seeming dumbing-down of the game whilst I was hoping for it to be given the depth of Company of Heroes.
The game is so reliant on twitch micro-play but with so little actual tactical options that Relic have pro-actively invited horrid balance issues. Orks have never been over-powered and an Ork player was lucky to win unless opponents disconnected or were beginners, but STILL they were nerfed for reasons unexplicable.
The racial diversity is GONE. In DoW: Orks were for massing, Space Marines were the all-rounders with the best morale, Eldar had speed and specialists, Chaos was extremely strategic. Races added in expansions were mostly unique too. In DoW 2, the most diversity is simply putting similiar units with similiar functions on a different level of the tech tree and there is so few of them with so few abilities, except the flavour of the month race(never Orks).
DoW was very simplistic compared with CoH, so I was glad to hear the news that DoW 2 would be taking a lot from CoH. It hasn’t though, if anything it’s even more dumbed down than the original DoW which I heartily reccomend fans stick to if they want a reasonably fair game and less griefing twats with voice chat.
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“Relic tech support don’t tend to be pricks. Try again.”
Here’s my problem, it took them the whole of the beta not to help, now it is over and I can’t test if it will work without buying the game, which I’m not going to do incase they can’t fix it. See my issue?
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I picture Jim saying “YOU HAVE BEEN JUDGED!” in his best Stallone impression before submitting EG reviews.
GFWL really, really pissed me off in the beta. (I don’t have an Xbox, so dealing with a random MS service was even more ridiculous.)
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@Helm: Regarding the tabletop rules, Space Marines are fearless. As in, specifically “Fearless;” the tendency of squads to panic and fleeing from the field of battle is a mechanic in the game, and is something Space Marines have a specific protection against.
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I wouldn’t hold out much hope for patch support even though they promised to do better. DoW was a total mess as the balance got shot to hell every expansion.
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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.
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I really like the singleplayer. One of the best since Starcraft imo. :O
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@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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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…
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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.
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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.
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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.
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