Rock, Paper, Shotgun

In preparation for the impending Chaos Rising expandaspansionlone due later this week, there’s just been a hunka hunka burning patch for the original Dawn of War II. While the price of Chaos Rising might seem a little unfair, given it’s primarily an expansion hiding in self-contained form, Relic are going to extreme lengths to not split the player base. The update that’s just hit allows DoW2-plain players to battle against Chaos Rising players (and Dow2+Chaos Rising players), essentially patching the entire Chaos Faction into the original game. You can’t play as ‘em if you don’t own Chaos Rising, but you can play against them. Better still, the shiny new units for the four existing DoW2 races are now yours to play with, for free – including Genestealers. Genestealers! Dance-dance-happy-dance. Also thrown in are a clutch of new maps – the net result being that, whichever configuration of DoW2 you own, you’re not locked out of playing with anyone else. It’s an incredibly generous update, and I’ve a sneaking feeling it’ll shift a lot of copies of the expansion as a result. Full patch notes are hiding below – but you’ll get the whole lot if you update your copy of DoW2 on Steam now.
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I have a dream. That dream is a submarine game set in the Warhammer 40,000 universe – Das Boot with Nurglings. This day will never become, of course. Today, however, we have come as close to it as we ever will – for Eurogamer is currently hosting adjacent reviews of Dawn of War II: Chaos Rising, by me, and *******’s Silent Hunter V, by Quintin. One of these reviews is happy, and one is angry. Before you click over to find out, though, take a guess as to which game each of these quotes refers:

Will you pet this cute puppy, or kick it into the nearest canal then tell the little girl who owns it that it always hated her anyway?

VS

But all of these missteps pale in comparison to how unfinished this game is. Any notes I take while reviewing a game tend to be of the angry variety; when I’m having fun I don’t often stop to jot things down.

Ooh!

Developers do listen, you know. If you thought Relic were consciously ignoring the common complaint that Dawn of War 2 was too lightweight, its maps and challenges too relentlessly similar, you’re wrong. Of course, they might get Chaos Rising, the first expansion (albeit standalone), wrong in new and interesting ways, but by all accounts they’re very conscious that, largely speaking, DOW2 didn’t net the same sky-high review scores most of their previous oeuvre has. Chaos Rising is a bigger, broader game, leaving the tactically-rewarding but rinse and repeat skirmish mentality of the parent game’s missions in favour of 15 heavily story-led, handcrafted levels. (There are plenty of non-mandatory, bonus-laden sidemissions, in case your reactive to the number 15 was to start writing something sweary and in capital letters). Each of the main missions is scripted up the wazoo, doling out new challenges and objectives at the point where, in DOW2-plain, the mission would have ended. The Blood Ravens are going on an adventure…
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