Unlikely Comrades: Dawn of War II - The Last Stand

Friday nights are for playing Champions Online for far too long with Messrs Gillen and Cameron while waiting in vain for grumbly John Walker to join us, instead of getting my posts for RPS done and packing for a camping trip in the wilds of Sussex. Sigh. At least I am cheered by news of an impending update for Dawn of War II, which adds a promising-sounding new mode to the game. It even gets its own chest-pounding WAR IS NOBLE AND MANLY CGI video...

Here's that trailer. Between that and the title, you can probably take a pretty educated guess as to what's involved:

HD version here, if you like.

Yep, it's about Orks, Space Marines and Eldar finally becoming bezzie chums and having a big old inter-species orgy amongst the chitin and ichor of a thousand Tyranid corpses.

Ah, dreams. And also fan-baiting lore-stretching.

In fact, The Last Stand is about two things. Number 1, a new co-operative multiplayer mode, in which you and your allies each play a single Hero character to hold out for as long as possible against rampaging swarms of enemies, and rack up combo points in the process. Number 2, it's about making DOW2 multiplayer accessible to folk who aren't dyed-in-the-wool online RTS veterans. This is simply about killing everything that moves, as enthusiastically as possible. At least if this Gamespy preview of the Last Stand to be believed, anyway.

Interestingly, a chap in that piece's comments thread observes it sounds rather similar to a DoW 2 mod named Hero Defense. Reading up about it, it does sound like he's got a point, but without having yet played both I'm really in no place to make a judgement. Devs taking ideas from the gaming community can be a wonderful thing, but this could perhaps be a little too close to the bone.

Nonethless, extra DOW2, different DOW2. Free embiggening can only be a good thing for an RTS that arguably wasn't quite as satisfying as it could have been.