Dawn of War 2 is a gorgeous looking game that emphasizes tactics over strategy.
50 or so hours later and I can say that I’m done with Dawn of War II. I may go back in and skirmish with the AI from time to time, but for the most part, I’ll say that Dawn of War II was quite a satisfying experience and I recommend it if you are in the market for a PC based RTS/RPG style game. It’s pretty much Company of Heroes inserted into Dawn of War, and for fans of Company of Heroes, that’s great news, but for fans of Dawn of War I, not so much. Read on for my review.
Good
- innovative campaign design
- enjoyable gameplay mechanics
- excellent presentation
Bad
- campaign is only for one of the four playable races
- polarizing multiplayer that isn’t as deep as traditional RTS game
- quite a departure from the previous Dawn of War game
Intro
Dawn of War II comes from the Warhammer franchise, and has a long history. Dawn of War II specifically comes from the Warhammer 40,000 universe, which was created in 1987 as a sci fi tabletop war game to the original Warhammer fantasy tabletop war game created in 1983. Many people will notice (especially now with Warhammer online out) that the Warhammer universes seem to bear similarities to Blizzard’s Warcraft series, but it’s actually been around longer so warcraft has tends to have borrowed from Warhammer and not the other way around.
The developer behind Dawn of War II, Relic, has become very popular nowadays due to the huge success of the Company of Heroes franchise. Between the Dawn of War series and the Company of Heroes series, PC gamers have been in luck as they are one of the only few strong PC developers still remaining today. Fans of the original Dawn of War were somewhat rubbed the wrong way though with the Dawn of War II release, as the gameplay was more like Company of Heroes than the original Dawn of War game, which was popular enough to warrant three expansions. Perhaps Relic’s Company of Heroes fanbase is larger than their Dawn of War fanbase so they adapted the gameplay accordingly to pull in more players to the Dawn of War universe. That worked for me.
The overwhelming numbers of the alien race known as the Tyranids threatens the entire galaxy.
Storyline and Premise
In Dawn of War II’s campaign, you play as the Space Marines, one of the four races in the game. The other three races are the Orks, Eldar, and Tyranids. From early missions, you discover the Orks to be more like bandits, causing trouble wherever they can but not necessarily the most intelligent. Then you have the Eldar, an intelligent race that while dwindling in number, appears to place great thought into its actions and battles. And then finally, you have the Tyranids, an alien race that pretty much eats through any planet it invades. During the course of the campaign, your squad of Space marines has minor skirmishes with both the Orks and Eldar, but ultimately, almost all efforts are focused on fighting back the Tyranids as they prove to be the biggest threat.
The campaign consists of three planets, each with about 4-5 regions in them where you can potentially deploy your squad. The campaign takes place in days and while it seems odd why days would matter, I will explain later on why it’s actually a pretty nifty feature to the campaign.
Dawn of War 2 emphasizes cover, and units will automatically get behind nearby structures for cover when engaged in combat
Gameplay Mechanics
Squads
Dawn of War II has completely removed basebuilding from the game, so you deploy to each mission with 3-4 squads total. Each of the squads that accompany your lone commander has 3-4 units, all led by a hero. The squads can take damage, and as the lifebar of the squad goes down, the supporting members of the squad die before finally the hero falls. Any hero that falls is only incapacitated, and can be revived by another hero but supporting members are not revivable. Instead, heroes can “refill” squad members at any reinforcement point on the map. Generally, each map will contain about 4-5 reinforcement points littered across the map and it is often best to set up defensive positions at these reinforcement points because when squad members are killed, reinforcements warp in to replace them.
Out of combat, the commander and the squads regenerate health, and regenerate it even faster near reinforcement points. However, squads with missing squad members will only able to regenerate up to a certain amount of health due to the missing squad member. For example, if a squad of a hero and two members lost one, the most health they could regenerate would be 2/3 the lifebar until they got back to a reinforcement point to get the replacement squad member.
Combat
For those that have played Company of Heroes, Dawn of War II pretty much adopts that combat style rather than the more standard RTS gameplay found in its predecessor. New to Dawn of War II is the ability for units to take cover behind destructable and indestructable objects, to fortify in buildings, and to use weapons like flamethrowers and grenades to deal with enemy units in cover. In short, you shouldn’t simply be commanding all of your units to attack move towards every destination. Every skirmish with the enemy results in both sides taking cover and using whatever weapons they can to gain the advantage. There’s no “steamrolling” here.
Each hero has a unique skillset that allows him to play differently from the others. And with more than four squads available to choose from for a deployment, it comes down to which squad’s abilities you want to use most. Thaddius, for example, has the ability to taunt to get all nearby enemies to focus fire on him, while also having a tank like ability that has his squad reducing nearly all damage for a certain period of time. Cyrus’s squad is a covert ops squad, allowing them to cloak, lay traps, snipe, and generally perform sneaky kills when you don’t want to engage the enemy head on. The tradeoff is that they are weak, and can’t stand toe to toe with any other enemy when engaged in direct combat. Deciding which types of squads are best for your playtype is part of the fun.
Experience System
As you play through the campaign, your heroes will level up. Experience is earned through destroying enemies, completing levels, and even selling loot you no longer want (you get experience points instead of money when you sell unwanted loot). Every squad can level up to 20, and each level up earns the hero two ability points to put towards several different ability paths. As you put points into these ability paths, not only do the stats related to that path go up (increased health, increased ranged damage, etc.), but you also unlock new abilities every five or so points down that path.
The thing is, you can’t go down every ability path so you have to choose how you want your hero to grow. Each hero can generally go down a health/defense path, a ranged weapon path, a melee path, or a mana/special ability based path. That means there’s a lot of customization out there. You can have certain squads play completely differently than the way they start, having ranged based squads shift over to being melee proficient or health/defensive based squads becoming very strong with mana/special ability based skills.
Loot
The experience points in the game lend Dawn of War II an RPG-like feel, but the loot makes it even more so. Loot in the game is randomly dropped off enemies, and is also randomly generated as rewards for completing each mission. Loot can range from normal to green to blue, with blue being the most rare. The equipment that you find can range from 1-2 handed ranged weapons, 1-2 handed melee weapons, armor, accessories, and items only your commander can use.
Unfortunately, there doesn’t seem to be unique epic loot in the game, nor can you trade it with other players so it isn’t exactly central to the gameplay. It’s a nice touch but by the end when you’re at level 20 and every mission is offering a randomly generated level 20 blue item, you no longer care too much.
Days
The campaign in Dawn of War II takes place in days. While there’s no actual deadline in terms of number of days you need to take to defeat the game, the days themselves are important due to the way the game handles saving: only after a mission. There is no manual saving/loading, and whether you beat a mission or lose during one, that generally means a day has elapsed and the game has saved. For each mission you get a particular score, and scoring highly on a mission will sometimes allow you one or two more mission deployments on that same day. This can be a big deal after I explain the signficance of the days.
As you progress through the game, there are generally storyline missions that are always around until you complete them. But along the way, there may be optional missions such as defeating certain “high value” enemies or defending regions. Each of those has a time limit of about three to five days. If you don’t complete those optional missions, something negative generally happens. In the case of defending regions, if you don’t go to the region’s aid before the time is up, you will lose that region’s special abilities. The more regions you “own” on a planet means you can use more special abilities like artillery, deployable turrets, and invulnerability shields.
Finally, as you get midway into the game, the alien race known as the Tyranids make their full apperance. Since this species generally eats through anything and can eventually consume planets, it’s possible to actually lose a whole planet if you don’t spend time defending against their invasion and they take over every region on the planet. Apparently once that happens, you lose access to that planet forever, which sound like pretty serious consequences.
Multiplayer
The best part about multiplayer I would say is that the entire campaign can be fully played co-op with another player. Just invite a friend in, and the two of you each command two squads as you go through the whole game, playing off the host’s game save.
The adversarial modes in the game are more of a mixed bag and not for everyone. I didn’t really enjoy it as I prefer base building and engaging opponents as the primary objectives for RTS games and I’m guessing that perhaps fans of the first Dawn of War game may have a hard time with it as well. There are simply inherent limitations on multiplayer that came with the way the game was designed , making multiplayer not as enjoyable as it could be for fans of the series. But for those with an open mind and a fondness for capture and hold type gameplay that is more prevalent in FPS games these days, you may very well enjoy the multiplayer.
To start, each player can choose a race and one of three unique heroes for that race, with each hero playing differently from the others due to special abilities and such. The main mode generally has two teams of up to three players competing to capture and hold important points to reduce their opponent’s tickets from 500 to 0. There are also other capturable points on the map, allowing the team holding these points to earn money and power, which in turn allow them to buy squads. As you gain more money and power, you can buy better equipment for your hero and unlock tier 2 and tier 3 units. The hero unit also levels up by gaining experience from enemy kills, so by the end of a match, you’ll most likely see high level heroes with strong gear accompanied by huge tier 3 units walking around. It’s not a bad mode for people that prefer tactics over strategy.
In between missions, you can view the map to determine which regions you need to deploy to.
Achievement Design
Two thirds of Dawn of War II’s Achievements can be earned through the campaign, while the final third is only available from multiplayer. Again, I will reiterate here that I have never really been a fan of multiplayer Achievements, as they generally force you to either play a certain way or others to play a certain way rather than how you would usually play just to get the Achievements. Dawn of War II is no different.
Some of the single player Achievements were innovative, and I was relieved that the Achievements for beating the game on each difficulty were stackable. What annoyed me though was that there was one Achievement where you had to capture every resource node in the game, and while it’s generally easy to capture resources by going into the region, there was one region I was never able to enter after the beginning of the game. The only way I was able to get the Achievement was to start the game over after I beat it the first time and not make the same mistake.
The only way you can play as the advanced Eldar race is in multiplayer.
Final Thoughts
While Dawn of War II differs from its predecessor in many ways, it’s still a quite an enjoyable game in its own right. The campaign is the biggest reason to play the game, and I would recommend playing it at a relatively high difficulty level since the lack of saving anytime you want makes any skirmish you participate have consequences (unlike the brainless reloading everytime something goes wrong). The shift from RTS to more “RPG” style gameplay made the game difficult to implement multiplayer for, but Relic has done an interesting job that may have certain types of players enjoying it.
I rate the game a B+. I played the campaign for over 40 hours alone, which goes to show how much I liked it. Of course, there are things that I felt could have been better and raised this game’s score. First of all, the general premise has a bit of repetitiveness to it. Whether it’s defending the lands you own over and over again to mostly every level having you capture objectives on the map before fighting a boss, those that are looking for more “adventure” will not really get it. This is honestly the first RTS game that I’ve played where this is actual “grinding” – replaying the same levels over and over to either gain experience or loot. Whether you enjoy that or not is up to the player, but I can’t help but feel like at least half of my 40 hours playing was just grinding. I also would have liked to see some sort of campaign from the other 3 races’ perspectives, but I won’t fault the game too much for that.
It seems like in order to fully enjoy Dawn of War II, there’s a ton of hoops to jump through: the willingness to have a Steam account, an Xbox Live account, the realization that Dawn of War II will not play like Dawn of War I, the understanding that the campaign is more like an RPG than traditional RTS missions, and the multiplayer is more like a FPS mode with RPG elements rather than straight up RTS. I feel like many of those hoops have scared off potential buyers to the game, but if you’re new to the series like I am, you may very well be happy with it if you know what you are getting yourself into.
