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Don't waste money on Dawn of War 2
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Even scarier is how much these troops actually COST.
Since taking part in the DoW2 open beta, I've had some pretty strong opinions about this game. After finally playing the full version (and not being subject to Relic's non-disclosure agreement, which was crap) I can honestly give a real opinion.
Don't bother yet.
I'm not Ben Croshaw, so don't expect me to start mouthing disgustingly British mannerisms about how much the game sucks. It doesn't suck. It's miles from awful, terrible, nasty, and lame.
At the same time, it is nowhere near ground-breaking, original, flawless, or even entirely fun.
The original Dawn of War series had some pretty ancient gameplay mechanics, with the new twist that territory controlled your resources instead of piles of crap sitting around your base. However, you still won battles with spam instead of good tactics. True, tactical gameplay could help, but unless you crapped out the max possible units (rather than buffing select ones with neat gear and using them intelligently) you were going to lose.
Relic claimed they'd change all that with DoW2. They also spread the vicious rumor that their net code wouldn't suck. Guess what? It's even worse than their previous RTS success Company of Heroes.
This part gets technical, but bear with me. For people who don't like viruses, routers can be used to firewall an internet connection over and above software firewalls. It's a good idea, and it can save you major headaches. The problem with this is a lot of games that require web connections (WoW, Steam, etc.) need to send information through certain ports in a router in order to work properly, and the firewall will choke off the information flow.
If you buy Dawn of War 2 through Steam, which seems like a good idea at first, you can be shooting yourself in the foot. Steam requires close to 200 ports open on any given router to completely elliminate chances of router-related bugs popping up. Some of them make games unplayable - like being disconnected from Steam Friends kicking you out of Left4Dead games because your ports are closed.
Add to this the fact that for some god-awful reason Relic sold their souls to Microsoft. Games for Windows Live is a terrible idea to begin with: "Let's port Xbox-Live onto a computer! Yay!", but forcing gamers to accept it in order to play a new game is like telling an orphan they need to get scurvy and the bubonic plague or no one will take them home to a family. GFWL requires yet another bevy of ports open on routers just to run in the background (and since half the people who buy this game will have steam running in the background, too, we're talking several hundred ports you need open.) Guess what? Most routers don't open hundreds of ports. Half the ones you buy at retail stores only are capable of opening 100 or so at a time.
What does this mean? It means a game you paid 50 dollars or more for requires arbitrary software that is clunky, buggy, and a pain in the ass to use, it requires that your firewall be turned off or modified via a process that at best takes 20 minutes to double-check, and you will probably have to buy a better router than you already have. Top this off with the fact that GFWL doesn't even support service in certain countries that the game is released in, and you've got one massive headache just to play a title that is at most a slightly varied take on previous games.
That's right kids, it's yet another port of Company of Heroes. Instead of having 4-6 man squads, you've got squads as small as three people for half the races available. Gameplay mechanics make the game hinge on sometimes as little as just one battle, and one false move can spell the end for a game that will take an hour to finally finish. Players are already complaining about balance issues on the forums, patches have been planned to fix a net code that seems CLONED from Company of Heroes, Vehicles are of course game-ending when brought out early, and there are enough graphics bugs that the whole thing can sometimes just lock up even the most advanced rigs.
This doesn't mean the game isn't fun. It has great moments - like watching a huge pack of orks scream "WAAAAAAAAAGH" and chop up their enemeis with wild abandon, or watching a Space Marine Force Commander pulp someone with a gigantic energy hammer. However, the real enjoyment of a strategy game seems lost in this title. Resource management is territory-tied like in the previous DoW games, but completely stripped-down compared to Company of Heroes. In CoH, cutting off a key sector can deny your opponent entire groups of resources, providing a nice strategic counter to being spammed. In DoW2, there's no such luck - each resource area is completely independent and will continue to give you resources, even if it's at the BFE end of the map and completely isolated.
As well, some of the units and powers seem clunky and awkward. The Hive Tyrant's Bio-Plasma attack, an area-effect burst of green goo, will track an enemy target once used. On the other hand, the Space Marine Apothecary's purification grenades hit the ground, even if you click on an enemy squad, meaning people just walk away. Half the time you tell someone to use a power or ability, they finish their nifty little enemy-crushing animation before they do it, meaning the opportunity has passed and you have completely annihilated a rock. Woo, you showed that rock.
The addition of a leveling-up system for your forces is nice, but can completely break multiplayer games. Normally a squad of Howling Banshees, a damaging but somewhat weak melee unit, stands no chance against a Space Marine Dreadnought - a walking tank designed to pick up things and crush them into flaming gore. If you have a level 6 squad of HB's (no easy task, but it's been done) they will most likely just eat the dreadnought, scream a little, and then crap out little metal bolts for the next two minutes. Then laugh. Then draw lewd pictures of your mother in compromising situations that have nothing to do with the game, but still hurt. True story.
This seems completely silly to me. Okay, you have a squad designed to kill lots of little orks or Tyranids in close combat. If they level up, they get better at it. I get that. Cool idea. How does knowing how to chop up little green snots translate into snarfing down titanium and powerfist? Doesn't make any kind of good sense.
Fun additions to the genre that weren't in the original DoW series were supposed to be buildings you can garrison, like in CoH. Unlike in CoH, these buildings are almost entirely worthless. One unit can manage to remove them from strategic use extremely easily, without taking heavy losses. Most players just ignore the buildings entirely, knowing that they are deathtraps.
In fact, as seems to be the case with lots of games these days, DoW2 has been over-hyped. All of the big changes that Relic promised are in fact little tweaks that have to be continuously fixed, over and over. This game took almost 3 years to be completed, and it feels half-assed.
Fans of the Dawn of War series seem rabid about this game, and I really can't understand why. Save your money, kids. Let Relic and THQ work out their bugs. Buy it in two weeks when it goes down to twenty bucks.
