Dawn of War 2 review (2009)

Special commentary on this classic PC Gamer review provided by:

Archive Spelunker

Archive Spelunker

Wes Fenlon

With the news that Dawn of War 4 has just etched a release date into its armor, I thought this was the perfect time to republish our review of Dawn of War 2, which has never before been online. I now think of this one as an out-and-out classic, and remember hauling my PC over to a friend's house for an awkward LAN setup to try playing it not too long after it came out. I loved RTS games like Command & Conquer, but this was my first smaller scale, squad-based game, and I didn't really have a good grasp of it—leaning forward on a leather couch with a monitor perched on a TV tray in front of me probably didn't help my APM much, either.

We played for a bit, and then I went back to my old standbys: C&C3 and Red Alert 2.

Tom Francis's review from 2009 reflects that at release, Dawn of War 2 wasn't quite considered the ultimate 40K RTS; according to Jody's definitive ranking of the best Warhammer 40K games, the first game still reigns supreme. But you can follow this review with Tom's review of the Retribution expansion, which he called "an essential purchase for anyone who enjoyed Dawn of War 2's tightly focused tactical scraps" and said was "more fun than Dawn of War 2 ever was."

Warhammer 40,000: Dawn of War 2 review - PC Gamer issue #197 (UK, February 2009)

From the archives: The review below appears as originally written, with only minor changes in formatting and presentation. By Tom Francis

Here's something I never thought I'd hear myself say playing a strategy game: "I think we brought the right classes, we just shouldn't have aggroed that second mob. Thaddeus makes a decent main tank now that Spiff is specced for range, we just need to find some better armour."

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Dawn of War is now a roleplaying game. It's a strategy game too, but it feels as if RPG is the dominant—if beardy and dice-juggling—gene.

This is an extraordinary shift, bemusing in some ways, exciting in others. Real-time strategy has stuck so closely to the template laid out by Dune 2 and Warcraft—that endemic absurdities plague the entire genre. Who the hell builds a city on a battlefield? Why, how and from whom am I buying upgrades?

Dawn of War developers Relic like to say that Space Marines don't chop wood. They'd already subverted the conceit of harvesting on a battlefield in the first Dawn of War, and partially avoided the unlikelihood of base-building in the World War 2 strategy of Company of Heroes. Now they've found the courage to do away with both mechanics entirely. In Dawn of War 2, you have no resources, no base and at most 11 men.

The 'classes' I mention above are really squads—there are six in the game, but you can only take four on each mission. Those missions are no longer skirmish matches against equal forces, but mini quests to slay bosses, working your way through 'mobs' of enemies. Squads earn experience, and you choose what attributes to spend their points on when they level up—which is how commander Spiff was 'specced for range'. Loot—from 'better armour' for Thaddeus to new grenade types—is dropped by every boss and awarded for every mission.

This is heresy. This is madness. This is what happens when strategy game developers play too much World of Warcraft while they're working on the sequel. And this is, strangely, really good fun.

I don't miss building a base from scratch every half an hour, or managing my requisition and power economies. What I do miss from Dawn of War is the broader choice of units. You only get to play as the Space Marines in Dawn of War 2's campaign, and even then six squads is a slim slice of what that army had to offer in the first game. I'm happy to choose just four at once, but doing so from such a stingy menu feels like no choice at all.

Dawn of War 2 focuses instead on squeezing every crimson drop of murderous fun from those six squads. By limiting your remit to such a tiny band of men, it can ask you to direct their every move with thought and precision. And when you do, the game rewards you by giving their attacks spectacular force.

All your units are tougher than they have any right to be, but the one-man 'squad' that is your commander—you—is a human tank. Send him wading into oceans of hostiles and watch him cut his way out with a buzzing chainsword and a shower of blood. Thaddeus, meanwhile, leads a three-man squad of jumpjet assault troops—human artillery. They land with the force of a howitzer, and before the prone can even stand they're being ripped to ribbons.

Avitus is the tactical backbone of your strike force, and the personifcation of one of Company of Heroes' most satisfying mechanics: emplaced weapons. He leads a three-man heavy bolter team who need a second to set up their guns, and a specific direction to point them. That means drawing your enemies into their fire rather than advancing directly, but their damage output is obscene enough to justify that rigmarole every time.

Tarkus leads a four-man squad of standard marines, useful and durable but rather unexciting. Cyrus's Scout squad are the opposite: fascinating but incredibly weak. He's a stealth unit, but initially there isn't a lot he can do once he's snuck into position. Levelled up and handed a sniper rifle, though, he becomes a superb assassin and munitions-delivery device.

The sixth unit I won't spoil, since he's not unlocked until towards the end of the game and it's a great moment. Whichever you pick, you'll have ten or more special abilities between your four squads, and it's vital to direct them individually and manually. If you don't use hotkeys already, believe me: you will.

There's an urgent need for swift and accurate micromanagement, which means this certainly isn't the dumbing down some will inevitably call it.

It's more of an action game, sure, but one that's intensely tactical in a way DoW never was for the average player. Select all >Right Click is never viable, and that's DoW 2's biggest change and greatest strength.

Personally, my preferred tactic was to lead with my Scouts, stealthed, until they were behind the nearest enemy force. I set up Avitus in the best cover just out of range, and place my commander in front of him as a bodyguard. Then: action.

Thaddeus slams down into the biggest cluster of troops, knocking them flying, and falls back before they can get up. Soon they're blundering after him in a neat column, right into Avitus's line of fire. As the bolter fire pelts their ranks, my commander charges directly down their line, splitting them like a chisel.

Immediately, Cyrus de-cloaks to snipe their commander, so far back in the direction they've just run from that no one can reach him before he cloaks again. My commander, now deep in their lines, engages any ranged units to stop them firing, leaving Thaddeus's men free to advance unassailed once they've finished mopping up the forward troops—and Cyrus safe to grenade any occupied buildings.

The first time you orchestrate a perfect combined arms assault, the satisfaction is enormous. I don't think I ever pulled off an attack with this level of cohesion in the original Dawn of War. I'm sure you can, and pro players do, but Dawn of War 2 exaggerates these mechanics and relationships until they're clear to the average player, and gives you hundreds of manageably sized mobs to practice them on.

The 250th time you orchestrate a perfect combined arms assault, the satisfaction is starting to wear thin. That's not an exaggeration—I fought around five mobs per mission, and I finished the campaign on Day 48. You play one, sometimes two missions each day, so 250 is guessing low.

It's an enormous campaign, the opposite extreme of the original game's brief and jarringly anti-climactic one. But there aren't 50 missions. In fact, there are only about ten, of 15 minutes each. It's just that two of those—kill the boss and defend the shrine—are repeated to the point of insanity. To the point where you start to wonder if you did anything wrong in a previous life.

The idea is that you have a choice of missions spread across three planets. Some are plot critical and marked as such, others just get you a reward. But once you've done all the plot ones available, they just run out. You're left to do the seemingly random ones, often on the exact same map, until a new plot mission crops up.

Missiony positions

The depressingly similar quests come in three flavours

It'd be fine if the missions were varied, but Relic seem to think that 'Fight your way through a series of mobs and kill the Tyranid' is different enough from 'Fight your way through a series of mobs and kill the Tyranid who can burrow.'

Sometimes it's on a different map, but they're all pretty similar. Sometimes it's against a different foe, but once you've done fighting an Eldar mob, an Ork mob and a Tyranid mob, you've fought them all. The differences between the bosses aren't tactically interesting, because the boss fights themselves are oversimplified wars of attrition. And often, even the boss itself is the same.

What's presumably supposed to provide the real sense of progress is the roleplaying game element—choosing how to level up your squads and equipping newly found loot.

This works for a time—some of the abilities you can unlock are incredibly potent, and I excitedly worked my way towards them. Similarly, a few new items found in the field or offered as mission rewards spectacularly outclassed the equipment I had at the time, so there was a little buzz from earning those.

Soon, though, you're struck by how little impact these things are having on the way you play.

I'm not sure I ever noticed my commander's chainsword doing more damage, whether it was a few dozen points or hundreds. Almost every new weapon worth using is just a better version of the one you already have, so your tactics remain the same. The few exotic ones—plasma guns, flamers and missile launchers—do so little damage compared to their conventional counterparts that you'll switch them back out for the boring old bolter.

The same goes for attribute points: the only workable choice is the dull one. When Avitus levels up, you put his points in ranged damage. When Cyrus does, they go into Will to keep him in stealth juice. With Thaddeus and your commander, it's mêlée damage or health. I tried the alternatives for the sake of experimentation, but they just end up feeble.

There are exceptions to both these disappointments. Tarkus and the extra unit you get later in the game are better suited to customisation. Finding a teleporter or jump pack for your Commander is a big deal. And the perk that lets Cyrus use abilities while stealthed opens a lot of doors. But all these things come into play very late in the game, after the bulk of the repetition, so it's a little too little much too late.

The climax of the campaign—that's your cue to skip this paragraph if you want to avoid a mild, non-specific spoiler—comprises the game's best missions. They're the only moments where the scale and spectacle of Dawn of War 2 escalates. They lead towards what would have been an inspired, brutal and brilliantly dark ending, but the game inexplicably chickens out of that at the last minute. I don't have anything more to say about that—except, I hope the readers skipping this paragraph just glimpse the word 'chickens'—but for safety reasons this paragraph needed to end on a non-spoiler sentence.

There's one word in this review's opening paragraph I've skipped over: 'we'. I was playing Dawn of War 2's campaign co-operatively at the time, which is absolutely the best way. The missions are identical, but you and your friend pick just two squads each. Good always-on voice comms courtesy of Games for Windows Live facilitates co-ordination, but you will occasionally grenade each other or wander into an artillery strike. The advantage is that each squad is effectively getting twice the attention and brainpower it normally would, so your force as a whole is reacting faster and fighting more efficiently.

You do need to be able to keep playing with the same partner, though. You're both using the host player's squads, so it's no fun for the guest if he's never going to see his guys again once the mission's over. The host needs to let him level up those characters and play with them for a good chunk of time.

That's not the extent of multiplayer by a long shot. Because in skirmish mode—against other players or AI—Dawn of War 2 is a completely different game.

Taken Apart

Suddenly bases are back. Suddenly resources are back. Suddenly the four-unit limit is gone, the simplicity is gone, and all four races are playable. Weirdly, the only two modes of play are one-on-one, or three-on-three. About the only simple thing about it is that there are only five maps, and of those, only three work in three-v-three.

It is, for your first few games, utter chaos. There are three hero units to choose from for each faction, four resources, nine upgrades for your hero, a three-tiered tech tree of ten or so units, four global abilities, turrets to place, two other players to coordinate with and your much larger army still requires as much micromanagement as your four squads in singleplayer. And before you know what you're doing, it's over—matches only last about 15 minutes. Relic said they wanted to make multiplayer Dawn of War more accessible—I have no idea how this was supposed to relate to that.

It's wholly enjoyable madness, though. Here at last you get to amass proper armies, choose any units, and play as the ravenously-anticipated Tyranids. They're a truly horrible bunch—seas of bony mouths flooding your enemies, while delicate but deadly towers of spines pick the strongest targets to pounce on or eviscerate. Their mechanics are obtuse and fascinating, which only makes me more desperate for a Tyranid campaign, one where individual units mean something. Multiplayer is too fast-paced to get attached to your squads or care much about upgrading them.

There's definitely virtue to a multiplayer strategy game that's over in a coffee break, but it doesn't mix well with the enormous complexity here. Even once I'd learnt to play effectively, I never felt like I had a good overview of what was going on.

You've got too much to focus on to keep tabs on your allies, so the match can turn around in a minute without you knowing why. Neither victory nor defeat feels entirely yours, so you're just less invested throughout.

DoW 2 ends up feeling like a boxset of cool new ideas for strategy games. An action-RPG that's incredibly satisfying but sorely lacks variety; a great long-term co-op game about tightly coordinating two teams; and a hectic, spectacular lunchbreak skirmish game. But I'm left wishing they'd concentrated on one of them, because no single part of this is better than the original game.

Relic started with a classic game and have made a merely great one out of it. In that sense, their attempt to overhaul strategy has failed. But I like what they tried. I think they were right to scrap bases, to forget about resources, and right to focus the game on skirmish tactics rather than economies or larger-scale strategy.

They just stopped short of giving us real choice of units or weapons, meaningfully different missions and a campaign for the most exciting race.

We don't give marks for effort, so the game they've ended up with is all that matters. It's a great and truly new one, just not varied or exciting enough to live up to this particular name.