I just heard about Dawn of War 2: Retribution. Now with Imperial Guard and Inquisition (!)
Not only that, but now all factions are single-player playable! So you actually have something to do if you don’t feel like having your sexuality insulted in 133tsp3@k by an immature 12-year old with a mastery of hotkeys inexplicable to modern science. I just may feel it’s worth it to pick up a combo pack down the line and play the originals.
Best of all - they’ve dropped the abomination that is GFWL and moved completely to steamworks. Part of the reason I never bought chaos rising is that GFWL is… well, let’s say not good.
Retribution is stand alone, by the way - no need to buy the others ones unless you really want to play the single player (which it sounds like you might). AFAIK you get all the races for single player and multiplayer just buying retribution alone.
I never really liked DoW2 as much as the first one (retreat is a terrible, terrible get out of fail free mechanic in multiplayer, especially combined with a nearly indestructible base) but for the price I’ll probably get retribution.
Surprised so little interest in this.
I found DoW2 and Chaos to kinda meh… But maybe I’ll check this out. Probably not, though. IG bore me.
The big problem with DoW2, I think, is that they did too much to streamline the gameplay for the non-RTS player. Leading up to the game’s release, they kept talking about how they’re eliminating the busy work in playing an RTS and players can focus on the strategy and tactics without needing to train their hands to pound out 200 APM. The pretty much removed the entire macro-game. You built few units over the course of a game. It’s hard to say how much effort went into selecting units, since the balance was so bad. Resources were pretty much automatic and whether or not you captured more nodes was surprisingly non-decisive. None of that is necessarily a problem though, except for the balance issues but that’s fixable. The problem is that they removed too much from the micro-game as well, leaving the player with nothing to do. Units moved slowly and were slow to respond to new commands. Their AI did too much, such as automatically finding cover and running around on their own. You’d just give your squad a general order and they’d sort of figure out their own. Also, all of the beautiful and elaborate kill animations detracted from the gameplay, since you were watching your Force Commander kill a Carnifex for 20 seconds while getting blasted away instead of listening to your retreat order. The retreat button took away a lot of the intensity of a fight. In the end, the game didn’t really consist of much more than enjoying its absolutely stunning graphics. That’s not considering its absolutely atrocious balance issues and technical problems. Oddly, it had all of the same gameplay problems as Warcraft III, just amplified. It’s a shame. The game had a lot of potential. Relic is terrible with their follow through.