With the on-going Steam Autumn Sale, I went ahead and added to my cart a whole bunch of games that I was waiting to go on sale. This included current releases such as Doom: Eternal and Battlefleet Gothic: Armada 2 and older titles such as Homeworld: Deserts of Kharak and Metro 2033. One game that I wanted to desperately try out though was Warhammer 40,000: Dawn of War 2.
The first Dawn of War was an amazing real-time strategy title in which elements of the tabletop game made the transition to the PC and it had everything a Warhammer 40,000 fan could expect: an amazing storyline, pretty cool units and the sheer variety of factions that you can choose to play: Space Marines, Chaos Space Marines, Orks, and the Eldar, and with expansion packs, Tau, Necrons, Sisters of Battle and Dark Eldar.
The only problem with the original game (which is about 16 years old), is that it doesn’t look that great in 2020. Full HD and high-definition texture support are definitely out of the window, which is why I choose to look at the sequel. Now, the thing that I totally forgot about Dawn of War 2 is that the base building elements have been totally removed and the game has pivoted to a squad-based real-time tactics game.
In each mission, you get to control several squads of Space Marines, consisting of one heavy-hitter squad, a bunch of scouts, a squad of tactical Space Marines and your hero unit who you get get to name. Meeting objectives and killing xenos (it’s 40K speak for aliens such as Orks) net you experience points and gear which you assign to your character and squad leaders, and supplies which you use in-game.
The missions are of the non-linear kind, and at least one of them had something most traditional RTS games wouldn’t have: a boss battle at the very end. Yup. You can watch it over on my stream over here:
I’ve to admit that the lack of a base-building element speeds things up a bit. I was up late last night for more than 2 hours trying to finish a skirmish level on Age of Empires II: Definitive Edition! If you’ve not gotten Dawn of War 2 (and its various expansion packs/DLC), you ought to check it out on Steam.
