Warhammer 40,000: Dawn of War II

If you’ve played Relic Entertainment’s Company of Heroes, you’d know that they’re not the type to conform to norms set by other developers. Their urge to experiment has bred Warhammer 40,000: Dawn of War II to not just innovate, but reinvent and re-engineer the real-time strategy genre to deliver an experience that’s entirely unique, refreshing, and so much more.

To accommodate this metamorphosis, Dawn of War II (DoW II) has shed a few things that many RTS fans might crave, out of which base-building is the most prominent absentee - you don’t have to lay down a single structure in the entire game, be it singleplayer or multiplayer. Instead, the focus is entirely on combat, to the point that even your unit upgrades and technology tier-ups are purchased through your headquarters.

How does the absence of such an integral part of traditional strategy games factor into its gameplay? It actually works really well for DoW II, since your game pivots more around controlling your army rather than setting up base defenses, securing resource collection routes, and building expansions every time your resource nodes runs out. Instead, you find yourself locked in a constant tug-of-war against the enemy from the moment the game (single or multiplayer) starts. Your goal in most single player missions is to either secure an objective, destroy an objective, defend an objective, or kill a boss.

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The campaign puts you in the boots of a newly promoted Commander in the Space Marine’s army, that’s part of the elite ‘Blood Ravens’. Your job as a Blood Raven is to safeguard a cluster of four planets from alien attacks. The campaign shows you the ropes with a handful of easy missions that act as a tutorial. Once you get a hang of the way the game is played though, the experience doesn’t change too much. There isn’t too much variety where missions are concerned, and almost all play out in a somewhat similar fashion.

DoW II incorporates a massive chunk of RPG elements - your units in the singleplayer campaign aren’t the disposable fodder you’re used to. Instead, you’re given control of just four squads of units in every mission, where each squad leader has a unique specialty to go along with his personality. Each squad leader voices out his own opinion or gives his own input during mission briefings, giving them all a well-defined personality as opposed to the lifeless grunts you’re used to controlling in most other RTSes. To give them more individuality, each squad can level up, allowing you to distribute skill points that give you access to different ’traits’, such as the ability to absorb more damage or deal special attacks every now and then.

To add to it, a few units and bosses in the game, drop ‘wargear’ when killed, which allows you to deck your character out in different equipment to help customize him to play any way you want. This equipment could range from a high quality battle armor, to a flame thrower, or a battle standard that allows your units to charge through even the heaviest of enemy fire. You can even convert all the equipment you don’t need into experience points, ensuring that your inventory’s never cluttered up. All these little RPG elements factor in, into making DoW II more of a squad-based RPG rather than an RTS!

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It’s not all RPG though, and Relic makes it quite clear by incorporating the best of Company of Heroes into DoW II - namely, the cover system. The first thing you learn is to get your ranged units behind cover, so that they stay protected from enemy fire, and at the same time dish out more damage. ‘Suppression’ is a major part of DoW II - if you catch the enemy in the open (i.e. without cover), your ranged units suppress them when they fire at them, reducing their movement speed and their ability to dish out loads of damage tremendously. This applies to you too, so taking cover forms an integral part of the game’s combat. It’s not too hard to get into the groove of it though, and before you know it you’ll begin taking cover at every opportunity. Cover can be taken behind almost anything, be it a destroyed wall, sand bags, a fallen tree, rocks - all of which can be found abundantly. To balance things out a bit, almost all cover can be destroyed using grenades or heavy fire. Alternately, units with flamethrowers can surpass most obstacles too, making them a valuable addition to your army, and adding an interesting variation to the mix.

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Besides the cover system, DoW II borrows its engine from Company of Heroes too. The upgraded Essence Engine - Essence Engine 2.0 - allows for great physics and a highly destructible environment. At high settings, everything from the environment to the character models looks extremely detailed, and the game doesn’t hiccup even once. My mid-ranged gaming rig - Core2Duo E8400, 4GB DDR2 RAM, Nvidia 9800 GTX - handled the game with ease and ran at a constant 60 FPS at 1680x1050 with all settings maxed out. Relic’s left no stone unturned when it comes to polish, making DoW II a finished product that’s been tried, tested and tweaked vigorously. Kudos to Relic!

Even the multiplayer mode works flawlessly! While the game uses the Games for Windows Live series (that I’ve always hated), finding games doesn’t take more than a few minutes. Your multiplayer avatar levels up as you play more games, and you’re always pitted against players that are around your level. You can only play 1v1 and 3v3 rated games; in 3v3s you can either pick your allies or the service does it for you, which again, doesn’t take too long.

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There are two multiplayer modes - Annihilation and Control Point Victory. Both modes require you to capture resource or ‘Victory’ nodes, which is the only way in which you can collect additional resources. The difference between the two, is that Annihilation mode doesn’t get over till you’ve destroyed every unit and structure of the enemy, while Control Point Victory requires you to capture Victory nodes and hold them until your enemy runs out of victory points. Both modes are a lot more fun than most RTSes out there, but lack as much tactical depth as StarCraft of WarCraft. It’s a fair trade off, since its action-focused gameplay and the fact that there’s no base-building involved will attract flocks of new RTS blood.

To sum up, Warhammer 40,000: Dawn of War II is the best RTS I’ve played in a long while. If you’re an RTS fan, you owe it to yourself to play it for both, its singleplayer as well as multiplayer offerings. While the game’s made quite a few sacrifices where RTS elements are concerned, it’s regained most of its depth by focusing heavily on combat. If you wish to take a dive and buy the game, it’s available at most major game retailers for a mere Rs. 699!