Mr. Disproportionate Response

It’s not often that I get excited about a new video game. It’s not often that I pay the full “new game,” price. Dawn of War 2 was an exception. The first game, Dawn of War, got me excited and got me involved in Warhammer 40k. It was a game that I played (and still play) for hours and hours, on end. When the opportunity to do it all again with better graphics, and against the TYRANIDS, no less, I was excited. I found the game, quite by accident on a Tuesday evening. I went home, installed it. I played until late into the night. Sunday afternoon, I uninstalled the game and put it back in its box. It wasn’t that the game upset me. It’s not that it didn’t work. It wasn’t that I needed the hard drive space. I was just done with it.

After mere days, I’d played through all of the single player content on its hard difficulty. I spent several hours playing with the multiplayer games to find that I wouldn’t be playing them very much, and by the end of the evening on Sunday, I knew that it was time to uninstall the game; there was just no reason to keep playing.

Single play in the game has stripped away the entire strategic aspect that became so intense in the first Dawn of War. Now, there was no building a base, no upgrading units, or managing resources. Instead, you have your squad(s) and you point your mouse at what you want to die, and click on it. Your little army mans dutifully march where you clicked and begin killing (followed by light salad.) That’s. About. It. Instead of building up an army, reinforcing your squads, and pairing them up with the right kinds of leadership, you have loot that you find during or as a reward for various missions, all without any explanation as to why the Eldar or Tyranids are running around with Marine power armor, or who the mysterious benefactor is that’s rewarding your units with the mission rewards, because by all accounts, your units have been cut off. It’s just you and your three warships, which somehow only have about 20 troops, and infinite ammunition.

The multiplayer was about as balanced as the United States’ foreign policy. Basically, you play as the Space Marines, or you lose. I AM pleased to announce that there is resource management in this portion of the game, but building a base consists roughly of telling your command center to get bigger (which it automagically does) and then it spits out bigger and scarier troops. The Eldar (per usual, I suppose) are extremely squishy, and need to rely upon their mobility and stealth to overcome their opponents. This would be fine, except that most of the play maps are a little smaller than that end table that your grandmother keeps the doily and crystal bowl with the miniature Hershey bars. The ork troops are too expensive to properly field a decent horde, and the ‘Nids. Ooooh, the poor ‘Nids. If the Orks have a resource problem, the Tyranids ARE a resource problem. For the cost of a small squad of shooty-gaunts, you can get a unit of 5 space marines, or a 3-man devastator squad. It’s just not pretty.

In the end, yes the game was fun to play. Yes, it was pretty. It made for wonderful hors d’oeuvres before the entreé for which I paid my $60. Alas, the main course was never delivered, and Dawn of War II leaves this player wondering, “Where’s the Beef?”