It´s been some time since I post something, I played a lot The WItcher:EE but then I left it because I wanted to cut this video game addiction to star thinking about studying a bit for the finals that are at the gates but then this Beta was out and I HAD to play it.
I was a big DoW fan, I played a lot of DoW , DoW:Winter Assault and DoW: Dark Crusade and missed SoulStorm because the two races that were introduced were not as interesting to me as the rest, but yeah I loved them and I must say that Relic has done a lot of good things to the RTS genre adding some cool mechanics instead of the regular base building and resource gathering type of RTS, that's the reason why I didn´t bother to get Red Alert 3 despite Gemma Atkinson, the british sexual entity was part of the actors crew.
A lot of ideas and hilarious things were going on in my head when I imagined a sequel to this franchised a thousands of times like perhaps a whole new engine and some new mechanics from Relic, bigger armies and more eye candy was like a must in my head since I constantly remembered watching a lot of great replays in which the battles went crazy with unexpected come backs and hectic combat.
This time Relic took the easy path, grab the new mechanics implemented on Company of Heroes and throw them over the table and cover them with the already 3 year old Essense Engine, which keeps being pretty cool but it just does not sound and look enough to the sequel of a popular 2004 game which already has 3 expansions and a crazy race count.
Well, let´s make a more deep look at this Beta which is in fact the version that went gold with some features locked, like private custom games and of course, the campaign mode.
Races and balance
The game features 4 playable races, Space Marines, Orks, Eldar and Tyranids. The last of them was a popular request to the first game, but Relic was not sure to bring that Race with the old engine because of the unit count, which is in fact the most annoying thing about this sequel, every Squad has now fewer units and the Tyranids seems to have 50% more units that every Race in DoW 1 had, so if you were expecting an increase on scale, that is a huge dissapointment including that you are going to wonder "Couldn´t they just add the Tyranid race to the old game??, their excuse was crap".
You can choose from 3 Heroes from each race and everyone will unlock some race powers that can be activated after raising some kind of meter which goes up after killing dudes, also the Heroes manage in a WC3-esque way, with skills and gear that you can buy depending on the Tier you are and they also can level up. This Hero thing is a good improvement since the first one but it also means that they have removed the diversity of units you can spawn, for example with the space marines now you can have a Force Commander, an Apothecary or a Techmarine selected, but in the old game you could also have the chaplain and the Librarian. Writing about unit diversity, there are fewer units for every race than the previous game and there is also less options to enhance your squads than before
The balance seems OK, but there are crazy overpowered skills or units here and there, that are ridiculous, like the Eldar guardians plasma grenades, that can wipe out an entire squad of another Tier 1 unit (and they are very cheap too), although that is counter with another ridiculous things about others Races that may appear in Tier 2 and 3, having advantage over the rest at the early game is not fair and you will see why.
Gameplay mechanics
Take the WC3 hero, the cover,retreat, suppression systems of CoH, the strategic point based resource gathering from CoH/ DoW and the paper/rock/sicssors infantry-stationary guns-tank thing of CoH too, add 0 building managing and you have this game, its like an obvious decition to grab the "best" of their own franchises and maybe rip of the hero thing from blizzard and the no building thing from World in Conflict and hope this game will be better than DOW 1, great mistake, that´s reminds me of the new Spyro the Dragon which now has some Krato´s fighting style, please Devs, stop stealing features of popular games thinking that they will automatically make yours better.
First of all, when you are playing, you will have fun like the first 5 hours of MP online gaming till you discover that everyone including you have found the optimal way to play each race-hero option, it's like it is FIXED, there is no option here, an strategy is the best and is unique, the order of the strategic points you are going to take, the first units you are going to spawn, the gear you are going to buy and the exact moment you are going Tier 2, and yes 2, because most of the matches don´t even go to Tier 3 because of the new Victory Point Control CoH-esque way of playing.
There are 3 Victory Points that you have to capture in order to reduce the points of your enemy, if you have all of them you will win faster, if you have 2 and them one, slower, and if you have the same both will remain where they are till someone claims another point. This way of playing encourages you to go and fight all the time, which is good, but it does not let you choose the quantity of initial points like CoH did, here there are 500 and you will wish you could choose 750 and 1000 or more.
The mode is fun but it´s cursed that whoever wins the first skirmishes and take advantage, there is little and no hope for the other team to come back. You screw it before the 5 minutes of a match and you know that you are doomed, there are some exceptions with some people making miracles and coming back but they rely on the mistakes that the "defenders" of the territory could make, if the other team/player is good, he will not let you come back despite how well you are trying, so the only thing you can do is watch your victory points go down quickly.
Graphics
The game is powered with an improved Essense Engine (the CoH engine) and I could max out the settings with my 9600 gt which is not a high-end video card so if you have a better card or even SLI/CrossFire I assume that you can play this game with some crazy resolutions without any framerate drop. The models are good, could have more poly count but it´s still an eye candy game. The big problem relies on the tiny map -squad direction Relic went with this game and the physics are not as good as in CoH, basicly because the maps are so small that there is no thing to be blown up or crushed properly in them, a few buildings to garrison your units and some things you can use to cover.
Misc
You have to use Live to play online and it works pretty well, lag is users problems, people trying to play with shitty ISP or shitty PCs but you can call an election to kick them of the match if they are ruining your game.
There are 5 maps I think, 3 for 3vs3 and 2 for head to head ( i have only played 2 head to head matches so maybe there is another one), Relic says they will let you download new ones a week or two after the game is launched
Several bugs are present but they may dissappear with an obvious patch the first week after releasing (remember that this beta was already the final code when it went gold)
Conclusion
I am not going to lie, this game is good but is not as good as DoW/CoH fans were expecting ( if you go the community forums where the beta is discussed, you will see that there is a lot of people that thinks the same), if you have not played any of those games or only CoH, then maybe it will blow your socks off anyway but later if you get the Relic Pack on Steam and play the original, you are going to see that the franchise was dumbed down a lot and that it`s not as good as a sequel of a 5 year old game should be (in terms of improvement), but well, let's hope they release some tools and add more maps with patches, perhaps when more races are introduced (with the typical Relic expansions) then the diversity will make it the game you were looking for. Go download the beta and see if you like it, it´s free now on Steam till it launches late this month.
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