Variety is for the weak!
I have to admit, I'm a huge fan of everything Relic has ever developed. I mean really, the first game of the Dawn of War-series is still one of the greatest RTS-games I have played and I still play it with my friends from time to time because of it's solid content and gameplay. The game just feels good to play and you don't find anything that bad about it if you just play and don't TRY to find the small problems every game has. But since Soulstorm (the last standalone expansion for the first game, developed by Iron Lore) I have felt some kind of disturbance in the force, maybe the soulstorm is there at the Relic HQ, torturing game designers with stupid ideas.
Don't get me wrong, I liked Dawn of War 2, I just didn't like it as much as Company of Heroes or the first game of the series. The co-op was fun even if the campaign was a bit of repetitive and included grinding of the optional defence-missions. Now Relic is here with new standalone expansion “Chaos Rising” that promises to bring a bit more varied gameplay and exciting new features. Let's check it out.
The most hyped addition is probably the new Chaos-race. You can play against the evil forces of the warp in singleplayer and/or you can join the Chaos Gods in the fight against the loyalist scum in multiplayer. The playstyle of Chaos is different and fresh and the units are full of personality, first time I heard the Plague Champion screaming: “Every step is a sickness.”, I was in love. But if you don't care that much about playing with the devil, there is not much else for you but the new campaign.
Well you kill Chaos Space Marines instead of Tyranids, most of the battles are fought on the new icy planet called Aurelia and Relic has for some absurd reason removed almost every single optional mission. So no infinite defence-missions or grinding for new wargear, there is only few optional missions left and they felt heavily scripted and the removal of most of the optional missions means that all wargear you are going to get, you get from the story-missions. The missions about the actual story of the game are ok, but are they that different?
No, the basic idea is the same, you drop down to a planet and you have to run from point A to point B while gunning down heretics, so the missions feel pretty much the same compared to the first game even if some of the missions have timelimits and smaller objectives like destroying special objects on the map. The only new addition to the game is the corruption-system, which kinda gives you only two options if you want to be efficient and you don't want to get your ass kicked on the higher difficulty-levels. You can play as a pure servant of the emperor, shitting rainbows and what not or you can play as the evil baby eating heretic. The whole system is very black and white and if you try to go and balance yourself between good and evil you are going to get into problems when playing on the “Primarch”-difficulty because you can't equip the best corrupt wargear and you lose very powerful passive skills of a pure character. The campaign in general isn't that bad but the problem is, it's not that good either.
If you seriously want to play as Chaos and you are obsessed with the lore of the game and want to know about the new adventures of Davian Thule in his mighty battlecan, why not? But if Chaos isn't your thing and you only want to play multiplayer then Chaos Rising is as pointless as a Deff Dread against three Predator tanks equipped with lascannons because there isn't really that much new, fresh content, the new units for the original four races are available to everyone even if they don't buy the expansion and so are the new maps and multiplayer-modes (FFA and Team FFA).
Final Verdict: 3/5 (You can add one star if you really like Chaos, a lot.)
