The dark gods are strong with this xpack
If you liked Dawn of War 2 you are going to love this game, I sure as hell did but it is definitely not without flaw. Dawn of War 2's campaign is arguably the most unique and innovative take on the RTS genre to date and Chaos Rising is essentially more of the same but with less repetition, more linearity and overall just more kick ass Warhammer goodness.
Both Dawn of War 2 and Chaos Rising do away with base building and mass army unit management in favor of small squad RPG like gameplay centered on controlling just four (or two in co-op) groups of units. Their are positives and negatives associated with Relic’s choice to do this which boils down to single player and co-op being awesome and multiplayer frankly, just not being fun. Each of your squads in the campaign has their own set of abilities and specializations, all of which are influenced by the loot you acquire as you play and the talents you wish to unlock via the point based leveling system. Additionally this time around the choices you chose to make during certain missions also grant powerful new abilities or insanely over powered epic loot.
Both paths have their own endings story wise and one even results in you losing a couple of potential squad members prior to the last few battles so I advise picking one and sticking to it. The downside to this nifty system I and my co-op buddy discovered was that not only do you constantly come across loot you simply cant use you also end up in a few situations where doing the ‘evil’ thing consists of little more than standing around waiting for a timer to finish counting down.
Do you want to save Cyrus’s scout friends? Then this mission is going to be awesome. Want to leave em to die? Well you won’t be doing much this mission then. So yeah Relic could have implemented the feature better but game development being what it is its understandable they couldn’t figure out how to keep it consistently fun.
It’s a shame then that multiplayer is still just so god damn boring.
I use to play the original Dawn of War games in multiplayer with my friends non-stop, those games were Starcraft 2 before Starcraft 2 for us and it really sucks that Relic didn’t just reproduce that experience in the sequel which sadly still hasn’t happened in Chaos Rising. Its not the lack of base building, but the little things in gameplay that ruin Dawn of War 2’s multiplayer, for example; not being able to re-enforce squads in the field resulting in you constantly having to run guys back to your single building every time a few get killed.
For some reason units are all very expensive, take forever to build and coming across resources is a slow and problematic task when everyone is competing for the same things. The best part of multiplayer in any rts is building units and destroying your enemies with them. Rather than doing this you feel like you are constantly only able to wipe out a handful of your enemy, then have to retreat and return over and over. There is no real sense of progression or power or reward in this mode unless you are fighting a really incompetent player or turtling like crazy. I don’t need every rts to have brilliant multiplayer but it would be really nice to see Relic do it well in a Dawn of War game once again, I guess I’ll just have to hope they do it in the next one.
Finally Last Stand, a patched in mode released for DoW2 makes a return in Chaos Rising with two new hero characters to level up in this Gears of War esc horde mode. It’s very simple but is easily more fun than multiplayer. Finding good players is really hard though so having friends is nice.
Chaos Rising is an excellent addition to the Dawn of War series of games, highly recommended if you liked DoW2 but if you didn’t then their isn’t really anything here that will change your mind.
For the DARK GODS!
