Single Player? I am disappoint.
Warhammer 40,000: Dawn of War 2: Retribution (and the quest for a longer title) plays a repetitive mix of action and strategy in a game that will leave you wanting to play your favourite race and forget about the rest.
When Retribution hit the shelves, they promised us six unique campaigns, but each campaign is basically the same, and focuses again on the Aurelia sector. This time however, they’ve decided they’ve had enough of this crap franchise and are just going to Exterminatus the entire sector . Your task is to play through six missions (and five optional missions) and kill Kyrus, the fallen Chapter Master of the Blood Ravens, and in doing so, safe the sector and the fuzzy woodland animals. Each campaign is exactly the same; the only thing that changes is the reason for killing Kyrus. Oh, and to keep things “interesting” they shuffle the optional missions around. The full plot is spread across the six campaigns, but it didn’t hold this reviewer’s interest long enough to matter. The co-op option for the campaigns means you can sucker a friend into helping you grind through the same missions thirty-six times though.
It’s strange how one of the biggest flaws in the game is its biggest selling point. While the six campaigns could be considered interesting in their own right, they’re so short, the characters are so unbelievable, and the plot so contrived that it feels like the game was thrown together out of a bunch of old scrap bits lying around after five other Dawn of War games. On the fourth mission, after Typhon gets Exterminatused it suddenly seems to throw its hands up in the air and say “I don’t even know anymore” and chucks you into a couple of missions that have absolutely nothing to do with the main campaign, and just feel like they were added on to lengthen the campaign from about five hours of gameplay to six.
Graphically, the game is quite pretty to look at. Units look crisp, explosions look explosion-y, and gunfire looks impressive. Where it really shines in the appearance department though is the terrain. The fully destructible scenery looks quite impressive, and when your tank explodes through a piece of rubble, you get that satisfying feeling everyone got watching the tank scene in Goldeneye.
Much like the other games in the Dawn of War series, Retributions best feature is fantastic sound. One of those games that makes you want to crank up the subwoofer and listen to the Big Shoota rumble as it fires, or the screaming of the pansy Eldar gettin krumped.
Sadly however, gameplay is where the game suffers the most. The biggest change between previous Dawn of War titles and Retribution is the ability to create an army; throughout the missions you acquire Requisition and Power, and you can use it to purchase troops and vehicles to aid you on your quest (it’s dangerous in the tall grass, take this Predator Tank). While this is a nice change from previous titles, it doesn’t really change the dynamic of the fights at all. While the game offers a lot of strategy options such as suppress and flank, and throwing grenades around obstacles, every single fight will still boil down to: “Select all your lads and right click on the enemy”, so outfitting your squads in a specific manner becomes a rather moot point as they won’t really be needing to do anything special. The other downside to the new army aspect is most of the maps are not properly designed for large armies. This combined with the painfully poor AI, you’ll find yourself micromanaging a lot, and watching your ranged squads gum up the choke-point so the melee squads can’t get through. The level up system for the heroes is nicely rounded out, and there are plenty of items to find in the levels to keep your options nice and fresh each round.
Overall, the game has this grand feeling of being a wonderful foundation. Good graphics, good sound, good concept, but it falls flat everywhere else. It leaves you with a feeling that the development team ran out of money or time and just said “Eh, close enough”, boxed and shipped. The campaigns leave you with this feeling like you’re only getting 1/6 of the story, but are just not compelling enough to want to keep playing them to get the full story in. Buy the game if you’re a Dawn of War 2 fan, but don’t expect it to blow you mind apart. The final boss (a greater daemon of Khorne) was one of the most disappointing I’ve fought in a while. A complete homage to old Nintendo bosses, he stands still and tells the world he really, really hopes you don’t hit him in his one unarmored weakspot.
Story: 2/5: Very weak story , combined with a really dull writing, and very poor voice acting
Setting: 3/5: The worlds are nice, if not unique, and very well designed for maximum gameplay, and micromanagement
Gameplay: 2/5 Poorly implemented army idea, along with boring combat
Art: 4/5 Units are very interesting to look at, and the high-level hero abilities are very cool
Sound: 4/5 While all the non-living things sound pretty fantastic, the voice acting is enough to make you cringe.
Overall Score: 3/5
