Okay, my big review on this. And if you know anything, it's that I'm always right.
I'm not a hugely huge RTS fan. The thing about RTS games is that there's 3 catagories of games - Sucky games, okay games, and awesome games. Unfortunately, unlike say FPS titles, the RTS genre suffers from an overwhelming majority of 'sucky' and 'okay' games. Finding an awesome RTS game is like picking your nose and pulling out gold boullion. A sucky game is 'Perimeter'. An okay one is 'Generals'. This is why I don't play many RTS games, because the 'okay' games are given rave reviews that frankly they don't deserve (on a subrant here, for example, why the hell did Generals try to combine 'modern warfare' with a bunch of high-tech neogizmo bull^^ that makes no sense at all? That's one of the many reasons I thought that game was stupid). So when I do get an RTS game, I only either play the Campaign mode or AI skirmish. Playing RTS games against other people usually isn't a battle of wits, it's a battle of who memorized their hotkeys and can mash them faster. Whatever.
Dawn Of War, I think, is a 'meh' game. There's many things about it that just rub me the wrong way. I think it's better then Generals, but not as good as Total Annihilation. Kinda fits in the gray ground around there. I'm basing most of this review off of the Space Marines since I like them the most.
Graphics - Graphics, and I don't give a ^^ what you think, you're wrong if you disagree with me - graphics usually make or break a game. Go piss in your own pool if you think I'm wrong, but if you bring it up I will beat this fact into your skull and you
will lose.
Graphically, this game is remarkably boring. The explosions were nice. That was about it. First of all, I don't know if it was the textures, or the models themselves, but units seem to be very low-detail to me. When you're zoomed all the way out, it looks fine, but zoomed in, when you compare Dawn of War to say, Ground Control 2, DOW just doesn't even come close. A good example is the Assault Marine. Basically, in your default view, the Assault Marine looks like a regular marine, but with a MASSIVE BOX glued to his head. It just looks awful. Also, the Eldar I hate. Now, I don't play WH40K on the board, and I never will, but I can't honestly think that people actually play an army whose infantry units all seem to look like Ronald McDonald in Power Ranger armor.
The particle systems were somewhat off as well. A powerfist ripples with electrcity. The Librarian sword courses with power. However, many times the systems don't line up. I've had my force commander have lightning coursing out his ass at points. Secondly, there's only about 4 particle systems. Smoke, fire, electricity, and dirt. You'll get used to seeing the 'smoke' a lot since every vehicle in this game seems to run on a coal-fired engine and pumps out more pollution then an SUV.
The animations are smooth, however, and units, as I said, look just fine zoomed all the way out. Melee combat, however, can look very vice many times, though it'd be nice to have them 'sync' a bit more (So when a unit hits another, he 'recoils' with pain, then strikes back instead of both swinging at each other like kids at a pinata). The death animations are also nice, and there's even some 'special' ones. Killing a soldier with your Force Commander in melee combat will cause him to do a little stabby stabby thing with his sword, then kick the enemy's body off it.
The weapon effects are less then desirable. Your average bullet effect is riddled with lame. The game randomly draws a line from the unit to a place arbitrarially around your target. The result is that your marines look like they're both crosseyed, blind, have their helmets on backwards, and are having an epileptic siezure caused by having a stroke with advanced parkisons at the same time. I have absolutely no idea how they are killing things, but with tracers flying 600 feet behind and around the target, and not actually HITTING it, they somehow do it. Fire (flamethrower) effects are also pretty good looking but I never figured out if the flamethrower actually does anything besides lower morale, since I would tell units to attack and the flamethrower guy would stand at the assend of the battle trying to set friendly units on fire. Another good one is when you have a Commander unit (Librarian, Force Commander, maybe even a Sargeant) with a plasma rifle, they shoot straight up in the air instead of their target. They aim at them, sure, but the bolts to WOOSH straight up.
Gameplay - Gameplay is pretty good, but I despise micromanagement, and if you can't micromanage, you're pants in this game.
First of all, one of the most irritating things I noticed is the squad behavior commands that don't actually work. You have a lot of settings. Hold Area. Hold Ground. Attack Ranged. Close to Melee. Stuff like that. The kicker? NONE OF THEM SEEM TO DO ANYTHING AT ALL! I set a squad of Bolt Gunner marines to 'Hold Ground', and the description itself says 'UNITS WILL NOT MOVE, BUT WILL ATTACK ENEMY UNITS IN RANGE'. So I leave them. I come back later and they're scattered all over. Why? Because they RAN AFTER UNITS. Another good one - I have a squad of Assault Marines. I jump them into combat (Assault Marines are good for melee and are bad at ranged attacks) so I set them to 'Use Melee Attacks' while they're in transit. They land, draw their peashooter pistols, and open fire at point blank range. Nevermind that they have a chainsaw stowed in the massive fuglyass box glued to their head, they're using pistols to kill units at close range. I was flabbergasted, so I checked it again. Sure enough, I was supposedly telling them to 'Close to Melee Combat' and they were utterly ignoring me. They died.
A neat effect is the 'morale' of a 'squad'. A squad consists of any number of marines, from 1 to 9, 10 with a sargeant, and 11 with a special unit attached as well. The worst part? Morale is based BY SQUAD. Having 9 squads of 5 marines each is more effective then having 5 squads of 9 marines. Pretty :Ding dumb if you ask me. Balance also isn't there. Eldar units tend to pack more punch then anything else and it's no secret that they're easy to win. Likewise, an orc army relies on an assload of little infantry units, and Space Marine Dreadnaughts are both fast and cheap to produce, and with upgrades, can slice through a billion orc soldiers like cheesecake.
The AI is less then phenominal. For all my experiences, the AI would usually pressure me a lot at the beginning, then just amass troops but do nothing with them. I attack their base and fight a ton of soldiers, but if I kill them, they stay dead. Eventually I wanted to see what an AI would do if I left it with no soldiers, just some builder units, and plenty of Control Points (or victory locations, whatever the
they are). All he did was build.... SCOUTS. Yes, that's right, he has a vehicle pad, several builder units and resource points, but is building nothing but scouts, and attacking me in waves of two. Oh boy. The most I'd ever seen it do was build lots of Landspeeders and charge them at my anti-vehicle Dreadnaughts (note: Dreadnaught = huge and strong. Landspeeer = weak and light) like car bombs. The AI also didn't seem to ever upgrade squads with heavy weapons, though it would reinforce them to larger squads.
The default controls are pants, namely camera controls. This is RELIC who made HOMEWORLD, RELIC who INVENTED FREE-FLOATING CAMERA, and they don't even use the middle mouse button for camera rotate? The ALT key? What the hell? Not to mention the camera seems to go :Ding insane if you bring it down to ground level and push it against the ground. You'll do stuff and suddenly your camera is flying off into space. Finally, the biggest irk of them all, you can't zoom out far enough. Hardly any game ever gets this right. We have sattelites that can read a lisence plate from space. The Space Marine buildings crash to the earth from above. Orbital strikes. And after all that they haven't invented a way to view a battlefield from afar yet.
Another stupid thing is about the buildings. The Orc buildings fly in on a jet and are launched and smash onto the ground. The Space Marine buildings fall from space. Maybe I'm not getting something here, but wouldn't it make sense to, oh, I don't know, use the buildings to SMASH ENEMY UNITS?
In conclusion, it's a fun game, but nothing to get really excited about. It's not 'the next starcraft', not by a long shot.
(Let it be known that Jefe finds this review incredibly and utterly offensive and violently objectionable)
Topic: Warhammer 40k Open Beta (Read 8632 times)
