Dawn of War: The Complete Collection
Platform/s:
Pc
Developer:
Relic Entertainment
Genré:
Real TIme Strategy
Review:
Oh Steam, you dirty little minx, I see that your still charging £9.99 for the original Dawn of war and a further £9.99 for each expansion pack. Oh but you put Winter Assault and the Original in a joint Gold Edition for that price? Well aren’t you just the Chinese salesman!
But that still means that I am officially shelling out £29.97 for it while Amazon is asking for £16 for its complete collection? AND that collection comes with discs, so why are you charging £9.99 for downloaded media? Its all very underpants gnomes these days with these guys.
1. buy Game licence
2. Scam buyers
3. ???
4. profit
With step 3 being not giving a damn about their reputation as online 2nd hand car salesmen.
And now they announce they actually use the Steam Network adaptors to get around that irritating NAT issue ALL Relic games seem to have that block you from playing something like 85% of online games.
That’s all well and good but I want to remind our readers that this game is now pushing 7yrs old and it entering the “Eww girls! Gross!” stage of its development having shed a few tears on the first day of school only weeks before.
Its around about now I come to realise that Steam is not just that innocently pretty girl across the bar who promises you the world from her bedroom in just a night of passion but rather hooker who will do questionable things for the right price.
No I don’t want to see what you can do with a chicken, a rubber glove and 2 tubs of butter, frankly the notion of even acknowledging your existence makes me ill but alas you do occasionally do some things I can live with, such as charging £6 for stalker and its worst expansion over one weekend or giving away clever and fun games like Alien Swarm for free.
Ok well enough teabagging the face of Steam lets talk games.
To the 41st Millennium we go…
"There is no such thing as Innocence. Just varying degrees of Guilt." - Librarians thoughts on the games industry and how it loves to scam its customers.
Intrigue of intrigue.
It seems someone finally got around to making a roughly acceptable conversation of the tabletop game that has you spending £150 on a box of plastic parts that when smelt down barely accumulate £10 in weight at a recycling centre, but hey if your ok with it then clearly Games Workshop will be ok with relaunching the armies every year to make you buy the entire thing again or stop you playing in their official tournaments until you do.
God bless capitalism!
The actual videogame however is a more of a much reasonable price and even includes a feature that allows you to paint the armies how you want, within constraints, it’s a decent game but my it has limits.
You can also customise the banners and shoulder insignias your soldiers have on them and at the moment I am sporting a very funky version of the Legion of the Damned on my space marines. Something I gained via an aesthetics mod.
These are abundant on the net and cover every single army or close to every single army in the tabletop both official paint schemes and ones mentioned in spin off games or the endless mountain of books from the ominously named and I think somewhat racist “Black Library”.
Sadly only you can see these colour schemes as the others online, unless they have the same mods, will just see the basic colour schemes.
In the original game you could choose from the four most important armies in the game, though who decided these 4 were the most important I would like to know.
They consisted of Space Marines (The Americans of 40k), the Eldar (the Vietcong of 40k), the Orcs (insert racist African / Middle Eastern reference here) and the Chaos (… Smash?)
Each army has its own architecture for its bases and its own armies. They function in completely unique fashions too with the HQ choices (bar the named heroes) featuring in each army, such as Librarians, Chaos Lords, Chaplains, Big Meks and Farseers.
Unlike games such as Battle for Middle-Earth where Aragorn can take on an entire army by himself and win with barely any healing required, the heroes in the 40k universe seem to be more balanced.
They can still take on an entire squad by themselves and stand a pretty good chance of winning, but over whelm them and you might wanna call in the Kroot to clean up the mess (nerd joke, if you understood that you must immediately go out and find a pair of boobs to play with. NO NOT YOUR SISTERS!)
You can attach most heroes to most squads and this serves to increase the total morale of the squad and its regeneration. Useful and offering some nice perks, for example the Librarian has a power called – The Emperors Word. When he is attached to a squad and he uses it that squad (but not himself) becomes invulnerable to damage for a short while. Funky eh?
Thing is though, the space marines in that game were about as balanced as taking a five iron to some ones shin. You could full your infantry pop cap with Terminators and your vehicle pop cap with Land raiders and basically steam roll the enemy.
Arriving at the first expansion we see the inclusion of the Imperial Guard, because apparently the Orks didn’t spam hard enough so now they include the IG. An army legendary for its morale breaking as soon as they even SEE a battlefield and whose men die from fear more often than a bad case of bullets.
They are however a decent army to play as once you start calling out the commissars and using the “Execute” power, which sees the Commissar shoot one random guy in the squad he is attached to, resulting in that squad and all who were in earshot to suddenly become unbreakable and fire twice as fast. Now imagine you have 5 squads of 20 men, fully upgraded with one commissar to hand out the random headshots and now suddenly your getting the firepower of 40 men per second instead of 20. Still anyone who knows the IG will know that this is still throwing a turd at a brick wall, yeah your throwing a lot of turds but its still just a turd.
This expansion also limits introduced to super units. While terminators, predators and whirlwinds can still choke up your pop caps the use of land raiders has been cut down to one. Now I look back on it, it was only ever the space marines who needed to be contained. The Chaos super unit was the bloodthirster of which you were always limited to one, Eldar had the Avatar of Khaine (again one) although the Orks could call up multiple Squiggoths but they suck so it doesn’t really matter if they balanced them.
When you look at this expansion you realise that Relic fall into the same category as my beloved Mythic Game Studios. This category is – We actually give a shit about what the gamers want and with the climate of games companies mainly flooded with the Neo fascists such as Bungie and EA who tell us what we want, Relic seems to actually care what we want from our games and with each expansion improved on the formulae a little more. Granted infantary elite units are still over powered and floodable onto the battlefield but at least now the super tanks are restricted to one. Although I think this was less Relic listening to its community bitching Space Marines were OP and more them thinking, “Hmmm the Baneblade IS kinda big…” and if you want to understand why that sentence is relevant please feel free to google or wikipedia the Baneblade. I don’t mind if you want to tab out for a second…
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Back?
Ok now I can continue onto Dark Crusade.
This being the 2nd expansion in the series and the first stand-alone expansion (meaning it doesn’t need the originals) it actually changed the single player completely. The original and the 1st expansion saw you playing through predetermined campaigns where you followed a series of objectives leading up to a finale. The first game was purely you as the Space Marines while Winter Assault let you switch between IG and Eldar if you chose the good campaign or Orks and Chaos if you chose evil. More variance and I’m glad for it.
This game however tears the old story based sequence of missions ‘til you win style out and throws it away in place of a “Conquer the world” mode which I personally feel is a much more fitting and better use of the engine and theme.
This game added in the Tau and Necron armies as well and despite the changes to the single player kept the back-story to the game but instead just left you to your own motives. You could now choose any army you like to conquer the world of Kronus with each of the capitals being a story heavy set of challenges that made the campaign that little bit more interesting, as did the special territories which when conquered gave bonuses such as extra moves during your turn or the ability to ignore boarders and just move where you want.
They also implemented a limited but still amusing War gear system whereupon the player would be rewarded with a war gear point should they complete certain (and inevitable) goals such as 5 wins, 3 defence wins, 2000 kills etc and you use these to buy upgrades for your commander to give them new powers like spotting infiltrated units etc.
It’s also around about this game that the proper limiting of units was introduced. Terminators and so on got limited to one per squad, Warp Spyders limited to 3, etc to really implement a proper balance to the game play. Some new units surfaced such as the Grey knights for the Space Marines and some new upgrades were introduced for each army to account for this. It still plays and feels like the originals its just so much cleaner and more functional now.
There was ONE tiny faux Pas that I will have to call Relic out on.
Why oh why did you make stealth units able to attack from stealth? Why did you then give 4 man scout teams 4 sniper rifles that are instant kills and capable of humiliating the Eldar Rangers who are technically seen as a hero unit?
Do you know how annoying it is to have your armies morale constantly assaulted by invisible units you HAVE to build a detector unit to unveil?
Some people would say its strategic and you have to account for these things, I say it’s a dick move by a company I was just getting so much respect for. It worked well before in the first 2 games where you had to unstealth to fire then restealth and run away. Shoot and scoot as its call in most FPS games and if it works with the unreasonable mutants that are the FPS community then it will work with the savvy and cultured arm chair generals that are the RTS community.
Finally we come to Soul Storm, an expansion no one asked for and no one needed but most bought because it came as part of the bundle packs which were still cheaper than buying them individually from STEAM!
HAH!
It added in a flying unit for each army bar the Necrons, not that anyone gave a shit because they do next to no damage and get shot to pieces really easily because this isn’t Empire Earth or Rise of Nations / Legends so everyone has guns and last time I checked there was no cover in the sky.
It also included the Sisters of Battle allowing the online community to finally play as an all female army and make jokes about the “Bolter Bitches” or “If the Rhino is rocking don’t come knocking” among the 101 funny but dangerously nerdy jokes that exist in the 41st.
They also added in the Dark Eldar, which kind of made me think they were really just scrapping the bottom of the barrel at this point and I swear to god if I had seen any squats I would have written to Relic asking them to please just find a new series to work on. It’s like watching a drunk trying to convince a cop he’s fine to drive when his pants are around his ankles and he’s leaning on his car roof to avoid being completely on the floor.
Cringe worthy right?
Still all in all I can’t really say anything about these games could be classed as truly awful. The NAT issue for playing online is as big a lump of bullsh*t as your going to get, so if you are going to buy this game for use online you may as well just shell out the £18 for the gold edition and Dark Crusade to use Steams network to avoid it but if you want it just to doss around and play on your own I say go for Amazons £16 offer and get all 4 in one go.
They will keep you amused for several hours and that’s even if you’re not the biggest of warhammer fans. If you’re the sort of guy who pre-orders £300 box sets of armies not released for another 2yrs then you may as well drop to your knees and thank the Emperor for this blessing because this game is exactly what you have been asking for.
It plays well and each army really is unique.
Some people would argue that the sisters of battle is just a mix of Space Marine fighting and Imperial Guard survivability and I would agree but that said they are the middle ground between the two and according to the lore of the 41st they aren’t actually frontline soldiers, they are specifically witch hunters or Ordo Hereticus. Same as the Grey Knights are Daemon hunters or Ordo Malleus, which actually sticks to true form and only permits one squad in a SM army. Still I feel dirty now and that rather unusual sensation of my virginity returning so Im going to tie this up now and head out to find a drunk chick to exploit.
In closing I will say that once I played Company of Heroes, having playing this, I did get a strong vibe this game started life as it’s own project but towards the end with the tweaks to the game it felt it might have become the protogenesis for CoH but interestingly enough not Dawn of War 2 which uses completely different mechanics in its style. That said it does draw on a lot of aspects from CoH so who knows.
If you can get your hands on it do so!
If not then lament and buy Battle for middle earth 2… or a cheeseburger
Pros:
Varied armies
Numerous multiplayer maps
Largely true to the tabletop
Improved with each expansion
Will keep you entertained for months
Cons:
Has a good chance to not work online
Early games were unbalanced
Final expansion feels unnecessary
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