City 16

…And so we come to the end of my week long series of first-hour impressions of the games I should have played long ago but didn’t. From the start I’ve had a rough idea of which games I’d play and on what day. This was mostly based on two factors: pick games that had the potential to produce interesting results and try to increase variety by picking games from different genres. For some reason I had Dawn of War II, the Real Time Strategy of the series, pegged as the last game I’d write about from the offset but, as I walked home from work this afternoon, I began to have doubts. Would the game, the genre even, really have enough variety to keep an hour long arc interesting? Maybe I should pick something else. I’d played some Far Cry 2 but certainly not an hours worth. Would that be a better fit? How about Time Gentleman, Please; the new adventure game from indie studio Zombie Cow that I bought last night? Then there’s Red Alert 3, also an RTS, but one I know from the promotional campaign at least has a batshit crazy storyline to write about. In the end as I sat down in front of my PC and scrolled the list of installed games I knew I was lying to myself about the source of my concerns. It was time to face up to my fears…

What is it?

Warhammer 40,000: Dawn of War II is an RTS from Relic, developers of both the original Dawn of War and the critically acclaimed Company of Heroes. It is, as the title may suggest, set in the Warhammer universe.

Why’d you buy it?

It’s the only game of the series that I actually bought in a box from an honest to God shop. It was also the only game that wasn’t bought in a sale, although I think whichever shop I did buy it from had deigned it old enough to justify a price drop. The reason I bought it? Good reviews and a fondness for the RTS genre as a whole, I guess.

The Playtest:

0:01 – As the never-ending list of creator and sponsor splash screens play in front of me, it’s probably wise to start with a disclaimer: I know nothing at all about Warhammer. I know of it; as a child I remember a friend of mine had a large table with figures spread out all over it. He tried to explain to me what it was about but he was wasting his time: it wasn’t electronic, it featured little models that had to be painted and it most definitely wasn’t Sonic the Hedgehog… Boring! I’m vaguely aware that there is a difference between Warhammer and Warhammer 40k but even then all I really know is that one features orcs and the other features orks, which in itself probably isn’t enough to base an entire splinter game on. If you really pressed me to make an educated guess as to what the series was all about I’d go out on a limb just enough to hazard that both probably centred around war… and hammers?

1:30 – If that last paragraph proved anything it’s that I should probably watch this intro. Okay, we’ve got blokes in massive armour. I mean really massive – we’re getting into Cliffy B wet-dream territory here. Stuff is happening.

2:30 – Giant robot! Electricity! Confusion!

5:00 – I’m being asked to name my Force Commander. Unfortunately I’ve only got 10 characters to do so meaning my first choice of ‘Basil Carnage’ is out.

6:00 – Oh God, it’s throwing out planet names at me. I hope this stuff isn’t important because I’ve got no chance at remembering it. It’s possible that I’m playing as a group called the Blood Ravens but it’s hard to be sure.

7:30 – Fraps is telling me that this loading screen is running at 965 frames per second. It’s true that I bought this PC primarily to kick the ass out of static pictures.

9:30 – “You have dropped right into the combat zone. Move north.” I’ve seen war films and if there’s one thing you don’t do it’s wait until your squad has touched down on the LZ to issue commands. If this is the level of professionalism displayed throughout our army then we could be in for trouble.

11:30 – Yellow spots mean light cover; green spots mean heavy cover. *Sigh* I suppose I should have been expecting this. Okay people, sit tight and prepare for a chunk of exposition. It’s time to delve into some backstory:

I mentioned that Company of Heroes was the previous game by Dawn of War II developer Relic Entertainment. I also mentioned that it was critically acclaimed. What I left out was that Company of Heroes is the reason that this week-long feature exists. That was the game I had moved on to. I figured it would take a couple of weeks to complete before I even got to the expansions. I figured I had time to weigh up which game would get picked next for attention while I was working through it. What I hadn’t counted on was that I would absolutely hate it. I’d always assumed I liked RTS games but looking back that all came down to my love of the Command & Conquer series. From the original through to Tiberian Sun and incorporating the Red Alert series and even bloody Generals (which was the newest game that my university laptop could handle and so where my experience of PC gaming held, in static). The problem is that while Command & Conquer games may be in real-time, they can only be counted as ‘strategy’ if your idea of strategy is to build 20 more tanks than your opponent. Company of Heroes, which everyone seemed to think was the future of the modern RTS, was just too fiddly for my tastes. You had to sit and micro-manage units like the preposterously temperamental tank, dealing with the fiddly command system, while in the meantime the macro-management of your overall strategy on any given map went completely to hell. I couldn’t even get used to right-clicking in order to move units. I’d bought Dawn of War II long before this realisation and I was genuinely worried that it would confirm that I just didn’t like the genre. It seems a strange thing to be care about, but the idea of a whole segment of gaming not appealing to me is one I’ve not really had to deal with before.

11:45 – I move my units into cover and tell them to target an enemy. My Force Commander leaves cover to charge at them in a way that was all too reminiscent of my biggest problem with Company of Heroes: the divide between what I wanted a unit to do and how they interpreted that command. Leaving cover to charge at the enemy was tantamount to suicide and it made no sense to me that they would do that when what I really wanted was for those units to stay back and fire from cover. My Force Commander reached the first orc and his chainsaw rips him to shreds. Then he moves to the next orc, and the next one, and the next one. As the final green skinned unit collapses, defeated, I feel the wave of relief wash over me.

15:00 – Click: select man. Click: kill enemy. Click: pick up loot. This is Company of Heroes meets Diablo… This is what I wanted!

20:00 – Click, boom. Click, eviscerate. Click, new item. The smile that is currently playing over my face is embarrassing.

Palpable relief. Also innards.

21:00 – I’ve been ordered to collapse a mine entrance using the tropy-est of all gaming tropes: the exploding fuel barrel. I pause the game and go into the graphical settings menu. Effects density is set to ‘Ultra’. Good, this should be fun!

22:30 – Mission complete. Stat increases are marked by a percussive punctuation. This game wants to do everything in its power to appear over the top, ridiculous and stupid fun. It’s working.

31:00 – I’ve been given an Infiltrator Squad. They can turn invisible and sneak past enemies. It’s just a moments work to set up suppressing fire from the other units, sneak the Infiltrators past and surprise the enemy with a sneak flank attack. The game has revealed itself to have a surprisingly deep strategic system. It’s heavily based on micro-management, there are no resources or overall battle tactics to worry about, but it works because they’ve made the actual execution of the strategies as simple as possible.

37:00 – I have heavy units with fields of fire, beacons that need capturing and encampments to take out with explosives. All of these seem directly ported from Company of Heroes, and yet I’m having fun in a way that I never did with that game; even before I realised I actively disliked it.

45:00 – Bloody hell, I’m using hotkeys. I never use hotkeys. I could be getting into the swing of this.

52:00 – My Force Commander’s down. I’m on a small map that contains loads of orc squads with what would seem to be a boss fight right at the end. Click: Select secondary unit. Click: Heal Force Commander. With that I’m back in the game and ready to take on the next wave. I’m reaching an understanding with the game. Instead of being punished by having to restart and reply a large section I’m being warned that blindly charging into the fray isn’t always the right option.

1:00:00 – The timer signals it’s time to stop as the boss character speaks his dying last words. I ignore them; they’re not important. The important point is that I’m down to one quarter of my original troops and yet I’m not worrying about the difficulty of future confrontations. The great thing about the stat increases and the loot drops is that I know my characters will get better as the levels become more challenging.

Conclusion

I’m a little blown away. Not just by how much I enjoyed Dawn of War II, but by the way it took so many elements from Company of Heroes and perverted them in a way that led to exactly the type of real time strategy game that I wanted. It’s the first RTS I’ve played that has made me think there is more about the genre that I can appreciate than is offered by the C&C games.