Maybe I ask for too much.
I should add context to this sentence. I fucking loved the original Dawn of War.
It was brilliant. The perfect RTS in my books. It was challenging, fun, diverse. It was well written. It had the occasional hilarious voice acting. It was accurate to the original fluff (That's right I'm disgustingly geeky, I could debate for hours about the finer points of the Warhammer 40k universe, and I'm not ashamed about it... Ok I'm ashamed).
Then Dawn of War 2 came out. I remember it clearly. I actually had to drag my computer to my friend's house to activate it as I was in halls of residence at university and they had the Steam ports blocked. I did this because I assumed THQ (the developers) would have created the same gold they had with Dawn of War and it's three expansions. Gold with better graphics.
Those bastards did not.
They raped the Dawn of War franchise. Taking away all the finely crafted RTS elements and turning it into a Company of Heroes clone. A badly constructed "Squad-based strategy game" in which the player does the exact same thing over and over again. Walk through a map, capture some strategic points. Kill a boss that throws explosives around. It was the most tedious game I had ever encountered. It was poorly written. It was limited. I hated it.
A few months later I bought the expansion. I don't know why I did. I took a big old bite of shit sandwich with the first game, finished it, painfully, then decided to order another one.
A year or so passes! Our hero (me) is growing a year closer to his inevitable demise. A friend approaches him.
"What do you want for your birthday?"
I panicked, and pointed at steam. I got Dawn of War 2: Retribution.
I'd like to say it was an accident, just like the story I tell about how I got my iPhone (It was a fucking accident!) but I don't think it was. I had read previews. They told me that the game was going back to it's routes, giving us back the ability to create troops again, build buildings, have epic battles. I was excited again.
Why does everybody lie to me?
Retribution is possibly worse than the original shit-covered Dawn of War 2. This is because they gave me what I wanted... The ability to create troops...
Hence my original statement about wanting too much...
You can build troops again, joy! Except they kept everything else the same. It's still squad based, you just can have more squads. Well I say more, it's gone from 4 squads to 6-8. Not a patch on the screen full of troops you would encounter regularly in the original games. You can't build buildings. You just find strategic bases, that let you build troops. This has made the game disgustingly easy. You find resources everywhere. Boxes no longer give you supplies, those are now unlimited, only costing energy, again making the game easier, instead the boxes are full of Energy and Resources, which you use to buy squads. Once you've gotten these squads you just walk through the level, destroying things until you get to the inevitable final boss of each level, in which you right click it, occasionally move out of exploding things and tediously await the next identical level.
It has no character. Each level has just been written differently for each race, so while it seems you're getting five (5 FIVE!) campaigns, you're getting one, with different skins. The Tyranid's (my favourite race) campaign writing is particularly awful, with the writers completely missing the point of them. You're no longer fighting characters and getting involved in the storyline, it's merely killing a group of unnamed troop choices. It feels like multiplayer gaming, without the human contact.
The levels are again the same. Monotonous. The original games had amazing levels. Levels in which you had to capture generators to power a Titan's (giant robot) arm to destroy a trench-full of enemies, and other epic sounding events like that.
The problem with this game is they tried to be like the original games again, in the easiest possible way. The entire game needs to redone in order to get back to what made the original games great. The writing needs to be reworked massively. The gameplay needs to change radically from the awful squad based pit of despair it is currently in. The levels need to change completely so it's not the same thing over and fucking over again. I ended up watching television whilst playing this game just to get through enough of it so I could write this review. It was painful to do. Games should not be painful.
To sum up. I hate this game.
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