Now a lot of you have probably heard my overall hatred for this genre. Real Time Strategy games seem designed from the ground up to stress me out. I can't play this genre. It seems like unless you memorize skill trees, hotkey macros, master the control of half a dozen squads at once, and play at the fastest pace possible without error, you will never win.
Due to this, I don't play RTS games online. I don't need that kind of frustration. Instead I stick to the campaigns that these games provide. Unfortunately, most of these suck, and still suffer from a lot of the same issues. I've only been able to stick through portions of StarCraft and Warcraft 3, and even then, I wasn't actually having any fun.
But Dawn of War 2 is something else.
Relic has single handedly revived my interest in the genre. They seem to be on an epic quest to extract everything that's good about RTS, take the boot to all that is bad, and finally incorporate some modern combat conventions.
Company of Heroes gave me my first taste, with a historical setting giving me a headstart at understanding the mechanics of the weaponry and tactics that humans actually used. This definitely lent itself to reacquainting me the basics I would otherwise overlook. It let me play the game in a way where I could just casually ignore the complicated aspects, while letting me control my little squads much in the way I would have played a third person shooter like Freedom Fighters.
COH still unfortunately has a lot of base building and defensive aspects however, which my brain will always have trouble keeping under strategic operation. All I ever really want to do in these games is conquer.
Dawn 2 heard my call, that's for sure. This game totally does away with base building. Hell, even in skirmish, the only building to be done is making generators for waypoints, and upgrading your HQ to lvl2 or lvl3. That's it. No joke. And I love this. Now I get to completely focus on the intricacies of the combat. In the campaign, you don't even have a base. From square one, you are dropped in to do the job, and you don't benefit from new equipment or experience until after the mission.
Yeah, I admit, the main hook was the RPG mechanics. I had a blast raising my characters to have special purposes. It's not a deep game, but it's extremely fulfilling. It takes what WarCraft 3's hero system did, and takes it to the next level. It has a basic lvl cap of 20 for all 6 of your commanders. They all are assigned stat points, skills, equipment and accessories over time. The looted items are Diablo style, with varying degrees of rarity and special benefits. You'll be constantly shuffling your setups around to get new effects. You may think a chainsaw is fine and dandy for one mission, until you realize it doesn't do jack to vehicles, and suddenly that thor hammer calls to you. Your character's roles will change many times, seemlessly.
Beyond that, you've got a great soundtrack, (available free from Steam by the way), very appropriate and professional voice actors for everyone, and some of the best graphics in the genre.
The campaign itself honestly isn't the star of the show, unfortunately. It will get repetitive by the end, when most of the optional missions are all defense of your capture territories, which are constantly under attack, infinitely. I suggest just skipping these unless the reward is an item you need. You'll lose the benefits of territories, but the main story missions, and the side missions are just much more fulfilling. Once you reach lvl20, if you're a nut like me, you might make use of the expiration missions just to get matching lvl20 equipment setups, but you definitely don't need to do this to survive the super easy final mission.
All in all, I had a fun time with my $25 purchase. I'll probably try to enjoy some multiplayer eventually, but the rape may prove to be too unbearable. Otherwise I may just start a new campaign on the 4th difficulty. I went with the 2nd choice, and after only dying once ever, it was obviously a bit too easy on me. I doubt the hardest mode will compare at all to the average player online. That's just how RTS fanbases are.
**Provided is a picture of my favorite boss close to the end of the game, and my final end-game score.
