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I just got the game, slightly against my better judgement, but I like the campaign. The campaign is more like an action RPG than a RTS. Due to this, the lack of base building and static defenses does not annoy me during the campaign. I know some people won't like this, but for me, the campaign is fine. It has some replay value as you can kit out your squads (characters) differently and play on different difficulties. A couple of key things about the campaign, there are no resources, no control points and you start with the maximum 4 full units. Keep this in mind for the next section of my review.

With that being said, I absolutely hate the multiplayer game because it's a huge game of cat and mouse that is beyond annoying. The fact that the game no turns the action RPG into a RTS, but uses a lot of the same mechanics, kills it. There are now resources, built squads and control points, all of which can't be adequately defended because of no static defenses and wide open maps with no choke points.

This is a rare occasion where the single player and multiplayer are so vastly different in a game, that people can easily like one but hate the other. The game is about 7/10 on my personal scale. I will probably be playing something else in a month.

Another bunch of questions:

1. How much can you kit out your Sergeants?
2. The reviews seem to mention you can set up your Force Commander as a HTH fighter or a shooter. To that end, can you give him two pistols?

BYE

H.B.M.C. wrote:Another bunch of questions:

1. How much can you kit out your Sergeants?
2. The reviews seem to mention you can set up your Force Commander as a HTH fighter or a shooter. To that end, can you give him two pistols?

BYE

Sergeants, at least in the campaign, get multiple accessory slots, and one armor and a left/right weapon or one two handed weapon. I've only played a few hours in, but you can unlock skills that allow more or different items to be equiped. My assault sergeant has 3 or 4 accessory slots that can hold things like grenades, med kits, melta bombs, etc. So it varies depending on their levels and where you put points.

And your Force Commander can carry around a heavy bolter or missle launcher if you put the points into shooting. Or you can give him a better bolter or a plasma gun or flamer, just gotta put the points into his shooting skill.

Wow. Missile Launcher Commander. That's pretty cool.

I'm guessing he can have two HTH weapons though, which is why I'm interested to see if he can have two pistols (two plasma pistols would be awesome!).

And, just on the subjects of weapons, there are obviously mundane weapons and then the wargear that you find that's unique. Do you ever run out of mundane wargear?

BYE

H.B.M.C. wrote:Wow. Missile Launcher Commander. That's pretty cool.

I'm guessing he can have two HTH weapons though, which is why I'm interested to see if he can have two pistols (two plasma pistols would be awesome!).

And, just on the subjects of weapons, there are obviously mundane weapons and then the wargear that you find that's unique. Do you ever run out of mundane wargear?

BYE

I'm only a few hours in, and all my characters have unique sets of power armor (+stats to shooting for the dev sgt, melee for the assault sgt, etc,) and I have a few chainswords, a power axe, a couple bolters, a heavy bolter and a crap ton of accessories (grenades, health packs, a rosarius, artillery strikes among others.) I don't know if you can have two HTH weapons, my commander currently has a power axe and bolt pistol. Have to try dual wielding pistols or HTH weapons when I get home.

And how do you mean runout? Like stop finding them, or get rid of your regular gear?

No, each leader character can only carry one close combat weapon, the other hand holds a pistol weapon when equipped with a melee weapon in the other. Exception to this is the Thunder hammer.

Drops are very random in regards to the quality and effect. At least that's what I had.

Here are some pictures of the outfitter screen: scouts, terminator squad, assault terminator squad
Each unit has the default gear if you don't give them a different weapon. If you equip them with something else it will override the default. Through the trait points system units can be diversified, tac squads can get bolt pistol and ccw proficiency if you put enough points into close combat, assault squads can be upgraded to be able to use assault weapons, commander can unlock heavy weapons, etc. Everyone except scouts can be upgraded to have terminator honors which lets them use terminator armor.

Heh, someone has been very busy. You've also horded quite a stockpile of spare weapons. I traded most old stuff in for extra experience.

Hi, obviously i am not a regular poster but I thought i would add a few comments about the game. For the record I have been playing Warhammer 40k for around17 years (i know that is a short time compared to many!) and I loved the first DoW game. There are soley opinions, and i am sure others will disagree.

The Good -

I like the equipment and the upgrades the game provides.

NOTE: It is very important that you read through the trait achievements to know what abilities you can pick up. This is especially important if you want to equip Terminator armor LATE in the game.

I too thought it would be kind of cool to have twin bolt pistols on my commander, but i do respect that they kept gearing options to the same standard as the tabletop (um sort of).

Replayability is there for the single campaign. On my second time through i am going with a heavy weapon force commander.

Very cool to be able to upgrade a Dreadnought as a character!

( i got really mad how long it too me to get terminator armor, but once i got it i understood why it doesn't come fast. This armor makes your squad a killing machine who is insanely hard to kill. I got a blue set of Thunderhammer\Storm Shield (only usable in T-armor) way earlier than my T-armor...and once i put it on my Commander i never took it off. He was 2 or 3 shotting tanks and Carnifex's.

The Bad-

Random weapon drops can stall the game big time, or frustrate the hell out of you! When the first Carnifex showed up as a boss, i had nothing in my inventory to really scratch him...let alone the 2 others he summoned. 4 or 5 missions later i finally got a Missile Launcher, which made all the difference. I feel this goes for the first 2 ork bosses too...i have yet to fight either of them without loosing all my rookies and having at least half my characters go down violently. Dunno, maybe i am doing it wrong.

There should be a pause button! Sometimes too much is going on and while i am activating a special ability or moving around my Devastators, a grenade goes off and kills an entire squad. And even when i try to move them away from a grenade, they end up walking right through the blast area...ugh!

Why do weapons upgrades only effect the sergeants?? I would like all my scouts to have sniper rifles, not just Cyrus.

The Ugly-

I really don't like how they cut down the feel of large scale war in multi-player.

No squad larger than 4 people??

Only one tank (Predator - no lascannon upgrades)

...and no lascannons period???

I really hope they add more units and upgrades later on.


Overall i give the Single player game a 8.9 and the Multi-player part a 6.

Anyone figure out what max level is?

20

The campaign is very fun. Choosing squads and kits (including skills) for missions is very cool.

However, the multiplayer, not so much. I have played a few games against comp and friends (we a rabid CoH fans) and it is disappointing. It seems to play alot less strategically than COH. No fortifications or barriers means very limited map control and most target areas have alot of access points meaning forcing battle is difficult, but you need overwhelming force to produce significant casualties. The strategy seems to be to create lots of squads to cap and build up for heavy hitters to charge their base. The cappers flee battles if outgunned to avoid loss and giving up too much exp. Then gather the squads and you hitters and search and destroy or base rush.

Kind of blah.

Hopefully CoH2 improves on this as much as CoH did on DOW (although I enjoyed DOW multi more than I do DOW2 multi).

Ozymandias wrote:

Great, now the PC gamers get our achievements!!

Ozymandias, King of Kings

To be fair, Team Fortress 2 had achievements on the PC before any other game (that I am aware of).

I am loving DOW2 though. It reminds me a lot of a cross between Diablo 2 and the original DOW series. The experience gains and the item drops make the game very customizable. I had a ton of issues upon initial installation, but once I worked past those everything turned out great.

Coop is entertaining, my only advice: get someone who knows a bit of team play. I had several moments where my comrade would do stupid things, like not sending his marines and devs into cover when facing heavy fire, or throwing a grenade at a boss monster while my commander was fighting it up close.

Played a lot of this home sick over the weekend.

Maybe I'm doing something wrong but man...the missions seem really, really repetitive. There's really only two missions:

Walk from bottom of map to top, kill boss monster

Defend base until attacked by boss monster, kill boss monster.

Thats it. The boss monsters all have kind of dumb AI which is made up for by lots of hit points or immunity to pretty much every item you've found up to that point. I'm level 13 or 14 and I'm not sure how high it goes but I've played something like 30 missions.

Maybe some of these special missions that have just opened will be different, but either way so far it feels like the game is one of the more unneccesarily repetitive that i've played in a while. it's not like they don't know how to make semi-interesting squad based RTS missions...they just did it in CoH!

Grinding mobs for loot sounds awesum

I havn't played it but i played the first one and this one just not appleal to me the way the first one did.

I just don't think its in the same league with starcraft 2 and empire total war

Axyl wrote:To be fair, Team Fortress 2 had achievements on the PC before any other game (that I am aware of).

Shadowrun was the first PC game to get Achievements(released 4 months before TF2).

glowgos wrote:I just don't think its in the same league with starcraft 2 and empire total war

Mainly because they are all different breeds of strategy.

lambadomy wrote:Played a lot of this home sick over the weekend.

Maybe I'm doing something wrong but man...the missions seem really, really repetitive. There's really only two missions:

Walk from bottom of map to top, kill boss monster

Defend base until attacked by boss monster, kill boss monster.

Congratulations! You've just discovered the golden formula of every RTS ever made.

For comparisons purposes, Starcraft had:

Walk from bottom of map to top

Build base - rush opponents base.

Total War is even more simplistic as it only have:

Destroy all opponents forces.

From someone who played craploads of dawn of war 1 this game is really a HUGE let down. Definetly a warning labe should be on this pice of crap. The only thing that made me drag my ass thru it is the cutscences, wich a fantaic of 40k will always love, but you can see them on youtube and the like.

Sure, the single player campaign has some nice roleplaying parts that arent all bad but it really is just charge the top of the map, over and over. Only having 3 man squads(with some exeption on 4) feel like your playing 1/3 of an army. Every squad can get alot of diffrent special attacks(grenades, airstrikes etc) that can kill off 2-3 enemy squads if placed right. The multiplayer part is even worse, by pretty much the same reasons + the fact that there are very few maps.

No, DoW1 was pretty much a +++++ game and this pice of crap is roghly +. Next time maybe they shouldnt just clone another game (company of heroes) and just change the models.

----

Destroy all enemies is alot more non repetative then in this game because in other RTS you actually have bases and points you have to attack, here you get a big marker on the map and you move all your guys there. No change there what so ever, no tactical choices involved.

The first mission I had any real trouble with was the Angel Gate Mission, that one was pretty tough.

Kallbrand wrote:Destroy all enemies is alot more non repetative then in this game because in other RTS you actually have bases and points you have to attack, here you get a big marker on the map and you move all your guys there. No change there what so ever, no tactical choices involved.

After the third baserush mission in SC I entered snooze mode - here's my base and oh, here's his base, I have to get all my guys there and blast him to pieces.

To each it's own, I guess.

His Master's Voice wrote:

lambadomy wrote:Played a lot of this home sick over the weekend.

Maybe I'm doing something wrong but man...the missions seem really, really repetitive. There's really only two missions:

Walk from bottom of map to top, kill boss monster

Defend base until attacked by boss monster, kill boss monster.

Congratulations! You've just discovered the golden formula of every RTS ever made.

For comparisons purposes, Starcraft had:

Walk from bottom of map to top

Build base - rush opponents base.

Total War is even more simplistic as it only have:

Destroy all opponents forces.

I agree with all this except the last point. I'd say 2/3rds of Total War games is in the campaign and logistics, not battles.

stonefox wrote:I agree with all this except the last point. I'd say 2/3rds of Total War games is in the campaign and logistics, not battles.

Of course, but only the battles are somewhat comparable to any other RTS.

Total War's battle system is glorious because morale, flanking, and the like actually matters to a great degree. There are real cover and elevation effects, which very few games have included to date. I am enjoying DOW2, but I am expecting to get completely lost in E:TW in two weeks.

I mean, come on: NAVAL BATTLES! I've been waiting for a good Age of Sail battle game for years.

That all said, I'm glad I had read reviews of DOW2 for awhile leading up to the release. Many of them went into great detail regarding the changes to the game, so I was fully expecting the small unit sizes and the lack of base building. I went into it looking at the game on its own merits instead of comparing it to other games. *shrug*

DoW 2 is an utter pile of gak in my opinion, they have completely noobified the game, no base building, no unit building or anything.

Single player is just a series of boring missions, you can't save in the middle of a mission and if you die or turn it off you have to repeat the entire dull experience again. I really suggest you either get a demo of this or download it before paying hard cash for DoW 2.
Graphically it aint even amazing either.

Had i paid for it i would be very pissed, Empire Total War on the other hand i pre ordered because it has greatness written all over it!

I prefer the Medievil era better but never mind, i will keep praying they one day get the Warhammer fantasy Licence!

Depends what you are looking for though doesn't it. If you wanna build bases, play CoH. If you want a really innovative RTS/RPG hybrid, give DoW2 a try.