GameLog Page

Please sign in or sign up!

...blogs for gamers

Find a GameLog

... by game	... by platform

[ advanced search ]

HOME	GAMES	LOGS	MEMBERS			ABOUT	HELP

dkirschner's Warhammer 40,000: Dawn of War II - Retribution (PC)

[August 5, 2013 01:10:00 AM]

Retribution changed up a couple things from the original DoW2 and from Chaos Rising. It introduced a multiplayer mode, which I haven't tried. The multiplayer mode "Last Stand" is supposed to be outstanding and I will try it at some point. Retribution also brings in resources and squads. Instead of only controlling your 4 heroes and their associated squads, you can choose to bench the heroes and bring squads instead.

Heroes level up the same as in the other games, boosting attributes and learning skills related to health, power or energy. In a nice symbiosis with the squad option, many skills you learn affect squads in some beneficial way if you bench the hero. So say I learn "Heal" for a hero. The tooltip might say something like, "If the hero is not in use, then all melee infantry heal when they attack" or something like that. So your squads are actually beefy special ones rather than cannon fodder. But the heroes are totally badass and have some pretty awesome abilities. For instance, I played the Ork campaign and the ranged unit, Mr. Nailbrain, gained the ability to teleport and to explode (hilarious every time). So I'd teleport in the middle of like 30 enemies and explode and they'd scatter and die. It was a great combo.

That said, I played Retribution the same way as the others, without using any squads. My reasoning is very practical and has to do with the still mind-boggling decision by the designers to not let you reassign new hotkeys or group hotkeys. There is NO reason why I shouldn't be able to create a hotkey to select all my units at once (or any combination I set a hotkey for). This feature, present in practically all RTSs, is one of the most useful ever created for the genre and it is just ridiculous that players cannot change or create hotkeys in the DoW2 series. So, I played with just my four heroes instead of like eight squads mostly because I then had to click only half as often. Every time I wanted to select all, I only had to drag a box around four things instead of eight, which is still irritating when they are spread out, but way simpler than doing it for eight.

There are six races in Retribution, each of which supposedly has a slightly different campaign. I played the Ork campaign, which I thought was rather silly. The Orks sound English/Scottish, which was a little weird, and they really dive deep into their way of talking with heavy accents. "Dis here's gunna git da lootz fer da boyz!" and lots more words I had to learn. That's one thing about Warhammer. I'll never understand how Orks are a force to be reckoned with. They're idiots! Maybe I just haven't read enough Warhammer stuff, but from all the games I've played, Orks are always just jokes. How are they smart enough to use teleporters and build spaceships and stuff? Anyway, I see how all the campaigns intersect and play around the larger Space Marine campaign. There were several maps where there was pretty much a big melee going on with a bunch of different races. My guess is that a lot of the maps are the same among races, just with some different objectives. The Orks seemed to just be going around looting and being a general nuisance to the other races who were actually doing consequential things in the world. To get the story proper I think I should have played the Space Marines, Imperial Guard or Chaos campaigns, but whatever. Orks were silly but entertaining enough. I won't play through anymore campaigns.

Like with the others in the DoW2 series, all the maps quickly start feeling the same. There's little variation (actually there was more variety in Chaos Rising) from just moving from A to B and killing everything very methodically. One annoying thing in this campaign was that a lot of times you go from A to B, then get a new objective requiring you to go back to A. Lots of backtracking. If I recall, there was one level where I had to beat a timer getting from A to B and that was intense. I think all the rest were pretty much the same. I suppose if you play more campaigns, you'd find some more interesting maps, but like I said, I won't find out.

I do miss a sort of meta system from the other two games. DoW2 had the Tyranid infestation where you had to keep planets from being overrun by Tyranid, and Chaos Rising had the corruption system where the Space Marines could become corrupted by chaos depending on their choices and if they wore corrupted wargear. That in particular was a lot of fun to try and balance corruption level while still trying to meet the requirements to wear the awesome corrupted wargear. Retribution was just completely straightforward in this regard. Nothing special, just level up and go forward in the story. No asides to think about. The extra campaigns and the multiplayer make up for it in the broad sense, but as far as my play style goes, I really wish there'd been something extra to manage in the campaign I played.