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Thursday 6 March, 2008
Gamelog #5
Entry #2
GAMEPLAY
For my second round of play, I played the campaign using the other new race, the Dark Eldar. It was much easier for me to handle the Dark Eldar than the Sisters of Battle, mostly because I had already played the demo which restricted me to playing only Dark Eldar. My first level of choice happened to be one where the win condition was not destroy all my enemies but capturing and holding over half of the critical points in the map for about seven minutes. This was fairly simple, I just had to keep two to three squads nearby two points and constantly reinforce them.
My second map proved slightly more challenging. Right off the bat, two squads of Chaos Space Marines attacked my base, leaving my hero unit the task of keeping them back while I built my building that requisitions soldiers. This map was very large in scope; it could probably have held eight or more armies. This made it difficult to spread out to search and capture points, because I didn’t want to spread my army too thin. Also it took awhile to find where the enemy base was. They often attacked from the south, making me think that that was where they were coming from. After searching around the southern area of the map only to find absolutely nothing, I started realizing that they were coming more from the northwest.
I wasn’t aware that the wind conditions in this game were to completely destroy all enemy buildings that produced soldiers. In the previous game, the HQ was all that had to be destroyed. Since I focused all my attention on just destroying their main base, they were able to spread out and build a few other buildings in opposite directions, making it harder for me to track them down. It only delayed the inevitable for them. I eventually got them.
DESIGN
This game of course has all the great features from previous Dawn of War series, such as point capturing and that all units were in the most part uniquely different than other races. The big thing with this game was the two new races, Dark Eldar and Sisters of Battle. With the two new races are new resources special to each race. Also the game now features vehicles that are not restricted by mountains and other obstacles.
The Dark Eldar have a unique feature in that once a building starts being constructed, it will automatically finish without having a builder stay and build it. This allows for a rapid base build up for the Dark Eldar. Their specific resource, souls of fallen soldiers, give them special bonuses that can be called upon in battle, such as demoralizing enemy units or weakening their armor. The Sisters of Battle’s resource did not seem nearly as innovative, although I didn’t get a chance to really try it.
The campaign has been improved significantly from the previous game, Dark Crusade. The campaign has a better narrator, who doesn’t over emphasize words like “indeed” and the campaign has a better story. The story explains more why certain races are involved in the first place and how the other races got involved. Dark Crusade’s campaign was more about that enemies exist and they must be killed.
One of the problems I had with the game was the voices for the Sisters of Battle. Either because their voices were louder or higher pitched, it was more annoying to constantly hear their battle cries repeated over and over. While other races do this too, it isn’t as obvious for them. Also, the Sisters are very similar to Space Marines and the Imperial Guard. Their builder unit and some of their buildings look similar to Imperial Guard buildings and how they are extremely zealous resembles the Space Marines. They are however more religious or ritual sounding then the Space Marines. While Space Marines are extremely religious zealous, the Sisters at times seem more ceremonial, for example, after capturing a point, they chant like they are at church.
This game however is extremely awesome and I can’t wait to play more of it.
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