The rising hodge
The hilariously poorly-named Warhammer 40000: Dawn of War 2: Chaos Rising is out. Seriously, this game’s name takes up like two thirds of my Steam games window real estate. And I had to upgrade my video card before I could install it, since my old card didn’t support enough colons.
If you played the original Dawn of War 2, you pretty much know how to play this one. There aren’t any major gameplay changes. Which is okay with me, mind, since Dawn of War 2 was a pretty good time; basically what you have here is a mission pack with meltaguns, and, since the lack of meltaguns was what really held the first game back, well, you’re good to go. For some reason, Relic still hasn’t decoupled the game from the truly awful Games For Windows Live service, but at least they (or Microsoft, or Satan, or somebody) have arranged for it to work properly this time.
The biggest problem with Chaos Rising is that it’s short. I mean, real short. It also doesn’t contain much in the way of side missions — there are twelve main campaign missions, three optional missions, and that’s it. They’re fun, but that’s not a whole lot of content for thirty bucks, even if it did ship with a free copy of Volition’s lousy GTA ripoff, Saints Row 2.
The game’s storyline junk is pretty decent. Entertainingly plotted, at least. The main arc is that there’s a traitor somewhere in your squad, and you need to ferret out who it is. So there’s a bunch of tension and moody music, and you go on missions to gather data and attempt to figure it out. There are just two problems with this. First, there’s a giant ridiculous plot hole involving the traitor doing things that make absolutely no sense at all. Secondly, it’s stupidly, blisteringly obvious the whole time who the traitor is, which kind of sucks a lot of the suspense out of it. But except for those two things, hey!
The game’s a lot harder than the original campaign was, but in a lot of ways I’m not sure it’s harder in a fun way. A lot of the difficulty increase comes from bosses having AOE instant death attacks without any warning, which pretty much just turns the fight into a graveyard zerg. The final boss in particular is annoying like that — he has so much health, and kills so many dudes so quickly that you’ll spend like three fifths of the fight falling back. On the other hand, there’s some new challenge involved via the corruption mechanic, which is pretty fun; certain choices you make can cause your squads to become corrupted by chaos, and they have a sliding track of new traits they pick up as you get more and more corrupt. It’s pretty fun. Usually there will be an easy way to accomplish a mission, but you’ll gain corruption for it; getting through with no corruption is a lot harder, and there will be a still-harder way that awards redemption points. Pretty good design, I’d say.
