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Warhammer 40,000: Dawn of War II review
By jykwan | March 27, 2009
Dawn of War 2. The sequel to the warhammer strategy game series. I have never played the first dawn of war, but have played Dark Crusade and SoulStorm however. Seems that dawn of war was a different gameplay from the usual 40K series. It follows the Company of Heroes style where you dont get to build anything but just capture locations and Kill the boss, probably due to Essence Game Engine 2.0.
mission deployment screen
The variety is very limited in Dawn of War 2. There are about 9 maps common maps in the whole game and if i recall about 2-4 special assignment related maps, where its only playable due to special mission assignments. The objective is always the same, go in and kill the boss, you could however take the time to hunt down all the enemies in the maps and capture strategic locations, which would help you boost some power ups. Overall its a fast pace game, every map took me about 5 – 20 mins at most, i believe you could actually finish the game in a day (if you rush).
your units for the entire game
There are 6 characters you would get in the game, and you only get to play as the space marine factions. You start with the Force Commander (you the commander) and Tarkus (terminator squad), then you would get Cyrus (scout) and Avitus (another Terminator squad using chainguns), soon after you will come across Thadeous (Jump Jet Assault squad) and later Davian thule(Dreadnaught). You’ll play with the first 4 units for quite a while before getting the Dreadnaught. You get the Dreadnaught when finishing one of the tyranid main missions, something about getting the original sample of the hive.
The Force commander, and collected war gear
“i’ve come to destroy you”, woo hoo, the dreadnaught
Each Squad is good with their own abilities, and during the game you get war gears which would allow you to upgrade your character. Each character has a max level of 20 and the amount of points does not allow you to cover all their attributes, so choose wisely when giving each character points.
Avitus in terminator armor, carrying big chaingun and missle backpack ranged damage 1800++
Near the end you will come across something called terminator Armor, well its one of the only wargear that doesn’t get dropped so far i’ve played but comes as a reward for completing3 main missions only, so you only get 3 terminator armors. Personally i don’t find the terminator armor that grand as the normal armor has better performance and you would also loose alot of the nice abilities when you equip the terminator armor. However you get to equip terminator weapons which obviously deals a hell lot more damage which makes up for the lack of armor i guess.
Anyway, my final conclusion is, if you’re looking for a fast pace and alot of strategy thinking because you only have very limited units (you do get reinforcements), this is the game for you.
Requirements: Windows XP SP2 / Windows Vista SP1
Minimum: P4 3.2 or any Intel Core 2 Duo, 1GB RAM (XP) 1.5GB RAM (Vista), 5.5 GB HDD space, 128 MB Nvidia GeForce 6600 GT / 128 MB ATI X1600, or equivalent (must have Shader Model 3.0 to run the game), Soundcard 100% DirectX 9.0c compliant card
Recommended: AMD Athlon 64×2 4400+ or any Intel Core 2 Duo, 2.0 GB (Windows XP and Vista), 256 MB Nvidia GeForce 7800 GT / 256 MB ATI X1900, or equivalent, 100% DirectX 9.0c compliant card sound hardware
*the left green bar you see on my pictures is due to my geforce performance monitor which i do not know how to turn it off, its not a game bug or anything.
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