Warhammer 40,000: Dawn of War - Soulstorm (PC)

It's still Dawn of War, but Soulstorm is massively overpriced and a very tough sell unless you just have to play with the two new factions.
3/14/2008 12:00 AM | 0 Comments | Page 2 of 2

The big problem is that online play isn't much better. Connecting to the servers (via GameSpy) is a nightmare, sometimes taking up to an hour to get into a game. Players will randomly get booted from a session or simply can't join all together. Multiplayer is still a blast, when it works, as Dawn of War's gameplay is absolutely perfect for this style of play, but as of right now the online portion is spotty at best.

The game's offline campaign is almost exactly like the Risk-style campaign used in the earlier expansion, Dark Crusade. This time you have to conquer multiple moons instead of one large planet, but this doesn't do much, other than make it more difficult to move your armies around, and make the smaller maps look cluttered and hard to decipher. The campaign screams for a more focused, concise design. Even a linear, story-driven campaign or a branching campaign -- something like the original Panzer General, would work better than this. The only interesting missions in the campaign are when you attack a race's stronghold. The other battles are basically skirmishes, where a quick rush usually wins the day. Also, for a 40K fan of 20 years, it's hard to get past the idea of the Space Marines, Sisters of Battle and the Imperial Guard fighting one another in this "battle royale" campaign design, and the reason presented in the backstory doesn't make a whole lot of sense with regard to why these factions would start slaughtering each other when Chaos, Necrons, Dark Eldar and Orks are on the loose.

Dawn of War was, and still is, a fantastic real-time strategy game, but Soulstorm isn't a very good expansion. There's an overall lack of polish, including graphical bugs that show multi-melta cannon blasts shooting in the wrong direction, and several basic spelling errors in the campaign's limited cut scenes. It comes off as a rushed, incomplete product and is about $20 overpriced. Rumors are rampant that Relic is working on a true Dawn of War sequel -- and let's hope so, because the original has been squeezed for all it's worth.

This review was based on a retail copy of the game purchased by Crispy Gamer.