Padchuckr

Or what happens when THQ theive the campaign system from Battle For Middle Earth 2 and bolt it onto a classic RTS, then still somehow get it wrong.

So Dawn Of War, a revolutionary RTS in its day. Fast paced, designed to encourage and nurture aggressive play, great graphics, brilliant interface, a winner through and through. What could adding new stuff to the game really do to hurt it? Well first we had the Winter Assault addon and the Imperial Guard. This didn’t add much of any particular significance, unless you’re a big fan of the Imperial Guard, but it did show that the developers were willing to add to the game in small, affordable bites. This boded well, particularly given the diversity of the Warhammer 40k universe, there might well have been a huge and vibrant selection of gun toting fascists, demons and monsters to pick the army from. All good so far.

All that bright future however just took a kick in the balls from Dark Crusade, the latest addon. What’s exactly wrong with it? Where to begin…

Firstly the new campaign mode is, frankly, weak. The Dark Crusade campaign is lifted almost entirely from Battle For Middle Earth 2’s War Of The Ring mode. However gone is the flexibility of BFME2’s non linear game setup, replaced by a fixed campaign in which you have to defeat all the other races. The other races attack you and they attack each other, but they won’t wipe each other out, and it’s pretty clear that in terms of the game objective of conquering the whole planet you are the only one really playing, with the other races just as fodder rather than dynamic opponents. Don’t get me wrong, the enemy in BFME2 were not exactly Napoleonic in their strategic thinking, but at least they were aggressive.

The next problem with the campaign is that, unlike BFME2, the base structures you build on a map stay put there. This sounds like a great idea, and really there is no reason for base structures not to remain in place on a map. But here’s the thing; if you fight on a map and win after rigging it up by capturing all the objective points, fortifying them and getting all your power stations and such built then there’s no way in hell anybody is going to be able to take that map off you. The flipside of this is that if you attack a map against the computer and lose you’ve got no chance at all of shifting the bastards, because they’ll be dug in deeper than Alabama ticks and while you’re still building your initial base structures they’ll be throwing tanks at you.

That said the campaign is fun, and far more engaging than the ordinary campaign mode for such games that basically consists of a line of missions. It’s just it needed a lot more work.

So we get to the next problem, and this, for me, is the biggest and most annoying; the new races.

First we have the Necrons. These are the Warhammer 40k take on the undead. I’m not sure what their backstory is but I’ve heard folks who are steeped in Warhammer 40k lore bemoaning how crappy and tacked on this race is to the history of the game universe. I don’t care enough to find out where these misgivings come from, but the more pressing problem is how fucking tedious they are to fight against. The Necrons have to be about the most poorly conceived race ever to make it onto a computer game. They are complete toss. The units consist of skeleton looking robots, almost lifted completely from The Terminator T-800s in the future battle scenes, and some Egyptian themed other units, mostly scarabs and such. Apart from looking totally retarded this half baked legion of doom is absolutely impossible to get a decent fight out of. While the traditional races fight in a conventional manner the Necrons fight using an array of cheesy special abilities, like the ability to stand up and fight on once killed or to render large numbers of units invisible, or pull troops out of the ground and so on. It makes for a lot of micro management and irritation, and the bottom line is that because their infantry and vehicles are so steeped in these special abilities you can’t get any sort of a battle going with them at all before some stupid looking skull headed nonce pulls some magic turd out of his arse that renders the fight lame and you 50% less inclined to play on.

The next stupid race to appear are the Tau. I like anime, I really do, but did I want anime to invade Warhammer 40k? No. Anime is not Warhammer, Warhammer is not Anime, the two did not have to be merged. The Tau are basically the bastard children of the Space Marines and an episode of Gundam Wing. This need not be the end of the world, but sadly it is. These guys just like their stablemates in the Dark Crusade the Necrons, are also complete arseholes to fight against. Why? Because they suck is why. Lame tanks, lame infantry, loads of twatty invisible troops and a bunch of allied races who consist of pointless idiots with spears who occassional ride on reptillian gorillas, and a bunch of flying twats who could not be more identical to the insectoid gimps from Star Wars Attack of the Clones if they tried.

I don’t hate Games Workshop and I certainly don’t hate THQ, both corporations have given me many hours of diversion from lifes little miseries, but I do hate that they have produced between them something with so much promise and cherry picked the worst elements of the game universe to add to it. Dawn Of War could have carried on for a long time, the graphics and sound are still good, the system and gameplay are easily as entertaining as Warcraft 3, and there’s every chance that with the addition of more races and the occassional tweaks the game could have lasted a very long time with an expansive catalogue of races. But why bring in such turkeys to this expansion? There’s no reason to do so. Warhammer has a reasonably good universe backing it up and so many better things could have come out of it rather than the Skullymen and the Animetards.

With Company of Heroes bound to kick around as a franchise for ages and Supreme Commander on the way it looks like Dark Crusade might not be a progression of a great franchise but just a full stop.