0/0/31
Warhammer 40k: Dawn of War 2: Retribution is out. It’s brilliant. You should get it.
The new faction, to absolutely nobody’s surprise, is Imperial Guard, thereby rounding out the "major" factions that everybody plays. Presumably further expansions will add the minor factions. Retribution also adds vehicles and deployable squads, and, most importantly, campaigns for the five factions that aren’t Space Marines. So there’s a good deal of play here if you want to run all six angles. To date all I’ve played is Imperial Guard, so that’s all I’ll discuss here.
Plot-wise, the game is far stronger than either the original Dawn of War 2 or Chaos Rising, with mysteries that are actually mysterious (though not, of course, the main "whodunit" the characters don’t understand — which answer is clear to you if you played Chaos Rising). There’s one dialogue scene in a later mission that is absolutely fantastic. The new characters are excellent, as well, with Lord General Castor the star of the show — he’s a ridiculous badass, like some type of nineteenth-century Great White Hunter who somehow found himself in the grim darkness of the far future and figured he may as well make the best of it. Seriously, he even has an outrageous walrus mustache. He’s great.
Game-wise, the game is actually quite different from Dawn of War 2, moving back somewhat toward traditional RTS (Dawn of War 2 being, after all, almost as much an action RPG as it was a proper RTS). The level band and stat distribution has been flattened; there are now only ten character levels, with one point to spend per level (though every point spent unlocks a new trait). Gear is slightly simpler; in the Imperial Guard mission, your general and sergeant will always be ranged attackers, while your inquisitor and commissar will always be melee. However, instead of each of your heroes coming with a squad, you now get just the heroes alone (except the Lord General, anyway, who has a retinue) and can recruit squads at captured… things. What are those things, anyhow? They’re like trapezoidal rocks. You have to accumulate Requisition and Power to build squads, and those you get by capturing victory points, blowing up resource crates, and also at other times that I haven’t quite isolated yet. I was a bit worried about the way this would play at first, but it seems fine — if anything, it appears to reduce the dependency on graveyard-zerging that higher-level Dawn of War 2 (and especially Chaos Rising) was prone to.
Consumables are gone — every ability, whether trait or accessory, is now limited by cooldown and energy. Also gone is automatic respawning of troops at bases; now, to restock your squads, you need to spend requisition (or use an ability that reinforces automatically). This change I’m not thrilled with, nor am I thrilled with the fact that the HUD can apparently display only nine squads at a time, when it’s rather simple for Imperial Guard (or Tyranids, I’d expect) to go over that limit and be stuck with squads you can’t easily select or watch.
New to the single-player game is the concept of "global abilities," which aren’t tied to any character or squad. These are things like deploying turrets, calling for air strikes, and building mobile fortifications. These abilities consume a faction-specific resource that you earn in a faction-specific way; for Imperial Guard, you gain "command" whenever you kill something, or whenever a guardsman gets killed.
So anyway, you should get this game. It’s very good. It doesn’t require Dawn of War 2 to play, but it’s still priced like an expansion, for some weird reason. Still and all, if you haven’t played Dawn of War 2, you really should anyhow, since it’s pretty great. Oh, also? Retribution’s finally been decoupled from the horrible Games for Windows Live, and now just uses goddamn Steam for its nebulous community features. Praise the Emperor.