Dawn of War II, post-play

I finished Warhammer 40,000: Dawn of War II a few days ago. Unfortunately, the game's name was not the biggest design failure. The second half of DoW2 (as I'll refer to it from now, as I'm into the whole brevity thing) suffers terribly. In the first chunk of the game, the fun lies in experimenting with new squad types (there are 6, you start with 2, and you can only field 4 on any given mission), active abilities (squads can gain these as they level), and gear (which you acquire in missions). The fun is in building a balanced fireteam for each mission with the best gear you can cobble together and active abilities that complement their role.


Unfortunately, by halfway through the game, the design team ran out of ideas. You've got all the useful active abilities (you can gain a few more, at a slower rate than before, but they're mostly useless once you've snagged the ones that define a squad's role). You have all the squads they'll give you. You've found the equipment with the active abilities that are necessary, and you just put the equipment with the biggest numbers in the other slots.

Squad outfitting. Notice how only 2 of the 4 upgrade tracks (bottom) are useful.

In short, you fall into the rut of efficiency. The last half of the game is spent doing exactly the same thing, over and over again. You choose 4 squads to focus on and ignore 2; the ignored 2 fall behind in leveling and, over time, you can't use the 2 you ignored without them being one-shot by enemies. There's no incentive to swap out squads. All missions use exactly 4 squads. They all become variants of 'drop here, clear out enemies, kill this boss with 1,500 times as many hitpoints as your walking tank.'

The first half had some real promise, but they failed to keep the game interesting by letting the player get complacent. Atom Zombie Smashers (which shares many mechanics) addresses this by rotating the squads you can use and alternating missions slightly.

This game is DoW2's campaign. But better.

DoW2 had some other issues (bossfights were horrible, all enemies could be beaten with exactly the same tactics, etc.), but incentivizing players to do the same thing over and over was the biggest core problem with the campaign.