Two words that aren’t often associated with real-time strategy games: instant gratification. Yet Dawn of War II manages to turn the RTS formula on its ear, putting you in the thick of battle almost 100 percent of the time and ensuring that your moment-to-moment decisions involve picking which alien ass to kick with your giant red armored boot.
Before we even talk about the game, let’s talk about that price. This is a huge offering for the $30 sticker on the box. Retribution is a standalone expansion, so you don’t need to have any other version to get it working. Your 30 notes will do the trick. And for that you get all of the multiplayer online goodness you’d expect from previous titles. It includes The Last Stand mode, which pits three players in a co-op mission to survive as long as they can against increasingly difficult waves of enemies. And – the main new feature – it comes with six individual campaigns, one for each of the game’s races, each lasting around eight hours. There’s a lot of meat on those bones...
Don’t be surprised if playing Warhammer 40,000: Space Marine causes a huge wave of Déjà vu to wash over you. Surly, grunting muscle men in huge armor with chainsaw melee attacks and big guns run down narrow corridors fighting off an invading alien horde in a 3rd person perspective. The sad reality of it is that Games Workshop’s Warhammer 40K invented many of the cornerstones that have come to define these games, but they’ve shown up rather late to the party. Even so, what it lacks in originality, Space Marine makes up for in dumb fun, tight gameplay and overall competence.
Dwarves are rubbish. Gold, beards, beer, shortness, regional accents – we’ve seen it a thousand times. Why play a dwarf when you could play a goblin with a pet squig or a Chaos marauder who can turn his arm into a fleshy club? So I’m surprised to find myself playing as a dwarf. And loving it.
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