Obviously I’m not going to do a full review, that would be a bit silly as this is a beta, athough the curiously named ‘beta’ seemed a little much for something which has clearly passed beta stage. Anyway… lets have a quick look then…

What is Dawn of Ware II?

Well if your pale skinned, not a vampire, and enjoy computing, your most likely to have encountered Warhammer 40,000 at some point, what started as the fantasy world of the future, where humans and aliens kill each other, usually in the most brutal way possible – due to their unhealthy obsession to make every sword, axe or spoon have a chainsaw feature.

What sides (races) are in DOW 2?

• Space Marines
• Orks
• Eldar
• Tyranids (FINALLY!!!)

Ok well this time they’ve included Tyranids, finally, in all the series of the old Dawn of War I series, they never included them, to the disappointment of every Warhammer fan and myself.

What’s New in Dawn of War 2?

Well, now it’s Company of Heroes… IN THE FUTURE!! Which is great, because Company of Heroes is the best strategy game in existence! They’ve updated the engine in Dawn of War, and adopted the brilliant gameplay of COH, which ultimatley did start with the orignal Dawn of War (even if it was basic).

Well in a bit more detail, we can now go into buildings, although in the BETA, they kindly graced us with about 4 buildigns, which had terrible line if sight problems, and so thus most  of time, ok all of the time, I didn’t bother to use them. The line of sight problem, involved my guy’s not being able to shoot over a wall which was far lower than them on the desert map (those who have played will know).

Dawn of War also now uses the Windows Live Games system, which whenever we tried to play, we got messages from people on XBOX live, asking how to get the Beta, and because they are fools, they didn’t know:

• What a PC is
• What Steam is

As a result, they have been removed off my Xbox Live account due to stupidtiy.

Dawn of War 2 Beta Gameplay

The gameplay overall falls into the ‘fun’ categorey, but to me, not everything was as perfect as it could be – but please stop shouting at me me that it’s a Beta, I know, hopefully they will fix these things.

Buildings are no more

Apparently buildings have offended someone at the development studio, because now you have 1 super bulding and thats all, it can withstand pretty much a million nuclear bombs, and has you ages firing at it with you and all your allies’ most powerful units chopping it up – this annoys me. I like multiple buildings, if only it allows strategic army building, but no, you can only build 1 unit at a time now.

I Cant find Genestealers

Now when I have fond flashbacks of being 9 years old, picking my nose, and playing with my Tyranid Genestealers, but I can’t seem to find them, and it makes me upset a little – and leads me to my other unhappy flashback of being bullied by larger children calling me 4 eyes.

Tatical Gameplay

Ok it’s great, now we can line our guy’s up in cover,  and have firefights, whilst we tactically flank them with my Jump-Jetting Chainsaw-Spoon-Wielding Assualt squads, when it comes to strategies, it doesn’t get better than this. Mass unit building is no more, roll on tactical strikes and subdefuge. Look forward to some great moments, and brilliantly epic battles when the full game is relased.

Vehicles are cool

I have noticed that I don’t really need to build them, but their model designs are awesome, so I do anyway. They seem to have a few animations missing, but I’m sure the full game will bring in that unncessary violence, and nasty bone crushing audio. But the truth is, they die pretty easy, and every shot seems to be a ‘rear shot’ according to the game. A few rocket launcher, or equivlent, and any vechicle is history, but in company of heroes, that destroyed vehicle becomes cover, not so far in DOW II.

Multiplayer Issues

Bill and I had a few goes at some ‘comp stomps’, but oftern we were getting NAT errors, I have read its down to firewall issues, however it still seems to happen randomly, for no particually reason, sometimes we can join a game, sometimes we can’t. Hopefully its teething problems and will be sorted soon.

The ingame chat doesn’t seem to work for us, we type, but we can’t see each others text. So we have to use the steam overlay, but if i ALT-TAB out of the game, and go back, the overaly stops working, its annoying.

Conclusion

Can’t wait to see finished product!