StarDestroyer.Net BBS

Despite what the thread title might indicate, I am not going to go parachuting with a gorilla, but rather, I'm thinking of buying Soulstorm.

I rather liked Dark Crusade, and all I'm really looking for is an overall improvement of what Dark Crusade was aiming for. Therefore the review would preferably be written from the perspective of "Given the choice, would I play Dark Crusade over this?"

I realize there are a swarm of bugs to the extent where tyranids might as well be in it, but Relic is currently making a patch which is currently in the "Q&A phase", whatever that means. So I'll reserve judgement in the bugs area for a while.

My reaction was a resounding 'meh whatever.'

The gameplay was fairly similar to Dark Crusade. I found the fact you no longer retain your original buildings when defending more obnoxious than anything else for the simple reason that I'd end up defending the same territory two or three times *each turn.* Since after the first turn of this annoyance I simply blew a lot of resources on garrison troops, defenses turned into "select all 3 squads of infantry and one armor unit, attack enemy base, wait."

Boring.

Enemy headquarters assaults seem quite a bit tougher (in some respects), I actually took fairly serious casualties attacking both the Imperial Guard and Chaos as the Sisters of Battle.

The new flying units are okay. Probably more useful in skirmish games than in the campaign.

I'm not sorry I bought the game, and I wouldn't necessarily prefer to play DC, but I can't say I regret buying the Witcher and playing that instead.

I got DC a few weeks ago and after being impressed with it's style I went and got Soulstorm.

Sadly, this expansion is really poor in adding 'new'. I find the air units to be pretty useless and they arent impressive in the slightest when most ground units can shoot them.
They have the same kind of pathing as ground units by flying around mountains, hills and cliffs which essentially means they are over hyped ground units. You will be lucky if you encounter them at all in the campaing beyond the scripted stronghold encounters where the AI has been MADE to use them. I find that very unimaginative addition and would have been happier with something more interesting than a single unit for every side.

The two new factions are fairly useless from my perspective and serve no purpose really. The Sisters of Battle mimic the Space Marines too much to be impressive and the Dark Eldar are uninspiring. The only aspect they seem to have brought in was the 'Souls' and 'Faith' super powers which I found to be equally useless.

The only saving grace to this game is the much larger campaign you get to play with which makes the conflict seem more epic. The Stronghold battles are a good highlight and struck me as being a lot harder as well. The only real gripe I have with the campaign is the lack of persistant bases which gets REALLY annoying if you have to defend the same territory again and again.
I noticed this most especially as the Necron when the Eldar were attacking the same goddamn territory after every turn to the point it became a simple case of investing defense into that point while conquering other areas.

The planets are actually rather small with two races on each planet meaning you will be spending at least 2 - 3 battles fighting the same race per planet. Taking more areas gets you more honour guard units which, can really help in stronghold battles, so you will either have to choose to blockade strongholds and suffer attacks on the same territory from the AI or take on the strongholds with limited forces. In a lot of these stronghold assualts you will be getting harrassed early so having honour guard units can help vastly.

Really there is only two reasons to get this game:

1) If you are really into the DoW mod community.

2) You want into the invitation only Beta for DoW II.

Dawn of War II website wrote:In addition, THQ is pleased to announce that gamers purchasing copies of the recently released Warhammer® 40,000™: Dawn of War® - Soulstorm™ will be able to participate in an invitation-only multiplayer beta program for Warhammer 40,000: Dawn of War II set to take place at a future date.