The latest Dawn of War expansion shows flashes of genius but, like its new air units, never manages to take off.
Warhammer 40,000: Dawn of War was a revelation when first released back in 2004. It helped pioneer a new style of RTS in which base-building was minimized in favor of fast action, squad maneuvering and territorial control. Since then, the game has spawned two successful expansion packs (Winter Assault and Dark Crusade) and has served as inspiration for Relic's Company of Heroes, our 2006 PC Game of the Year. After a run like that, it might be expected that Dawn of War would fade into a well-deserved retirement. Such was not to be, however. Relic and THQ decided to trot the old warhorse out for one last race under the development of just-closed Iron Lore. The resulting expansion shows flashes of the old brilliance but ends up ultimately disappointing.
The strongest aspect of Soulstorm comes in the two new races Iron Lore added to the mix. The first, the Dark Eldar, are the Chaos-corrupted brethren of the original game's Eldar, who buttress their fragile units with quick movement and an assortment of spell powers designed to break enemy morale and reduce resistances. The other, the Sisters of Battle, are the distaff arm of the Imperium's Inquisition who use Space Marine-level equipment with Faith-created miracles to bring the Emperor's justice (punctuated by laser fire and flamethrowers) to the guilty and innocent alike.
Each of the new races has been crafted with an eye toward remaining visually true to the original Games Workshop tabletop game lore and translating those characteristics into a workable and enjoyable strategic doctrine. In both cases the Iron Lore team was spectacularly successful. Both look great, are fun to play with and also offer a completely different "feel" than any of the other races in the game. The Dark Eldar, for example, are beautifully rendered in ways that immediately suggest their moral decadence, all spiky armor, gothic curlicues and slave girls on floating transports. The Sisters, on the other hand, bring new meaning to the term "religious fundamentalist," with units that sport glowing halos, an end-game super unit that looks very much like an angel, and a melee walker that's nothing less than a martyr crucified on one of the loaders from "Aliens."
It isn't until one takes the new units into battle, though, that what the Iron Lore team has crafted can truly be appreciated. The Dark Eldar re-define the term "glass cannon" by being more fragile than even the Eldar but packing a pretty spectacular punch. Their strategic conceit is a special "soul essence" that they can harvest from fresh corpses on the battlefield. This third resource is then used to fuel special "soul powers" that drop a variety of effects onto the battlefield. The result is a very fast-moving army that can't really hack a stand-up fight but in the hands of a good micro-manager will carve up pretty much anything they're set against.
The Sisters of Battle, on the other hand, play a bit more like the Necron from Dark Crusade than the ostensibly allied Space Marines. They start slow and weak but with a decent supply of their special "Faith" resource and attached commander units they will roll over everything. Once players figure out all sorts of devious combinations of commanders and troopers, the Sisters start getting really fun. In our games, for example, the Confessor commander seemed to work quite well with the heavy melee Sisters Repentia units. His stun powers plus chainsaw-sword melee made for all sort of glorious mayhem on the battlefield.
Unfortunately, once the glow of playing with Soulstorm's new races fades, the unfinished seams begin to show. The new air units for each race feel like a test run for a feature to be completed later. They're graphically ugly (though the Ork Fighta Bomma does sport a cool smoke trail) and way out of proportion with the rest of the buildings and units. They don't "fly" so much as sort of hover in place, and the game's tight camera combined with inconsistent path-finding makes them difficult to control. The worst thing, however, is that they really don't bring much to the party strategically that isn't already provided by another unit. The best that can be said for them is that they're fairly cheap to invest in for the damage they do, but the time investment in player attention they require combined with how fragile they are make them very low on any decent player's priority list.
The game's single-player campaign is an expanded version of Dark Crusade's RISK-style turn-based provincial map. It wasn't particularly innovative in Dark Crusade, nor is it here, but "more of the same" is okay as far as it goes. The problem is that expanding the map from one planet to four is merely a cosmetic alteration that doesn't make the campaign more interesting strategically and actually makes army movement harder to follow. Province maps are fairly generic and ultimately dull (though each race's citadel mission is a delightful exception). There's also no storyline to speak of and this robs the game of one of its major attractions, the personality of the Warhammer 40,000 universe.
Even multiplayer, the place where Soulstorm should really shine, is marred by at least two game-killing bugs. First, there's an exploit with the Sisters of Battle that gives Sisters players essentially unlimited resources. The other is that Dark Eldar players may suddenly find that they've lost control of their soul powers, due to a bug that allows observers in multiplayer matches to utilize their abilities. The result has been predictably devastating for the two new races in multiplayer: trying to automatch while using the new races will often result in a disconnect when players see someone they don't know using one of them. THQ and Relic have acknowledged the bugs and are working on fixes, but it seems the damage has already been done; it's hard to see how bugs of this magnitude could make it into a finished product for an established franchise.
Soulstorm is an unfortunate way for an incredible game to sail into the sunset. It shows flashes of its former brilliance through two new races that are full of personality and are a lot of fun to play with, but falls flat through a lackluster single-player campaign, mediocre (at best) new air units and two devastating bugs that will kill the multiplayer scene until Relic issues an eventual patch. The Sisters and the Dark Eldar could really reinvigorate multiplayer games, but until a patch is released the Dawn of War faithful deserved a better expansion.
©2008-03-11, IGN Entertainment, Inc. All Rights Reserved