Recent reviews by Thomas

The campaign itself is a cinematic and immersive experience. Most realistic and immersive 40k thing i've seen so far, apart from maybe the Astartes fan made film (please get that guy a team to work under him!).

Anyway the operations are a bit repetitive when played with strangers, multipplayer is also fun. But really just for the campaign this game is worth it.

Its 6 bucks and a lot of fun. Worth it for those of us who like to messa round with plenty of items, classes and skilltrees

The best Dawn of War campaign IMO. Dawn of war 1 was the best overall game. But dawn of war II (not the expansions) has a great campaign with amazing loot options and a fun skill tree. In DOW: Retribution and the Chaos version the campaigns are a lot less fun unfortunately. But the campaign in this basegame is an amazing experience and a must-play for 40k fans

Very enjoyable. Sort of relaxing. Every now and then I come back to this game. The only thing I'd like is a definite ending/mission to complete (there is currently achievements/milestones you can unlock, but no victory condition). Thats perrsonal preference though, some others might really like that

very entertaining

I've already played this game on other platforms. Multiple time. Probably the best ancient city building game out there. I absolutely love it, and its not just the nostalgia talking.

It has:
- A nice amount of depth
- Plenty of stuff to learn
- Events like fire, collapse, disease, god blessings/wraths
- You can trade
- You have to make your own furniture, whine, pottery and food production
- It has an almost unique system of houses automatically upgrading once the conditions are met, so careful planning is required
- It has some light army type combat

The graphics are outdated, but I still dont mind spending hours on it. Especially with the Augustus mod. This game is as close to a 10/10 as I will ever rate a game.

One of the best RTS games of all time. Graphics not the best, but the gameplay is amazing. Way better than Supreme Commander 2, which looks better but scaled down a lot on size and functionality

The smoothest RTS I've ever played. Too bad it never got too big. But it's the first RTS in which you could drive units backwards (front armor is stronger) and it had so many cool units you knew from Tiberian Sun.

In my opinion it's as good as Starcraft II, even though there are some obvious differences. 9/10 would reccomend

First the pros;
- more factions, yay!
- some mechanics have improved a bit
- in general the gameplay stayed fairly true to armada 1
- pretty skybox
- Tyranids! They have unique mechanics too

The cons;
- they removed ship customization (?? wutttt)
- each 'subfaction' is just a skin, while I think most of us expected differences in abilities or ships or something
- you kill almost no ships with regular damage. Almost all ship kills are obtained with skills
- eldar are still overpowered (when are they not)
- balacing issues (carriers are overpowered)
- necron ships nearly unkillable
- you can no longer spam escorts, instead per 'big ship' you can choose like 3 escort ships, so no more wacky fun builds (its a balancing thing perhaps, which is normally a good thing)
- no graphical upgrade compared to gothic armada 1, and the shaders look a bit wacky
- only minor differences between factions in terms of abilities

I have never before refunded a game but with this game I wanted to. No ship customzation is a dealbreaker for me. Too bad I didn't know about the 'play less than 2 hours rule' otherwise I would have refunded for sure. I dont think I will be playing this game often, and the games I do have I usually put 100+ hours in at least. Gothic armada 1 is way better.

It's a shame, especially after the hype

- - - - - RELIC PAY ATTENTION - - - - -

All in all this is a decent game. The main reason why it is considered bad is because the regular units have too many flaws. Lets take tactical marines for example:

1: When you lose 1 marine in the squad you have to walk that squad all the way back to base just to get 1 unit back. In DOW1 you could reinforce in the field, in DOW2 you could at least rush back to base by pressing the retreat button (X). Here you don't have that luxery, which means you have to babysit one squad all the way back to base. It's wasting a lot of time and makes the game a ♥♥♥♥ tonne less dynamic. Being able to reinforce at listening posts by default or having a vehicle at which you can replenish squads would already fix this.

2: There is absolutely no reason to keep your squads alive. Sure they cost slightly less to reinforce, but because of the escalation and the required micro/time to reinforce your squads it's usually just as easy to let them die and just buy a new squad. The Elites and AOE attacks are too strong, so your regular line units feel completely useless and lack identity. This is also easily fixed; add squad leveveling and increase the health of the squad by 25% for each level. This is a great way to motivate people to keep their squads alive. Being able to add a sargeant or buy a grenade pack for individual squads will also increase our love for individual squads.

3: They look less cool because you have no camera control. You can't zoom in, you can't really 'inspect' your troops and admire their looks. This all adds up to the regular line units feeling insignificant and you not giving a ♥♥♥♥ about a few squads.

4: Most Elites are too strong (Ironmaw is fine though). They already have good crowd control and everything but yet they also still deal a ♥♥♥♥ tonne of damage. The amount of health is good, the damage just needs to be lower depending on the elite. Gabriel Angelos needs 25% less damage at least for example or less crowd control, because right now in the early game he can solo whole armies.

5: Escalation phases. The idea is good, but it scales way too fast. At some point you just keep spamming units and keep sending them into the meatgrinder. The amount of extra resources the escalation phases give you need to be halved.


The rest of the game is fine really. There are a lot of things that could be slightly better(lascannons dont work like lascannons for example, no executions, gabriel doing backflips in terminator armour, the MOBA aspect with the inhibitors/turret/nexus being the default game mode etc), but fixing the individual units would already help an insane amount. I would even dare to say that if all the above points are fixed that I would rate this game 8/10 instead of the 6/10 I currently give it. I would actually buy the game even though I never buy games (I have less than 50 on steam).

PS. I also played the beta a lot, so ignore the 1.2 hours.