Two new races and a new campaign may seem gold at first, but somehow it all comes out to be merely bronze.
Unfortunately, the pimply grots somehow messed this dere thing up. Somehow.
The two new races are interesting enough. The Sisters of Battle use a faith-based system and a lot of flame-based weaponry, and are like a strange combination between Space Marines and Imperial Guard in both look and feel. The Dark Eldar are the new rushers of the bunch with an emphasis on quick production of fast units, and have soul resource units that power abilities you can activate at any time. Both races seem to be balanced well, and offer even more choices to the game. So far so good. As far as new units are concerned across the old races, though, all you end up with are flying units, which seem pretty much just tacked on at best. At worse, though, you have the Necrons which basically only had the support scarabs of the Tomb Spyders modified to be air units. Their function now is reduced to anti-air and scouting, which you really can only justify in a pinch considering how much health it shaves off your already-fragile tomb spyders to create them. Guess the Necrons are afraid of heights. At least they are granted an alternative to the Nightbringer, the Deceiver, which can be used to temporarily turn units to your side or create an illusion of an Activated Monolith.
Unfortunately, the single-player game itself really could have used a few extra coats of paint. True, there are four planets containing nine races, but only so much of each planet is divided into territories, which basically means you have only just a little more provinces to control than you did in Dark Crusade. Not much of a deal breaker, but this is the first in a line of disappointments.
Note that provinces no longer remember the base layout that you had at the end of each skirmish, which basically means that, apart from the basic structures you add in through Reinforcement that fills out your starting tier, you end up having to build up your latter tech tiers repeatedly on the same province, making the gameplay needlessly repetitive and tedious. After a while, you start asking yourself, "Why am I building up my base? Most of it is just going to mysteriously vanish anyway."
Gone also are the periodic special missions scattered across the provinces that added a bit of variety to Dark Crusade. You can only get power-ups by defeating enemy strongholds, aside from a couple token panels that give meager starting resource bonuses. The webgate panels, which allow you to move from planet to planet, all follow a Take and Hold mission plan, which is all right the first couple times you do it, but becomes ho-hum quickly.
That leaves the enemy stronghold missions to break the tedium. The enemy stronghold missions can range from laughably easy (Dark Eldar) to frustratingly hard (Imperial Guard). The rewards themselves also range from practically useless (Necrons, Orks) to must-haves (Sisters of Battle, Space Marines). However, many of them follow the same conventions: Several bases around the map specialize in creating one type of unit, these bases gradually being phased into play, and your commander bellows for you to eliminate them as you gradually work up to the main base. Occasionally thrown in are convoys or points that need to be destroyed or taken to prevent the enemy from dispatching a large force of units and/or the enemy super-unit to give you a world of hurt, and some sides utilize a giant cannon of sorts that can wreak havoc on your armies. Finally, there are the occasional random unit drops called in that have the habit of targeting weak spots on your base. Most bases are simply a combination of these elements thrown together. The Imperial Guard stronghold has all of these clichés, making the assault on their base a juggling act of catastrophic proportions.
Of course, even these issues could be mitigated if the journey is accompanied by an awesome storyline. Unfortunately, they have bungled this, too. In Dark Crusade, when you assaulted the enemy stronghold, the two sides would exchange unique banter that established that the enemy knew who they were fighting. In Soulstorm, these lines are cut out, making the entire campaign experience storywise feeling a bit generic, with only narratives occurring when you finish the stronghold missions. In addition, there are some rather bizarre story elements as well, not the least of which the continuity gaffe that allows a Necron Lord to speak. For a taste of the most bizarre of these, beat the Sisters of Battle stronghold as the Orks.
Finally, there also seems to be a nasty set of bugs with the game at the time of this review that have yet to be corrected, not the least of which a bug that allows the Sisters of Battle in multiplayer to have free requisition, essentially banning them from any fair competition. A few of the aforementioned strongholds in the game are made considerably easier because the game does not accommodate for one doing things "out of order". For instance, the Imperial Guards don't realize you have destroyed the stronghold's huge cannon until the point where they were scripted to start firing it. The Dark Eldar base has an exploit that I won't mention here that lets one with a decent honor guard finish the scenario with extremely minimal resistance providing you skip some of the objectives they expect you to do. A patch is supposedly in the works, but it has been a long time in coming, which almost makes me think they are rebuilding the game almost from the ground up.
In short, the only thing that keeps this game afloat is the tried and true Dawn of War gameplay and the two new races that manage to freshen things up a bit. It just saddens me how much better the game could have been with a bit of extra time and effort. Ah well. So when is the sequel coming out?