Warhammer 40,000: Dawn of War II Impressions - Destructible Terrain, Campaign, and Squaddies

The original Dawn of War was a fast-paced and highly violent real-time strategy game that took place in the ultrafuturistic Warhammer 40,000 universe created by tabletop games studio Games Workshop. It pitted the mighty Space Marines against the savage Orks, the swift Eldar, and the forces of Chaos. Then, it expanded the universe with more playable factions, single-player campaigns, and multiplayer maps in a series of expansion packs that fans continued to explore. Now, developer Relic Entertainment is finally working on a sequel--the very impressive-looking Dawn of War II, which will at once improve on the original game with even more explosive action while also going in a totally different direction.

The original Dawn of War offered real-time strategy gameplay that strayed from the typical formula of "gather resources, construct base, churn out units, overrun your opponent" by streamlining the early game and focusing a bit more on the action of building armies, outfitting units with specific upgrades, and fighting (plus more fighting). Though Dawn of War II will continue to focus less on gathering resources and more on battles, the single-player campaign will shift its focus to covering the adventures of a small squad of individual characters, similar to some of the most popular missions in Relic's highly acclaimed strategy game Company of Heroes. The campaign will give you greater freedom to customize these characters with dozens of different war gear items--weapons, armor, and other items. You'll do so while also learning their names, faces, and, ultimately, coming to care whether or not they live or die because surviving characters will improve over time--along with all those big guns or swords they'll recover from battle--with experience.

In the single-player game, you'll preside over a squad of ambitious Space Marines who find themselves in the middle of the galaxy's worst crisis--an alien invasion sweeping across multiple planets. Each planet will act as a sort of hub for missions, which will come in the form of several distress calls from each one. The idea is to make the campaign more open-ended and less linear, so you'll actually be able to choose which planets you'd like to rescue next then ship your crew planetside, receiving a shortaudio briefing from your commanding officers that sets the scene.

We watched several different demonstration battles between Space Marines and Orks that showed off several of the game's new aspects, including ranged combat, melee combat, and destructible terrain. Each demonstration showed a squadron of Space Marines as they dove into battle against their enemies; first, against a horde of Orks that were easily cut down by ranged fire; then later, overwhelmed by airborne marine squads, with the ability to instantly descend on land-bound enemies, crushing them into a bloody pulp.

Like in Company of Heroes, units will take cover behind the nearest environmental objects that can block incoming fire, but this tactic won't be an easy way out of a sticky situation. Although the original Dawn of War helped establish the idea of tactical cover, smart use of mixed forces can pin down your enemies, as we saw in the second combat demonstration. This demonstration showed our squad of heroes pinned down in a tight, circular area by a mob of Ork gunners while Ork choppa melee units came charging in and hacked the marines to bits until the marines sent in reinforcements in the form of space pods that instantly crushed any Orks beneath them. The pods opened, revealing heavy-duty infantry units, such as the new-and-improved force commander. These commanders can be equipped with heavy-duty items, such as souped-up body armor and mighty two-handed hammers, which deal plenty of damage up close.

In our final demonstration, we watched the dramatic way in which destructible terrain will play a role in battle. There will definitely be combustible elements that appear in the world, such as stray barrels of fuel that go up in huge explosions to take out any nearby units and, even, cover elements that can eventually be cut through with fire or blown up with grenades that count down on an onscreen timer. However, there will also be huge chunks of environments that can be completely destroyed, such as a crucial bridge spanning a chasm into Ork territory, which we saw completely destroyed in spectacular fashion as our Space Marine crew attempted to head into enemy territory. With the bridge destroyed, the vast majority of the squad members immediately plummeted to their deaths while the remaining flyer units took to the air to infiltrate the lair of a mighty Ork war boss unit. This was a huge and especially powerful melee Ork hero unit that absolutely decimated the remaining marines, using several of its own special abilities to send the valiant soldiers tumbling head over heels or simply killing them instantly by impaling them on its blade.

The extremely close encounter finally ended with the arrival of a force commander unit, which was eventually able to gain the upper hand in battle by performing a sync kill on the war boss. Yes, these dramatic death animations will return from the original Dawn of War when certain enemies are dispatched in certain ways. In this case, the brave and desperate force commander leapt onto the Ork's shoulders, sinking his own bladed gauntlet deep into the brute's skull. The force commander, the only surviving unit, prepared to leave the area--perhaps planning to use the downtime to rifle through the spoils of war, including a few powerful war gear weapons that had been hidden on the battlefield and dropped by enemies--when a new swarm of Orks came swarming in from another front. At this point, the force commander called in the help of a superweapon--in this case, an orbital strike that painted the ground nearby then rained down thunderous columns of energy that obliterated the invaders.

There's no question that Dawn of War II's upgraded graphics engine will be able to make the sequel's battles even more dynamic, brutal, and spectacular. The game's added emphasis on destructible terrain carried over from Company of Heroes will also make wreaking havoc on the battlefield even more over-the-top as barriers, bridges, and entire building complexes can be razed to the ground. Additionally, we found the game's role-playing-game-like emphasis on characters to be an intriguing idea--it's quite possible that the act of tweaking, upgrading, and shuffling equipment among different units in between missions could be as compelling as developing characters in a traditional RPG. However, it remains to be seen how this aspect will be treated in multiplayer, which we have not yet seen in action. In any case, Dawn of War II shows a ton of promise, both as an exciting new strategy game and as a bold step in a new direction with the game's RPG-like focus on smaller squads in the single-player game. Stay tuned to GameSpot for more updates on this promising sequel.