Warty Goblin reviews Dark Crusade

Hey, its Warty Goblin, again with another one of his quality reviews.  Enjoy as a thanksgiving gift.  Now if you excuse me, i have to go steal food from native americans 

The Gaming Goblin talks Warhammer 40,000: Dawn of War: Dark Crusade.

 

            This week I’m going to continue to review games that came out years ago and normal people long ago removed from their hard drives by discussing Warhammer 40,000: Dawn of War: Dark Crusade, hereinafter referred to simply as Dark Crusade, or possibly Dawn of War.

            First I should give a bit of background. Dark Crusade, released way back in October of aught six, is the second expansion pack for the original Dawn of War, which came out in the far distant past of 2004, back when the ancestors of today’s games hunted mammoths across the glaciers, and was set in Games Workshop’s exceptionally grim and dark futuristic space fantasy  Warhammer 40,000. Dark Crusade lacks the campaigns of the original and the first expansion pack, Winter Assault, but has the five races available in the previous two games, and even adds some new units to each of them, as well as introducing two entirely new races. It is also almost entirely stand-alone, which is to say you do not need the original game or the first expansion to play it, and in single player you even get access to all the races in the non-linear campaign and skirmish. For multiplayer you do need the previous games to use the races that debuted with them, which means that with only Dark Crusade you only have access to the two new races, the Tau and the Necrons, but other than that, it’s all there.

Dark Crusade is, as RTSs go, rather action oriented. It simplifies base building, but leaves the essence of the idea still intact. Units are still made from buildings, and destroying your enemy’s HQ is still a victory condition. Defenses are minimal, with most factions getting turrets and mines, but no walls or garrisonable buildings. The economy is also simplified, there’s no management of peasants hauling different resources, just Requisition which comes from fixed strategic points on the map that need to be captured by infantry, and Power, which is produced by generators. This forces me to be aggressive, since the only way to get Requisition, the resource used for pretty much everything is to go and get it, which means taking points. After the first ten minutes or so this means fighting for them, so pretty much the only way to gain a meaningful economic advantage over an enemy is to outfight them. Needless to say this places a lot of emphasis on having your peons go out and brutally murder lots of people, as opposed to say balancing their checkbooks.

            Since I like complicated economies and have a truly disturbing attraction to defensive fighting, it’s a damn good thing that Dark Crusade has good combat. Really good combat.  Combat that, in some visceral way, makes sense to a degree that at the time I had seldom seen in an RTS, and is actually enjoyable to watch and manage. Infantry comes in squads, many of which can be upgraded with heavy weapons, or have their morale broken, and all of which can be reinforced in the field for a cost. Reinforcement is really easy, just click the little reinforcement button , cough up some resources, and after some sort of build time, a new soldier appears. Squads start out under their maximum size, and reinforcing a squad is nearly always cheaper than just letting the old one be killed off and then building a new one, which means keeping a squad, as opposed to an individual soldier, alive is key.  Morale is also fairly simple. Unlike individual squad member who each have their own health bar, morale is sort of a health bar for the whole squad, and all attacks do regular damage as well as morale damage, with some, like flamethrowers, doing much more morale damage. Once the morale bar hits zero, the squad routes, which means they take more damage, do less damage and move faster, encouraging a tactical retreat. Morale is just one of the ways in which squads act as discrete units, they also do so in combat. If one squad member is in melee combat, all of them are in melee combat, if one is shooting, all of them are shooting.

This brings me to one of the key points in the game; the melee and ranged combat system. Nearly all infantry have both melee and ranged attacks, which can differ widely in terms of damage. Thus a ranged specialist squad of Tau Fire Warriors are brilliant at shooting things, but terrible at hitting things up close and personal, not because they have low health or any of the usual genre methods of making units suffer in one area but excel in another, but because they simply do less damage, whereas melee specialists like Khorne Berzerkers do pathetic ranged damage but are engines of destruction in melee. Units can’t make ranged attacks when they are being attacked in melee, they have to retaliate all up close and personal. This immediately creates a very intuitive relationship between units; keep my shooty guys away from the enemy stabby guys, and try to hit the enemy shooty guys with my stabby ones.

             There are also vehicles. The vehicles are honestly not as well done as the infantry, there’s no facing, no differing values for rear and side armor, no morale and reinforcement. On the other hand the tanks often have multiple weapons and spew death from sponson guns, hull guns and the main cannon all at once, often tracking different targets, which is a sight to see, and take little damage from small arms. Few things irritate me more than having to retreat a tank because of a guy with a machine gun.

An agreeably large and durable tank

            That brings me to the look of combat. A lot of RTS games have combat wherein two guys standing next to each other making the same vaguely aggressive gesture at each other over and over like they are thinking about fighting, or having a break dancing contest.  Eventually somebody’s health bar will run out, and he’ll keel over, the victim of over-exertion, or perhaps realizing that he hates break dancing. Soldiers in Dawn of War really look like they are fighting. Gunners jerk under the recoil of their weapons, clouds of dust are thrown up by missed shots, and some of the larger guns spray cartridge casings everywhere as they fire. Tanks lurch under recoil and turn to face targets. The melee combat is even better, weapons really appear to make contact and units go into defensive animations between attacks. When one kills another he does so in wonderfully brutal fashion thanks to a system of ‘sync kills,’ wherein the killer and victim go through a little animated scene of execution, with one stabbing his sword into his enemy’s chest perhaps, then putting his foot on his unfortunate opponent’s torso and yanking his blade free with a spray of blood, or knocking him to his knees, then shooting him once in the forehead, or in the case of walkers, picking him up and crushing him. Some powerful units even have special attacks that they perform at random intervals throughout a fight, like a spinning attack that knocks enemies flying.

 

Above: the Space Marine Blood Drive in action. Donate today!

 

 This does have something of a downside I suppose, since with all the explosions, flying bodies, flamethrowers lighting the place up, and bodies spraying blood like a grapefruit under a dumptruck, things can get a bit difficult to manage. Personally I regard this as an asset, on the principle that actual combat conditions tend to be rather chaotic, and making me, the player, account for that is only fair, but your mileage may vary here. And really, once one spends a bit of time with the game, it becomes much easier to deal with the massive explosions and flying pieces of soldier. Another thing that may or may not offend certain more hardcore elements of the RTS playing community is that all the units do randomized damage over an interval, which means one can never know to a tee when exactly one unit will kill another, and if this happens in melee, which sync kill animation is used and how long this process will take. Again I consider this a positive, since it adds unpredictability, and the hallmark of really good tactics is not their ability to predict future events with clockwork precision, but the ability to use the tools at hand to adapt to slight or sometimes major deviations from the norm.

 

In case you couldn’t tell, I’m winning. Hint, I’m the guys with all the flamethrowers

            Earlier I mentioned that I found the combat to make sense, a comment I think it worthwhile to elaborate on. By sensible I do not in any sense of the word mean realistic. This is a game where genetically modified demon possessed super soldiers that make the Space Nazis look like good guys waving chainsaw axes charge into battle against ambulatory combat space fungus firing three inch handheld autocannons. Realism’s broken body is lying forgotten in the mounds of gibs, which are being eaten by the horde of DNA stealing non-fixed phenotype bird lizards armed with black powder muskets. What I mean by sensible is well, sensible- the demon possessed genetically modified super soldiers with chainsaw axes work like I expect chainaxe wielding sociopaths to work. They chop people apart and are damn scary in the process. Their purpose is clear, and their use is apparent after a couple minutes messing around with them, which leaves me free to think of how best to put their already known attributes to use, as opposed to flailing blindly around trying to figure out what the hell I’m supposed to do with this guy. Artillery deserves its own note, since unlike so many games it actually works like artillery, providing very long range fire support and disrupting infantry.

Artillery, doing what it does best.

         So that’s the gameplay basics. Dark Crusade packs a lot of stuff in the box as well, with fully seven different races, the balance of which is not perfect, at least between any two factions. Imperial Guard for example have a really hard time with Necrons, but I have the feeling that taken as a whole no faction enjoys that much of an advantage over the others.  The factions also play reasonably differently for the most part, Space Marines and Chaos share a lot of units, but it’s hard to find two factions in an RTS that play more differently than the Necrons and the Orks, or the Eldar and the Imperial Guard.

Above: Diversity in Action, an Ork lashes out in a plea for help after the cancellation of after school programs.

The Dark Crusade campaign is a rather interesting beast. You can play as any of the factions over sort of a Risk style overview of most of a planet, on which you and the AI take turns moving your leaders around to attack territories, and then play out the battles in real time. Some land masses grant you special honor guard units, powered up versions of normal units,when you conquer them, and some give you other bonuses like being able to attack twice a turn or extra production. The former sort of mission plays out like a skirmish, which is to say a non-scripted battle against the AI, except you start with your leader and his/her/its honor guard. The later tend to be somewhat scripted challenge missions, such as killing some number of enemies in a set amount of time, and spice things up without being too onerous with only a few exceptions. There are also strongholds, the capitals of each of the seven factions, which are heavily scripted RTS missions, and quite often a complete pain in the ass. Worse, conquering them is non-optional, since the only way to win is to eliminate all other factions, and the only way to eliminate a faction is to destroy its stronghold. I’ve never liked scripted missions, since they compromise my strategic and tactical freedom, often with piss poor justification, and make me do really stupid things like try to get the wotchacallit to the flashing beacon on the mini-map. Well, the stronghold missions often have these in force. Of particular note is the Necron stronghold, which is a mess of underground tunnels. These caused my units to often get hopelessly strung out, and made bringing up new squads to the front a complete pain. Also I had to place a wotchamacallit carried by the one character who had to survive right in the middle of the enemy base. I hate doing that. In general though I found the campaign to be pretty enjoyable, since I got tangible gameplay rewards for winning fights in the form of powerful units and new abilities, and I wasn’t constantly being force-fed idiot scripted commands.

There is another side to this naturally, and that is that there isn’t much of a story to the campaign. There are cutscenes whenever a major territory or stronghold is conquered, and opening and closing cutscenes for each race, all of which are written like a history of the battles, which is pretty cool, but not much in the way of characters. Again this is something I chalk up as a positive. I like having stories in games as a general rule, but make an exception for RTSs. An RTS story is, in my opinion, just a way for the developers to make me do stupid escort missions and other tripe of a similar nature. By minimizing the story, Dark Crusade minimizes the amount of stupid crap I have to deal with, and lets me go back to setting people on fire with tanks and other tasks of a highly strategic nature.

There are a few other things worth noting. The game comes with a handy little in-game utility for customizing the paint schemes of units. It is somewhat limited, but some pretty cool stuff can be done with it. I took all of the screenshots in this review, and most of them have at least one of my custom paint schemes in them somewhere. The game also saves screenshots in their own folder automatically, and allows for replays of matches to be saved as well. Also, in a welcome touch, there’s an option for permanent bodies, which can lead to some truly corpse covered scenery if you have the hardware for the task.

So in conclusion I would heartily recommend Dark Crusade. It’s got some downsides like slightly off balance, and depending on your viewpoint very chaotic battles and a lack of story, but I’ve enjoyed it as much as any other RTS of the last generation. It is also exceedingly violent, but after years of T rated fantasy fare is sort of a relief to play a game where combat isn’t a bunch of people standing next to each other making mildly aggressive arm gestures, but instead is a giant green freak shooting somebody six times in the face before whacking him with an axe the size of a station wagon. There’s a lot of little touches in this game that make the battles interesting to watch, like the melee kills or mounds of bodies catching fire in the muzzle blast of artillery. These don’t add depth to the gameplay, but they do make playing the game more enjoyable, and they turn the battles into little stories of brutality and harrowing survival. So if you like some messy fights, aren’t put off by a lack of plot, and haven’t tried Dawn of War, Dark Crusade is an excellent place to start. For single player it’s got all seven races, and it doesn’t require the original game to play. Now excuse me, I need to go purge some filthy aliens.

Purging in progress.