Game review

Dawn of War 2: Chaos Rising

PC: £24.99; cert 16+; Relic/THQ
4 out of 5 4
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Dawn of War 2
Dawn of War 2: Chaos Rising … shorter than the original, but more focussed

Dawn of War 2 marked a turning point in the Warhammer 40,000 universe, at last becoming the kind of RTS it always should have been to differentiate itself from the mighty Command & Conquer. Gone were the intricacies of resource management, in came fewer units with a greater range of RPG-like powers and a whole host of new fans.

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  1. PC
  1. Dawn of War II: Chaos Rising
  2. THQ

This mission pack (which you'll need the original DoW2 to play) concentrates on fine tuning that same formula. There's new planets to explore, some new heroes (including a new "warrior mage" class) and a plot full of treachery and surprise. However, you're still restricted to only four heroes per level, each with up to three followers in tow. As if to compensate for this paucity of firepower, there's loads of new items to be discovered – so many, in fact, that it's lucky you can sell them for extra experience points, because there's no way you'll ever use them all.

This time round, some items or decisions force your heroes to develop "dark" powers, with the subsequent loss of their more saintly equivalents. It's a weird kind of internal morality system that litters the game with corrupted items, promising more in terms of underhand tactics or visual effects than they actually deliver. And although there's now a steady stream of optional mission goals – for example, saving trapped allies – this is balanced by fewer side missions, making the game significantly shorter but also more focussed.

Unfortunately, Chaos Rising is not the perfect fix we might have hoped for, leaving untouched the most annoying bits of the original game. So, even though the levels are challenging and feature multiple objectives, every time you die you have to restart them from the beginning. As this includes a pointless return to the mission menu you have to wonder why a quicksave function was still not added.

Yes, it makes the game more challenging, but it's also the kind of user-unfriendliness that explains why PC games are losing out to their shallower but slicker console rivals. It's also annoying that enemy AI shows a marked reluctance to use the whole map or reclaim lost choke-points, making for an unnecessarily linear single player experience. The exception to this, of course, is the multiplayer mode which now supports 4-player co-op battles and remains as gloriously unpredictable le as ever.

Chaos Rising is a big, challenging slice of realtime strategy that the latest Command & Conquer 4 has tried (and failed miserably) to emulate. The really annoying thing is that is could have been even better.

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