Chaos Rising is the first expansion for real time strategy game Dawn of War II. We get a look at the new faction and a new multiplayer mode that redefines the meaning of “chaos.”
Fans of real time strategy (RTS) games like me are no strangers to expansions. The reason I never got into the first Dawn of War is because it had three heavy-hitter expansions that I needed to buy in order to keep up with my friends online — and this was even before developer Relic Entertainment announced a proper sequel. Now that DoW II’s been out for almost a year, though, I guess it’s high time for the sequels to start and Chaos Rising leads off.
I expected the usual laundry list of new maps, units, and campaign sections, but I was pleased to see that Chaos Rising adds a little pizzazz to DoW II in the form of the gruesome Chaos faction. These guys were Space Marines, but after a trip through something called the Warp, they’ve become something else – something corrupted and bloodthirsty (seriously, one of their faction heroes wears the skin of a Space Marine’s face as a banner — sick). The story behind the expansion campaign is that a planet lost in the Warp reappears a year after the events of the base game. As the Space Marine faction, you explore this icy, strange planet to find clues about where it’s been and what happened to the Space Marines who held it. The campaign introduces players to the Corruption System where certain events in the game corrupt units under your command depending on the player’s choices (which in turn changes their skill set and personal attacks). Presumably this is what happened to the Space Marines who held the missing planet after they went into the Warp, and this is where we get the flashy Chaos faction from.
“Chaos brings a lot of charisma to the game,” Producer Jeff Lydell told me during a multiplayer preview event. He showed me a little demo of the “mark” system that the Chaos faction uses to summon huge area effect attacks that look like burning crop circles. I had to agree with him — it was “very fancy.”
The Chaos faction had three out of four heroes to show off during the preview event – the aforementioned skin-banner-wearing Chaos Lord, the Plague Champion, and the Chaos Sorcerer. Games journalists had the chance to try out each class in at least one player-versus-AI match and two matches of the new Free For All multiplayer mode. The defense-oriented Plague Champion worked well for me in the AI match because I had plenty of time to try out his personal area debuff items like poisonous armor, and build up various units at the base. Also, I managed to set off one of the crop-circle style marks directly over the enemy’s hero. It was pretty sweet.
In Free For All, however, I stuck with the offense-oriented Chaos Lord because defense was pretty much the last thing on my mind. Free For All pits six players against each other in a brawl for victory points. There are seven victory points on the map and with a full six players, I couldn’t turn around without smacking into another player let alone find time to capture resources to score unit upgrades. The point of the mode is to grab as many of the seven points as possible to reach a score of 1000. First to hit that magic number wins, and you only score when you capture a point – not when you wipe out an enemy, or manage to upgrade your units. I really didn’t have much luck in Free For All (although I’m proud to say I didn’t come in last), but I did make it hard for everyone else by sabotaging capture points by blowing up their generators. Whenever an enemy unit would try to repair the generators so that they could capture the victory point, I’d pounce on them, which made my tiny slice of the map a really dangerous place for other players to be. Unfortunately, that didn’t score me points.
Lydell told me that the nature of Free For All doesn’t necessarily reward really any kind of behavior – he once made it all the way to five points (and got an Achievement for it) only to lose the entire match when somebody else with a better army swept the map toward the end of the round. That, really, is the true essence of Free For All that fits the Chaos Rising theme: it’s chaotic.
Dawn of War II: Chaos Rising is available March 11. Once the game hits the shelves, Relic Entertainment plans on rolling out all the new maps and units included in the pack to base game users for absolutely free — that’s something I’ve never heard of an RTS doing before. So I say to anybody who’s holding out on DoW II the way I held out on DoW: Don’t be afraid of the expansions. Embrace the chaos.