Dawn of War is probably my favorite RTS game to date. The base game is a pretty by-the-numbers "do a mission, watch a cutscene" type game with a mediocre story, but it's not bad. The first expansion, Winter Assault, is a bit better, letting you play two different campaigns. Then, you've got Dark Crusade, which has eaten hundreds of hours of my life. For Dark Crusade, the campaign is a fairly open ended war where you're directing where you attack next, which determines what battles you fight, and holding various regions gives you different bonuses, a formula which is so fun I'm surprised it hasn't become the default for RTS. Soulstorm is kind of a sidegrade, with a bit less polish but more playable factions. Overall, excellent games. The GoG version leaves a bit to be desired, unfortunately. The games are a bit crashy and unstable at certain points, which doesn't seem to be a problem with the other versions, and there's some weirdness with the multiplayer options that other reviews have more information on. Overall, though, still a great game.
Dawn of War is probably my favorite RTS of all time. The first game in the series has a pretty standard single player mode, with a serviceable (if not particularly amazing) plot. The expansion, Winter Assault, introduces two interweaving campaigns, but is otherwise pretty similar to the base game. Dark Crusade, in my opinion, is where things get excellent. The story is (mostly) discarded in favor of a planetary campaign map that lets you direct your forces in a global war, running around the planet acquiring wargear and new units. Soulstorm is also pretty good, sticking with the campaign map and adding two new races. Overall, two excellent titles and two solid titles. One minor issue is that this port seems to introduce some weird crashes and stability issues that I haven't noticed in other versions of the game, but still, overall, this is peak RTS, in my opinion.
It's not a terrible idea, but I keep running in to issues. In terms of presentation, it's mostly fine. The graphics and sound are pretty solidly done. The UI is wonky, feels like it was designed for consoles with giant shortcut buttons all over the screen and awkward to navigate with a mouse. I decided to start with the campaign mode, so that might be part of the problem. Your first few acrades are so small that you have to keep playing furniture Tetris to fit in even three or four arcade machines on top of your required amenities, and the new unlockables are too big to even fit in the room. As a result, profits were really low. The game kept telling me what the new popular trends were, but I couldn't afford anything, so the game devolved to me just watching my money meter barely creeping up for years. There are random events ("You won the lottery," etc.) which give you a nice stack of cash, but outside these, progression was very slow. I tried to figure out how to improve my arcade, but guidance is very spotty. The game tells me that my food selection is poor but I can't really improve it without buying a bigger food vendor which won't fit inside my acrade. It tells me my "decor" is zero, despite covering every wall with the highest rated wallpaper and plastering tacky wall art all over. I'm not sure if this is because I'm doing it wrong, or if it's glitchy, because this game is pretty unstable. Like, stars are the research currency for the campaign, they carry over between maps... or they usually do, but if you decide to restart a map, it wipes your stars to zero, even if you had a bunch going in. The one that ruined the game for me was a bug where, upon loading, my entire floor became non-interactive, meaning I couldn't move or purchase any new furniture that needed to sit on the ground. I can't finish the level without buying more stuff, and I can't restart without wiping my stars, so I guess this is where I stop.
Gog doesn't allow review editing, so I'm writing this on the ASSUMPTION that at some point, the devs get the bugs ironed out. The devs have a reasonably good track record with this kind of thing, or else I wouldn't be bothering to write this, but I can absolutely understand people who played it at launch being frustrated with the technical state of the game. It's not great. The game is full of bugs and glitches, with non-functional abilities, immortal enemies, uncompletable quests, buggy AI, and more. I found it playable, but as with all technical issues, your experience may be very, very different. That aside, it's probably the most fun Warhammer game I've played. They do a great job of setting up the atmosphere and the tone of the world. By setting the player as a Rogue Trader, essentially a regular human with lots of political power, you're able to show the star players of the IP (Space Marines, evil cults, various aliens, etc.) as massive threats to normal people, while still giving the player a plausible way to beat them (you are, after all, hiring the best companions with the best gear). It also helps the writing, because as a Rogue Trader, you have a lot more freedom than most Warhammer 40k characters, leading to a story that has a lot more versatility than most 40k fiction. You're not just whipping out a chainsword and screaming "FOR THE EMPRAH" every time you see someone like in most Space Marine stories, you're actualy engaging with various political factions and trying to figure out how to resolve a situation in a way that you want. Some people might find that kind of thing tedious, but I really enjoy it, and it's where this game shines. The combat system is a bit unintuitive at times, but the learning curve mostly matched the difficulty curve in my play through, with the exception of a few mid-game bosses which utterly stomped me a time or two. Overall, great game, hope they fix it, would happily buy a sequel or DLC. In a year or two.
This is a pretty fun game and a neat way to tell a story. Instead of telling you what happened, you get to investigate an instant in time, and deduce what happened by examining clues. Fun visuals, the puzzles were all straightforward and made sense, didn't have any issues with bugs. The one concern I'd have is the price point vs. the length, the game took me about 5 hours to 100%, so if money is tight, you might want to wait for a sale. Ignoring that, though, I definitely had a fun time with this.
This is a tough one to review... pretty much any score that anyone gives this game, I could not and go "yeah, I understand that." It's a pretty great idea for a game, in my opinion: you run a business where you manage an arcade, and playing the arcade games improves your business. The arcade cabinets are mostly knock-off versions of classic arcade games (Pac-man, Space Invaders, Frogger, etc.) and the other chores around the business, like doing laundry or picking up trash, are all presented in a similar retro video game style. The problem is the execution, which has two main issues. First, the game is technically a bit of a buggy mess, with crashes, objectives not being tracked correctly, control glitches, hit box problems, etc. etc. Second, there's also a lot of very frustrating design decisions, like the lack of save slots (you get one) or inability to skip cutscenes. Probably the most frustrating design decision, though, is the constant pressure to do the most boring tasks in the game: the laundromat work. This gets better in the endgame, but for most of your playtime, you'll be getting constant nagging every 30 seconds or so to check on the laundry and do more laundry and process the laundry and did I mention the laundry do the laundry laundry LAUNDRY. I just want to play some bootleg bomberman, but the game blocks half the screen with alerts for this stuff, it's really frustrating. You can (and probably should) ignore most of the laundry stuff, but the game isn't super clear about that, and once you do figure out that it's OK to ignore it, you still have to deal with the alerts blocking your view of the game you're trying to play. So, yeah. I had a lot of fun with it, I definitely hope to see more patches / DLC / sequels. But, on the other hand, I can definitely see why some people are frustrated with the game.
So, the base game here is not BAD, assuming you don't run in to technical problems. It's a bit simplistic, but looks good and plays fine. It's a straightforward third person shooter, no cover mechanics or level up system or crafting or anything like that, just run forward and shoot. Good, simple fun. The problem is that this isn't the only version of Space Marine out there. The Steam version also exists, and has multiplayer, which was actually pretty well done in Space Marine, with different classes and game modes including versus and co-op and a bunch of character customization, all of which is not in this version at all. Now, if you've GONE to the Steam page, you might say "Hang on, that version costs twice as much as this one, so maybe that's why there's a difference in content." Except that the Steam version USED to cost the same as this version currently does, they just doubled the price a year ago. You could maybe argue that the price increase on Steam was just to roll all the DLC in to the base cost of the game, but the Gog version doesn't include the DLC either (since it's tied to the multiplayer modes). So, SEGA doubled the price of the full game and released this slashed down version at the same price the full version used to be. So, I can't really jump up and say "Yes, you should definitely buy this." If you can get this on steep discount, it's probably worth it. At launch, it's 75% off, and I'd say I got my money's worth out of it for that price. It's a fun game, a bit short and simple but still worth a run through. At full price, I'd say wait. If you're looking for multiplayer, look elsewhere.
I wish there was more of it, but what's here isn't bad. Battlesector is a turn based tactics game, kind of similar to something like XCOM or Battletech, where your focus is on positioning your troops on the field and trying to kill the enemy before they kill you. An in that regard, it's pretty fun. The issue is that it takes place in the Warhammer 40k universe. If you've never heard of the 40k universe, this game does basically nothing to explain what the heck is going on or who these characters are. And if you DO know the 40k universe.... well, I hope you like the Blood Angels, because that's who you play as. It's not unheard of for 40k games to feature one faction, but the mechanics in this game don't really do anything that screams "BLOOD ANGELS" in the way that, say, Mechanicus does. The gameplay in Mechanicus doesn't really make sense with any other faction, but Battlesector feels like a generic strategy game where your only option is Blood Angels. Add some other factions (Necrons were just released, so it looks like it's headed in a good direction) and this could be so much better. Aside from that, it's pretty fun. The game is a turn based tactics thing, blending a bit from the tabletop Warhammer 40k game and other tactics games. It doesn't do a whole lot to innovate, but what's there works fine. The unit balance is pretty good, there doesn't seem to be a "garbage" unit that you'd never include, even your starting soldiers are very useful against certain enemy units. In between missions, you can upgrade your army with permanent buffs, and I had enough of these to upgrade probably around 2/3 of my unit types to max by the end of the game. You also get to choose which units you want to field, so if you feel like going mass infantry or just tanks you can do that. Overall, not AMAZING or groundbreaking or anything, and I'd love to have some more variety in factions, but what is there is solid fun.
