Review - Dawn of War 2 : Retribution

Relic entertainment is well known as the developers who popularized the squad-based RTS genre with their Dawn of War and Company of Heroes games. They are also well known for their awesome stand alone expansions – the original Dawn of War has three freaking stand-alone pieces of added awesomeness that managed to top the original in every possible ways. So, it couldn’t be a surprise that they would release yet another expansion for their acclaimed Dawn of War 2, not when Chaos Rising got even better reviews than its predecessor.

One great thing about Relic is that they never cease to innovate. They go ahead and experiment when most other developers would sit back, enjoying the spoils of war in total complacency. A great example of this would be their Homeworld series of three dimensional space-based RTSes. Last week I picked up Homeworld 2, released back in 2003. I haven’t given it much time, but so far it plays as great as it looks (the graphics are remarkable considering when it was released).

My point here is that the original Dawn of War was so freaking successful that Relic could’ve just polished up the game-play and graphics, patched in a new story and released the sequel. But they went ahead, changed the basics of the game adding in the great RPG mechanics we love, cuz “why the heck not?” Yes, DOW2 was criticized in the beginning but most people realized that relic was going in the right direction. I admit that DOW2 campaign was kinda repetitive in the end, but I still loved it. Chaos Rising only improved upon it.

With Retribution, Relic aims to give us choice and flexibility. The campaign follows mostly a similar pathway as in DOW2 but resource management has been introduced; sans the pesky based-building stuff. So, you have a choice with almost every race. You can choose to take in your four heroes and use the resources you get to upgrade them for the duration of the mission. Or take some powerful honor guard and vehicle units and the resources will be used to buy reinforcements for the squads. This is a nice option if you preferred the original DOW approach or if you just wish to forgo the micromanagement part and get the thrill of steamrolling with a large army for a change.

And yes, I did say ‘with almost every race’. Rather than playin with the same Space Marines for the third time round, you can choose to play with any of the six races in the game – Space Marines, Orks, Eldar, Chaos, Tyranids and the Imperial Guard. The campaign itself remains largely the same, with many of the same missions; but this approach is certainly better than forcing people to play with a single race – one they may not even like. For those who fear playing through the campaign with a different race wont be fun consider this – in DOW2, you just got the space marines and played through the same bunch of maps in campaign again and again; in Retribution, no map is repeated even once in the game and each of the race is so different from the others that it is a new experience every time. Admittedly, you would have to be a pure DOW nerd to play it with each of the races (like me) but the campaign is good enough for three to four playthroughs.

All the races have diverse heroes and units, paving way for a unique and fun experience each time round. The Imperial Guard for example have the Commissar, a hero unit that encourages friendly squads by shooting one of their squad members to motivate the rest of them to fight harder and a General who can call in reinforcements. The imperial guard are squishy, admittedly, but they have some pretty impressive tanks.

 The orks heavy weapons specialist gets the perk to explode when using any of his abilities – he exploded on teleporting into a group of enemies, exploded on activating his force field and explodes on activating his explosion ability – Static Charge.

The chaos units and level up abilities revolve around their four gods. The best Chaos unit is the Plague marine who spreads a disease that heals Chaos units and damages enemies. Its later abilities allow killed enemies to zombify and get up to fight as friendlies. The upgrade path you choose makes for pretty diverse tactics – for example depending how you allocate points your shrines work in the battle – they may call in reinforcements, cloak nearby units, spew out daemons or fire doombolts at enemies.

Rather than recycle the same old heroes for the Space Marines, Relic has changed the formula for them too. The Scout hero is the same and the Force Commander is rather similar but there is a new Techmarine who specializes in deployables, turrets and stuff and a mysterious unit called the Ancient who can take on any role depending on how you spec him – jump assault, tank or heavy suppression weaponry.

The elder are a bit different to get into since they employ their mobility and abilities rather than brute force. There is the Farseer who has the ability to slow down time around her, causing foes to move slowly while the Eldar move and attack normally. But one of the coolest heroes is the Autarch who has an ability similar to the jump-packs of the assault marines except that he drops explosives on the part of the battlefield that he jumps over creating a deadly line of explosions behind him.

It’s a shame then, that the Tyranid campaign is so much weaker than the others. Much of this is because you control only a single hero (is would be illogical for there to be different heroes due to the whole hive-mind thing). The loot is therefore less much of the Swarmlord’s abilities consist of spawning various reinforcements which is rather uninteresting. The different squads themselves hardly provide any diversity and the most effective thing is to spam the cheap and easily-replaceable low-tier units anyway.

Still, five good campaigns is an awesome thing, and we haven’t even started talking of the multiplayer yet.

One of the best things in Retribution is that G4WL has been scrapped and match-making is now done via Steam itself which is noticeably faster. Not only that, but Retribution allows you to play as the older races even if you do not own the previous DOW2 games.

The skirmish multiplayer is mostly the same with the addition of the Imperial Guard. Its fun but tough getting into since DoW has its own dedicated community of multiplayer geeks – I’d recommend you practice a bit with the AI before jumping into online matches. There are two modes and in my opinion Annihilation is definitely better. It allows for more tactics as well as more exciting game play when you are rushing to wipe your opponent’s base. On the other hand Control is hardly fun, since you can always retreat your endangered units and an early start always leads to winning the round anyway.

The there is the Last Stand – a co-op mode where you and two allies are choose a hero and are tasked with surviving increasingly tougher waves of enemies. At the end of each map you get experience points and level up which in turn unlocks more wargear. Retribution adds another map – The Anvil of Khorne - and the Imperial Guard hero to the Last Stand. The Last Stand the best mode in the game – insanely paced and exceedingly visceral. I’d go as far as to say you should buy the game just for the Last Stand mode. I don’t lie when I say that as good as the campaign was, I had to force myself to play it for this review since I didn’t want to play anything except the Last Stand. In the first week after getting DoW2:retribution I clocked in a whopping 35 hours into this mode alone. If that isn’t indicative of a ridiculously fun and addictive experiences, then I don’t know what is.

With Retribution, Relic has nailed the game-play perfectly. Though Retribution has its flaws, the insane amount of content and replayabilty make them easy to overlook. For a stand-alone expansion that provides 5 awesome campaigns, a fun multiplayer and the addictive Last Stand mode for just 30 bucks, it was great value for money. If you haven’t picked it up already, you owe it to yourself as a gamer to play it – whether you are DoW nerd or not.

Note – Relic released a free update on 6 April that, in addition to various bug-fixes, added 12 steam achievements for Last Stand (two for each hero) each of which unlocks a new piece of wargear.

Braving The Planes

Planescape : Torment

The one thing I can confidently say about the hardcore PC gaming crowd is that we love our RPGs. RPGs have been in practically since the beginning of mainstream gaming; they're hot now; they'll continue to be big in the future.

So, what is special about them that lures us to lose days of our precious lifespan into these time-sinks? Is it the world and its people that only we can save? The choice we make to influence the flexible plot? Or all the side-quests and exploration that we undertake, and the-world-that-needs-saving be damned? Maybe its just that shiny pointy new katana I found that does enough fire damage to make me feel like a balrog? The lure of dungeon-hunting, people-killing and corpse-looting? Or the basic human instincts to flirt with your companions to advance to second base and beyond - particularly since I'm currently struggling with the dilemma of choosing between Isabela and Merril in Dragon Age 2 . . .

There's no single answer. Maybe its all of them. Basically the main thing that RPGs provide us is the sense of progression, and the sense of control. That is the reason RPG elements are being incorporated in other genres too - to make the gameplay more deep and involving.
But I digress. This article isn't supposed to be about why RPGs are great. And it isn't supposed to be about modern RPGs anyway.

Forget your Dragon Age 2. Forget The Witcher. Forget Skyrim. Today I take you to a journey towards the very roots of RPGs. I talk about the grand-daddy of them all. I talk about Planescape : Torment.

Over the years RPGs have evolved, yes. The graphics and gameplay mechanics have certainly improved. But, except for a few instances, we do not get a great plot or memorable characters.
Enter Planescape. A game released in the Baldur's Gate era, with the same isometric perspective and D&D mechanics. But its the setting, plot and characters that set it apart from everything else.

The game is set in the planescape multiverse - an intersection of all the different planes of existence, with its capital city Sigil.
 You, the Nameless One, wake up in a  mortuary, with a real bad case of amnesia - you've no idea of who you are or how you got there. Eventually you realize that you're immortal & people recognize you (not all in a nice way, I might add) you've lived plenty of lives before, worked nearly every profession - which makes way for an interesting mechanic - you can freely switch between being a fighter, a mage or a thief; since you are not learning, you are remembering; you've done all that before.

THIS is the Nameless One. Hello Ugly . . .

Thus begins your journey in search of your identity and the reason of your immortality. Oh and you've also lost your journal, so you gotta look for that too. And this is what sets Planescape apart from the myriad other RPGs; its not a quest to save the world, but a quest of self-discovery.

Right off the bat, you will realize that Planescape puts much less emphasis on combat; the meat here is in the character interactions. You read through a fantasy novel's worth of dialogue, and its absorbing and fun, varied and entertaining; and sometimes its remarkable enough to make a deep impact upon you. You approach quests and interactions depending on your preference - an intelligent character will perceive small details and use them, a wise one will sway others with philosophical implications, a charismatic or strong character will charm & manipulate or intimidate others. You often get the choices to bluff, play dumb, lie or speak truthfully in the dialogue. All these things impacts your alignment, and the ways the plot unfold later on.

Your companions take the game to a whole different level - believe me when I say that they are the best you have ever encountered in an RPG. Where else will you find companions such as these : a disembodied skull called Morte who has a crush on zombie chicks & is adept at swearing & taunting others, a weird-talking weirdo(!?) from the planes of order, a succubus who has given up sex (a shame!), a restless vigilante of a spirit trapped in an ancient suit of armor or a rat-tailed half-demon lass capable of trading insults with even Morte.

Many other characters you meet are pretty interesting and memorable. They may range from wiseguys and know-it-alls to freaks and madmen, all fun to talk to in their own way. One instance I remember was such : I had decided to play a totally evil character (as in chaotic evil, doesn't get better than that) until I met a poor wretched fellow looking for his sister. I intimidated him into handing me over all his money for my help, but after the subsequent dialogue and his forlorn response, I just couldn't bear to do that. And that was just the impact of the dialogue sans any voice-acting! Go figure.

Seeing how ugly The Nameless One is, I'm not surprised the succubus gave up sex

This is an RPG in the true sense of the word - a game where your character influences your approach, the plot is something original and intriguing, and ever random people you meet leave an impact on you and has just dang awesome companions.

If, fellow traveller, you are impressed by my long awe-induced rantings and are ready to leave behind your precious high resolution textures and 4X Antialiasing to journey into the world of planes, you need to grab this - a bunch of mods and tweaks (installation instructions included) - these range from gameplay fixes, tweaks to a widescreen and high resolution mod. These are essential to play the game on your modern rigs.
Until next time, people. I gotta find out why that inn has a burning man hanging there. . .

Book Review : 'A Matter of Honour' by Jeffrey Archer

'A Matter Of Honour' was recommended to me by a friend over an year ago, but it was only last week that I sat down to read it. That is one reason I am overtly critical of it, since when you anticipate something for so long, it tends to fall a bit short of your high expectations. The other reason is that the last thriller I read was 'The Bourne Supremacy'.

Jeffrey Archer draws us into the plot right away. The year is 1966. KGB has discovered that the Tsar's Icon hanging in the Winter Palace  is a fake. Moreover, the original has a document hidden inside it that could tip the balance in the ongoing global power struggle. With the deadline to recover the document drawing near, KGB officer Alex Romanov is assigned to retrieve the icon, despite his ambitious & unreliable nature.

Adam Scott, an ex-military officer, discovers his deceased father has left him a letter which says he has been bequeathed a relic (no prizes for guessing), of whose value he isn't entirely sure of. On opening the letter he sets in motion a series of events that  threaten to shake the foundations of the free world itself. Chased by the KGB and CIA, Adam finds himself betrayed by his own government. Still he resolves to protect his possession seeing it wasn’t only a matter of life and death, but a matter of honour.

'A Matter of Honour' is an engrossing and enjoyable read. the pace of the plot is set from the very first page and it doesn't fall till the end.The plot itself is interesting and cleverly designed. That being said, the beginning of the book is definitely better than the latter half. Once the pieces are set and the chase ensues, Archer doesn't bring anything new to the table. Don't worry, you will still be eagerly turning the pages for more.

To me the story of the book seemed more like a movie script as you could easily imagine the scenes taking place in any military-espionage flick. It isn't a bad thing, rather it sets the pace of the novel and keeps things exciting.

The characters, especially the supporting cast, as well as the verbal interactions are very well done and are fun to read. My favorite is Robin - one of the most sarcastic and witty characters I've ever read.

Still I do have some minor gripes with the book.

Firstly, the actions of the main characters aren't entirely consistent. This is especially true for Adam - one moment he analyzes brilliantly enough to make Jason Bourne proud, the next he is at  loss at what to do. It seems the plot is dictating the actions of the character rather than the other way round.

The narration also lacks adequate emotional development of Adam. A person who recently lost his father & witnessed the murder of his girlfriend should show more emotion. Maybe they train them like that in the military.

Jeffrey Archer leaves a couple of really minor plotlines unresolved or unexplored as if he was unsure of what to do with them.

These minor annoyances aside, 'A Matter of Honour' is a great read and easy to recommend. Especially good for taking the boredom away on an uneventful weekend.