Warhammer 40,000: Dawn of War Soulstorm

Written by Jason Cisarano  on February 04, 2008

Hands-On Preview: When it comes to expansions, the third time isn't so charming

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Warhammer 40,000: Dawn of War is a solid game that deserves a place on any PC gamer's shelf. It takes the best elements of the RTS (massive battlefields, tech trees, resource gathering) and puts them into a package that's all about adrenaline-pumping action. The fights are fast and furious, and there isn't much down time between skirmishes. It's a great feeling to orchestrate a battle that involves Space Marine ground troops, tanks, and artillery and watch as they Уunleash hell.Ф Explosions + rockets + bodies flying through the air = great gaming experience. So with the bar raised up to the stratosphere, what can an expansion packЧmuch less threeЧbring to the experience?

Like a lot of expansion packs, Soulstorm hopes that giving new maps and playable factions will be enough to have players pulling out their credit cards. The new factions are the Dark Eldar and the Sisters of Battle, and both seem to keep up the quality of the earlier releases. The Sisters are part of the Imperium, and they have a third resource called Faith that they can use to call special Acts of Faith abilities that range from shields to offensive attacks. Only the Dark Eldar are playable in the demo, and their companion abilities with names like Corrosion, Piercing Vision, and Screams of the Damned, aren't all that exciting. Corrosion, for example, is an area affect that looks like a brief flash of green fuzz that does a bit of damage to enemy units. Their third resource is called Soul Essence, and it's harvested right on the battlefield from corpses of friendly and enemy dead alike.



Okay, so the Dark Eldar are a whole lot, well, darker than most of the other factions, and that makes for some interesting moments. There's a hero known as the Haemonculus, a specialist in torture, pain, and plenty of suffering. He has a weapon that spits acid at the enemy, and another that chops away at an opponent's flesh in small, painful chunks. They keep slaves, so the builder is a slave who cringes in fear each time the player clicks on him to assign a task. And some of their buildings seem to be built on mounds of corpses. Nobody ever said that the developers at Relic don't know how to build atmosphere: everything about the Dark Eldar seems designed to bring a shiver to players' spines. Unfortunately, they didn't bring the same creativity to the gameplay. The expansion plays the same as all the other ones, and little things like those special abilities don't do enough toward making it feel new again. The units of the Dark Eldar pretty much line up with those of other factions, cookie-cutter style. There are light infantry, heavy infantry, skirmish troops, and structures and vehicles that all the other factions have. It feels too much like the same old game with new, mostly unremarkable skins. Speaking of vehicles, one of Soulstorm's main claims to fame is that it brings flying vehicles to the game. It gives all the factions a mix of bombers, attack planes, and transports to fill out the ranks. Overall, it doesn't feel like an exciting addition to the game.

The game feels just like the earlier versions. It has the same controls and more or less the same interface. And the AI seems to behave as always. It builds suspiciously fast, upgrades its technology just as quick, and assaults over and over until one army or the other is done for. It's more of a logistical challenge to keep up with the AI's building than it is a tactical challenge. The tech trees seem deeper than ever before, meaning that it takes a bit of planning to decide where to spend resources since it's tougher to build a pool that allows unlimited building and upgrading.

Every game these days seems to be jumping on the Xbox bandwagon and adding achievements, and Soulstorm is no exception. Players will be able to earn medals based on things like winning streaks and win-loss ratios. Each faction will also have some unique achievements, like playing a given number of online matches with that faction. These achievements won't have anything to do with Games for Windows Live. Multiplayer play wasn't available in the demo, but the series' multiplayer has always been a strong point.

This is a standalone expansion, so new players won't have to buy the earlier game in order to get into the action. With this, they'll get all nine factions playable in the single-player campaign, but only the two new ones in multiplayer. The single-player campaign will include a meta-campaign that has more than 30 battlefields spread across over a half a dozen planets and moons. Though the metagame might be a natural extension of the game (it always seemed like it was missing from the first release), it won't change how the battles happen on the ground. In other words, it won't revolutionize the play.