Super Nerd Sundays Presents: Dawn of War II: Retribution Part 2 - Single Player!

Dawn of War II’s single player campaign wasn’t a revolution so much as an iteration. It grasped the fundamental factor at the core of Dawn of War: Dark Crusade’s massive, brand resurrecting success: the concept of sustained progress over a campaign. Dark Crusade used several carrots to represent this progress: global bonuses, special bodyguard squads, powerful wargear and bonus resources deployed with your force at the beginning of each mission. The end result was a fun progress curve which eventually culminated in an anti-climax when your all-powerful army crushed all enemy opposition with its souped up bonuses and super-powerful units.

Dawn of War II corrected this by focusing on character progress. You could still earn wargear, but it was more like loot. Your characters could still progress, but the progression trees were more nuanced, and the bodyguard units were replaced by a core group of supporting characters who fought with you throughout and grew stronger as you did, developed in a way that you could influence. Chaos Rising added more units, more powerful wargear, and more of what you’d have to be generous to call a “story” to the mix, and it worked a little better. Both games kept a steady difficulty curve and forced you to stay on your toes right up until the final mission, especially if you wanted to play around with the progressively more difficult optional missions that kept cropping up at the end of the first two Dawn of War II games. Retribution changes all of this.

Right off the bat, common squads are back. They’re back with a vengeance. You cannot play Dawn of War II: Retribution without using these squads. They’re thrown at you in the first level of the game, and they’re handy. Just like regular Dawn of War squads they do the job they’re designed to do well, and they give your heroes some much needed backup. But instead of having a fully unlocked tech tree from game one, as was the case with Dark Crusade, Retribution insists on doling out content, forcing you to choose between a juicy piece of wargear, still-locked unit types or upgrades for already-unlocked unit types. This means that every mission ends with a tactical choice which forces you to sacrifice one enduring bonus for another, a bold choice in any era of gaming but especially in our current era of designing games so that players need never experience fail states lest they violate the game’s rules severely. Retribution limits the resources provided to players, makes them decide how much they want to rely on their squads and how much they want to rely on their heroes. This means that the race you choose is probably going to impact the choices you make (why bother upgrading a scout squad all the way when you’ve got Cyrus, a free, more powerful scout doing everything they do better?) along with your personal play style. It also means that each mission plays very different for different people. I’m sure some players would’ve used armies for the majority of the trouble they ran into during the campaign, but I spent most of the game with my four space marine heroes. I’d occasionally leave Cyrus behind for some incredible assault terminator you can swap him out for (an effective and, again, well executed nod to the honor guard squads of yore), but for the most part I beat each level with four heroes slogging along against the universe.

The level cap has shrunken, along with the tech tree, to accompany this focus on a larger playing field of units and races. It makes perfect sense from a design perspective, and from a play perspective. The previous Dawn of War II campaigns took dozens of hours, two or three at least. They demanded nuanced, drawn out character customization to make up for a fairly stripped down core game which focused on one race, a very small group of units and, when you come right down to it, a set of four path choices for each unit, many of which were simply not viable. Retribution has done quite a bit to make sure that each available progression path is viable in its own special way, and it has also established limitations that insure that no one unit can be all powerful.

The end result is a campaign that plays a bit like a long-form RTS game. Not completely, of course. The resource acquisition is completely inelastic, the choices solely in your investment of those resources. There’s no sense of the rush-boom-turtle of classic RTS gameplay, and plenty of the trappings of Dawn of War II’s previously single player campaign’s RTS aspirations. There’s even a terrible story that unfolds differently based on the perspective of the race you play. I’ve only had a chance to play through as Space Marines (spoiler alert – it has a lot of racism in it) but after dabbling in some others I’ve gathered the mission progression is the same for all the groups across the board. In this context, your game-play choices take the shape of tactical choices you’d normally make in real time in a multiplayer game.

It’s no substitute for an actual multiplayer environment for preparing and training new players, don’t get me wrong. Even the sub-par skirmish AI is better than the single player as a tool for learning just how Dawn of War II works, and that won’t get you very far against human opponents who don’t advance squads one by one across the map to resource points, ignoring the majority of threats they encounter along the way. But it provides a framework for comprehending the interplay of various units. Playing through the Space Marine campaign you get a sense for how a Devastator squad works and how Assault Marines work. The only unit that you won’t really understand after the single player campaign closes its doors is the humble Terminator, a rarely seen incredibly tough multiplayer unit that requires a global ability to deploy and tends to ruin the game for everyone else involved. But after completing the campaign you’ll understand that the Razorback is useful for breaking up enemy formations and rapidly transporting units around the battlefield, but that it cannot stand up to other heavy units in a fight, that the Dreadnaught beats the shit out of everything it can touch but moves slower than a paraplegic through whatever viscous liquid paraplegics frequently find themselves immersed in, and that Tactical Marines are just fucking great in general, assuming you take the time to upgrade them.

It’s difficult to read the tea leaves of Relic’s latest effort. Is this an admission on their part that their games function best as multiplayer ventures, that the single player game is at best an afterthought, a fun way to kill hours when your friends are offline? Is it a refinement of a game-type that functioned extremely well as a time sink in the past? Or is it an attempt to combine the two systems, to bridge the gaping divide between single and multiplayer play in Dawn of War II? It fulfills all three functions, although I’d contend it’s best at offering up the second. You won’t learn much about how to play Dawn of War II from playing through the pat little levels that Retribution throws your way, though you’ll learn more than you would’ve in the past. But you will have an experience that forces you to make choices, to think about the units you command and do more than just wait for the best piece of gear for each situation to roll along. You’ll start to learn about the branching decision trees that the game constantly throws your way, the choices you’ll have to make with each resource tick as to just what you want to pick. Will you get those lightning claws for your Chaos Lord? Or a squad of Chaos Havocs to help contain that victory point? Retribution’s single player won’t ask you that question, not exactly, but it will hint at it while fitting the choice into a larger framework which eventually shapes a larger than life battlefield.

I’d never recommend a Relic game post-Homeworld for the strength of its single player campaign, though there’s nothing wrong with any of them per sec. They’re just RTS single player campaigns. Most of them are shit. Age of Mythology was the last game that delivered an amazing single player campaign, and did so by largely ignoring all the rules of a single-player RTS campaign (that all of this is training for what is to come in multiplayer, the game you really bought). Relic has taken some stabs at solving this problem, and they’ve had a modicum of success, more than even Blizzard I’d say, but after I’ve been introduced to the systems of their RTSes I rarely find myself encouraged to play single player out of anything more than a sense of OCD. Dawn of War II: Retribution’s single player represents the latest and greatest iteration of this OCD exploitation, a game with modest intentions in its single player campaign and a broad range of experiences on offer, more than you’ll likely engage. It’s proximity and inclusion with one of the best multiplayer games I’ve played in the last four years makes it easily worth playing through at least once, however, even if it’s not enough to warrant Retribution’s price tag alone. The same could not be said for its exceptional overhauled multiplayer.