The Game, Continued
Which brings me to my first gripe of the game. Last the last time I played Warhammer 40k, I was certain there were more than four races. For all you die hard fans, I’m sorry to say that there’s no sign of Dark Eldar, Necrons or Tau. All you’ve got to go up against is Orks, Eldar and Chaos Marines. Ok, the single player campaign is only spread over 11 missions, and the storyline doesn’t really allow for more races to be involved, but surely we could have had these races in the skirmish modes? While I mention the number of missions, although 11 missions may seem to not be all that many, the length of the missions means that it will take you at least a week of solid playing to get through them and probably longer on the harder difficulty.
And so to the story, which revolves around a Space Marine Commander’s hunt for the reasons behind a sudden and violent Ork attack on a human settled world. The plot twists and turns nicely, leaving you guessing as to what will happen next and is explained very nicely with some in-game cut scenes as well as in the pre-mission briefings. One that puzzled me though, was the mission load map, which showed enemy forces slowly swamping the world, even though I’m winning every mission.
Mission variety is a little wanting though, with the vast majority of missions being along the lines of taking hold of as many resource points as you can, building an army large enough to swamp everything on the map, then going off and wiping the enemy out. As I said earlier, a couple of them need to have certain criteria met, such as holding all the relic sites or using vehicles not troops to break down a door.
Each mission gives you access to a new unit and gives you the opportunity to see how well they do in certain situations, but I still found myself going back to the old standby of building lots of well tooled up marines, throwing in a few tanks and then sweeping off across the map to obliterate anything in my path. I completed the game using this method, losing only two dreadnoughts and half of a squad even when I was up against the very final boss of the game. All of which makes the more powerful, expensive and cumbersome units a bit of a waste of time… shame as they added some much needed variety to the game, but proved to be superfluous to winning it and by that measure, unnecessary, so although its fun to go berserk with the big guns, you don’t need them to win.
Don’t get me wrong, this is still a fun game to play and in some strange way very, very addictive its just the balance of the units hasn’t been thought through properly and the old ‘build and rush’ tactic we all learnt in C+C still works a treat here, which is a shame and I was hoping for more. Perhaps some hard as nails defensive units that need softening up with long range weapons might’ve have given me a use for the Whirlwind tank… or some fast, swarming, numerous but weak enemies might have made me go for the slower, more powerful Terminators.
