Dawn of War: Dark Crusade

Realemente não tenho mais saco para Warhammer 40k. Seja pela falta de um local pra jogar, pela falta de desafio, mas não tenho a menor paciência para perder horas jogando este wargame. Entretanto, existe um joguinho de computador que me lembra os velhos tempos, e também por falta de saco de escrever uma matéria sobre ele, copio essa direto do site Gamespy. O que me chama atenção neste jogo são as novas opções de exército: Tau, que foi meu primeiro exército de W40K, e Necron, que enfrentei por anos a fio.

Com vocês, Dawn of War: Dark Crusade

is a rather unusual game. When the original game was released back in 2004, I fell in love with it. Dawn of War was a brilliant way to take the Warhammer 40,000 tabletop game and translate the essence of its insanely violent universe into a top-flight RTS. This was followed up by the Imperial Guard-themed Winter Assault, an excellent expansion that addressed a lot of the weaknesses of the original game. Then in 2006, Relic released Company of Heroes, an exceptional RTS based heavily on Dawn of War's gameplay formula but also improving on it. As a result, Dark Crusade can't help but feel like a half-step backwards despite being an exceptional expansion pack by almost any other measure.

Dark Crusade brings quite a few new things to Dawn of War, chief among them two new races, the Necron and the Tau. The Necron are remorseless, robotic killing machines designed to exterminate all life from the universe. The Tau is a multi-species coalition that offers new races the opportunity to join their police-state society or die. The Tau are basically a "shooter's army." They're all about hitting enemies at range with insanely powerful guns and moving long before enemies have a chance to hit back.

The Necron, on the other hand, completely reverse the usually aggressive strategic model of Dawn of War by focusing on base-building and the blitzkrieg. This has contributed to them becoming my favorite race in the game and (judging by the number of people playing them online) a lot of other people's as well. Their one major weakness is that as a turtle race, the Necron seem rather vulnerable to early rushes. They seem especially vulnerable to Orks and the Imperial Guard, who, in my games, seemed to put together a credible rushing force much faster than I could get out my basic troopers. From an aesthetic point of view, both races look really cool. I particularly enjoyed the way the Tau create buildings out of nothing, using technology so advanced it might as well be magic. Nothing holds a candle to the Necron, though, who are all matte-black and bilious green and are designed in such a way that everything about them screams "death." I did, however, notice an infrequent bug in which build animations would "skip" frames. There were no gameplay ramifications to it, but it was annoying.

Of course, good-looking new races mean nothing without the strategic chops to back it up, and this is where our extended multiplayer testing policy came in handy. In short, Relic has done an outstanding job in balancing (and rebalancing) the game in ways that should make both single and especially multiplayer fans very happy. Chaos picks up the Daemon Prince, which boosts their endgame melee capabilities beyond what the time-limited Bloodthirster made available. The melee-heavy Orks' biggest problem has always been getting them to the battlefield without being shot down, so the gun-toting Ork Flash Gitz unit is the answer to a prayer. The only difficulty I've found with them is that Tau guns can be so devastating that Flash Gitz aren't that much help. The only really problematic new unit is the Imperial Heavy Weapons Team. While they seem initially useful (and they are in the single-player campaign), after a few games in multiplayer I found that they just move, set up and break down too slowly to be terribly useful.

The biggest additions to the game have been more subtle. Dark Crusade has instituted hard caps on the amount of elite units a player can field. The Space Marines, for example, can only have one team of Terminators or their high-end Whirlwind tank out at a time. The stealth mechanic has also been redone. Stealth is no longer a trigger effect. Instead stealth is now a passive effect that can only be detected by turrets and certain low-level units. The effect of this has been profound and generally positive on the multiplayer experience. Players can no longer win by spamming the battlefield with five or six high-end units, and lower-tier infantry that can detect stealth units become not only viable, but necessary. That's forced players to actually think about using real combined arms tactics in multiplayer and contributed to more games decided by genuine strategy and skill rather than just who can spec out the proper build order. All these changes, new races and new units should be welcome news to Dawn of War fans and help revitalize the multiplayer scene.

As much fun as Dawn of War's gameplay still is, though, when compared with Relic's own Company of Heroes it feels like a step backward. I can't remember how many times I looked for a "retreat" button during a big firefight. The battlefields of Dawn of War feel a bit barren because its simpler resource model requires very little geographic maneuvering or strategic positioning and much of the map goes to waste as players relentlessly push forward on each other. Unit pathing and combat AI are very good, but once you get used to the intelligent reactions of a Company of Heroes soldier, it gets hard to go back to the level of micromanagement needed to win in a game of Dawn of War.

One of the best things about the Dawn of War expansion is how open Relic is to acknowledging the shortcomings in the original product and working to fill those holes. After the number of complaints leveled against the original game about its lackluster single-player campaign, they answered with the far superior but still rather short single-player campaign in Winter Assault. This time around, Relic clearly concentrated a great deal of time and effort into completely revamping the single-player experience.

Dark Crusade's single-player game takes place on a strategic map of the planet Kronus. Every turn, the player has the opportunity to attack one of Kronus' 25 provinces held by an enemy, and then defend against the other race's counterattack. When they do, play descends to the RTS battlefield as the two factions duke it out for control of the territory. Certain territories will impart certain bonuses to the holder (the Vandean Coast, for example, allows the holder to start a battle with an extra 1,000 energy). Each race's leader can also acquire wargear that enhances their battlefield capabilities. The winner is the first faction to sterilize Kronus of their hated opponents.

This is hardly an original concept in real-time strategy games. Rise of Nations, for example, did this quite well, and the Total War series is built on it. Neither is the Dark Crusade version particularly innovative. What the single-player campaign has going for it is what the series as a whole has always boasted -- oodles of personality. The storyline is very amusing, the voiceovers are well-done and players will certainly want to play through the campaign a number of times to experience it from each race's perspective. The single-player campaign is also superior to random skirmishes for players who don't want to hit the Net in search of multiplayer to play as and against each of the game's seven races. There are a few issues with the single-player campaign. The challenge level on the tactical map is pretty low. This is partly because the AI is strategically weak and partly because there are no random elements to enhance replayability. It might also have been nice if the strategic map play could have been extended to multiplayer.

Finally, I really have to applaud Relic for Dark Crusade's customer focus. It's a standalone expansion, which means that players don't have to own the original game or Winter Assault to play as any of the seven races in the single-player campaign or in skirmish mode (players who only own Dark Crusade are restricted to the Necron and the Tau in multiplayer). The game doesn't require the CD to be in the drive in order to start up, and players can also use multiple installs off the same CD in LAN games. In a world where players get punished by increasingly draconian install and anti-pirate protection schemes, this is a nice change.

In the end, Dark Crusade is an excellent swan song for Dawn of War. It's not perfect, and it suffers a bit (perhaps unfairly) in comparison to Relic's own Company of Heroes. The new races and game balance changes have revitalized the multiplayer game, and the new campaign gives plenty of gameplay for single-player fans to sink their teeth into. In fact, if the biggest knock against Warhammer 40,000: Dawn of War -- Dark Crusade is not an inherent lack of merit, but merely the fact that time has passed it by, then this marks one of the most graceful exits in gaming history. Plus it's got a Grim Reaper beheading an Orkish Squiggoth. Take that, you namby-pambies in Able Company!