Warhammer 40,000: Dawn of War II – Chaos Rising

Wiki: Warhammer 40,000: Dawn of War II – Chaos Rising Guides

Anonymous — Tue, 19 Jun 2012 22:38:00 GMT

Guides for Warhammer 40,000: Dawn of War II – Chaos Rising

Blog Post: One step forward and two steps back

febtober swords — Fri, 15 Jul 2011 20:49:00 GMT

Chaos Rising is a great expansion to the original game, providing new units, new features, and new strategies. Focusing on variety and storytelling, the campaign is much more polished than in the base game. Each mission feels unique, the ability to import saves gives your sqauds much more personality, and the corruption system is an interesting gameplay feature. The story is remarkably interesting and provides much insight into the actions of the Blood Ravens. New optional dialogue further explores the story and personality of each of your squad members, even though it lacks any sort of branching system. Unlike the base game, none of the missions feel repetitive. The goals and level design of each mission are varied and unique.

However, the campaign suffers heavily from two flaws. First, your strategies throughout the game will likely be the same as in the first one, since you'll be using the same squads as before with similar abilities and equipment. Expansions for the first game introduced unique races and units that drastically changed players' strategies, and often handicapped players in certain missions, making it impossible or unwise to use certain units. This doesn't seem to be the case in Chaos Rising; new enemies seem to fight in almost the exact same way as the last game's enemies, and the only new unit you recieve is the Librarian. While he does have many unique skills, this new unit is so fragile that most players won't use him at all. The second flaw is length. Compared to the original game, Chaos Rising is abysmally short, offering almost no optional missions and only a handful of story missions. While new locales like a space hulk are interesting to play in, the fact that you're only able to visit them twice is a huge letdown. This also makes obtaining full corruption extremely difficult for players caught unaware by the game's sudden end. Furthermore, even though each mission feels unique, you will almost always be fighting Chaos Space Marines. Orks, Eldar, and traitor guardsmen briefly appear in a handful of the early missions (half of which are optional), and the Tyranids only appear in the aformentioned space hulk missions. Frankly, this game could have been greatly improved by a few more missions against these races, as well as more optional missions.

Blog Post: Chaos Rising Offers More to the DoWII Experience

The Critic — Sun, 21 Mar 2010 15:51:00 GMT

Naturally, I'd played Dawn of War II since its release in February. After a year of getting my butt handed to me over and over again in the unforgiving multiplayer I stopped playing less and less frequently.

Then came Chaos Rising.

The campaign is undoubtedly a lot of fun, and yes, it is still a pain to play on Primarch difficulty. None of the missions feel repeated, and there's a good deal of variety here. One new grabber is the Corruption system. As your Space Marines complete certain objectives they begin to fall under the shadow of Chaos. This means that new abilities and wargear become available as you play, but I felt that the Corruption system itself was flawed. I get corruption for letting too many scouts die before I can reach them? Other situations like this makes you feel like instead of turning to the dark side you're gaining fail points. Still, these flaws occured rarely, and I still had fun playing through the campaign.

Adding Chaos Space Marines to the multiplayer was a wise choice as well. With Chaos, new mechanics are explored and evolved, such as the Heretic unit. While weak, the Heretics are able to use the worship ability to enhance friendly units around them. The buffs those friendlies get depend on which commander you've chosen. Chaos also marks the arival of a new kind of vehicle, one that's lighter than a walker, but fights in melee. New units have been added to the other multiplayer armies as well to compensate for the arrival of Chaos.

But, naturally, this all comes at a cost. Relic chose not to live up to their promise, which was a tighter, better matchmaking system. I'm still fighting against people who are literally three times my trueskill rank, and Chaos feels imblalanced. Over the forums, Relic said their goal for Chaos was to have the Heretics be an important part of the Chaos army, yet most enemies I've faced ignore the Heretic completely, instead aiming for more Chaos Marines with the Mark of Tzeentch.

In the end: Chaos Rising IS fun with an expanded campaign and slightly improved multiplayer, but the unforgiving Trueskill system remains a crippling problem for the casual player.

Blog Post: terrible

jcho123 — Thu, 11 Mar 2010 23:47:00 GMT

Blog Post: Standalone expansion continues solid mix of RPG and RTS

Adam Biessener — Thu, 11 Mar 2010 23:40:00 GMT

This standalone expansion does everything necessary[Excerpt] to recreate and enhance the excellent small-squad role-playing/real-time strategy hybrid gameplay of Dawn of War II. It’s obviously more of the same, being an expansion and all, but it’s the kind of add-on that fans of any title hope for.

Chaos Rising’s lengthy co-op enabled campaign features similarly stupid boss battles to the original, but the much greater variety of maps and mission objectives is a major improvement. Exploring the decrepit space hulks of the Judgment of Carrion ghost fleet and battling through the Warp-corrupted ice fields of the lost planet Aurelia are pleasantly novel compared to the endless slogs through the same handful of maps that Dawn of War II’s campaign often devolved into. The new character, a psyker Librarian, allows for interesting new strategies with his diverse array of quasi-magical abilities.

Also new to the Chaos Rising campaign is the Corruption mechanic, where failing secondary objectives or using Chaos-tainted equipment corrupts the souls of your Blood Ravens. Penance in the form of accessories that penalize your abilities or completing side-missions can bring them back to the path of righteousness. The trick is, Chaos grants nifty powers to its disciples – for instance, the moderate-cooldown, unlimited-use full force revival is unbalanced as hell. This is far from a Mass Effect-style morality play, but it does add replay value as welcoming or avoiding corruption noticeably changes your playstyle during the campaign.

New maps and champions refresh the multiplayer scene. The Chaos Marines are a nice addition to the roster, with their daemon-summoning rites and strong, multi-purpose infantry. I salute Relic’s decision to give away the new maps to all Dawn of War II players in a patch, and for allowing original and expansion players to play together (though Chaos Marines are only available to expansion owners). Chaos Rising is good news for DoW II multi fans.

The fundamental experience isn’t noticeably different, but the breadth and variety that Chaos Rising adds are solid improvements to an already good game.

File: Chaos Rising Screens