Wow i can honestly say i have never been so pissed off with a game as i am pissed off playing dawn of war 2.
I owned the original dawn of war when i got it as a freebie when i purchased company of heroes, i took dawn of war out the box, installed it, set it to the maximum settings and had a great time with it.....i wish i could say the same about dawn of war 2.
To begin with i got dawn of war 2 a day early so, happy it had arrived i went to install and play the game. I sat there for over 10 minutes waiting for it to install and then i get told i have to install steam, so i do. Then i get told i have to register the product with steam, okay no problem there i think but everytime i typed in the code i get told i am unable to register this product, after an hour of messing about on the internet i find out that even though i have the damn game in my possession i can't install it because it officially doesnt come out till the next day and only then will steam register it. So slightly annoyed i leave it till the next day.
The following day i go to install dawn of war again and this time hoooorah it works, i can finally play the game, so i click on the game to play it......only for me to be told that before i can play the game i now have to install a day zero patch. Now i don't mind patches in general but releasing a game that needs patching day one just goes to show how rushed this game is. The patch was only 130mb so with my internet connection that should take less then 5 minutes, again okay not a massive problem i thought to myself but the reality was the shitty steam severs were so busy and broken that i had to restart the download 6 times over the space of an hour because the download kept on hanging, and even tho it finally started downloading without freezing it took 8 and half hours for the damn patch to fully download and i had to leave it going over night to finish, what a joke, i had to wait 2 full days to play the game that i paid for because of a bunch of bullshit.
Well anyway the game was on my pc now and it was time to actually play the game. So i booted it up and set everything to the maximum settings to see how it would play, the frame rate was around 30fps which was good enough and off i went into the warhammer 40,000 universe.....for about 4 minutes until the game crashed my entire pc by overheating the cpu. Now i know i don't have the greatest pc in world but it is above the minimum specs of the game and i can run crysis on maximum settings in direct x 9. So again i thought to myself fair enough, my fault for setting the settings too high, i'll tone them down a bit. Over the next 2 hours i continually knock the settings down but each time watched the game crash to the desktop or crash my entire pc over and over again, till finally with everything set to the absolute lowest setting it worked about 80% of the time with random crashes still happening at the most annoying times. And every damn time it crashes, the game thinks i quit the mission and it counts as a loss costing me items and resources!!!
Battling through the game breaking crashes i finally complete the single player game which was way too short and had a distinct lack of levels and mission types. Unlike dawn of war 1 there was only one race to play as which was very disappointing and the characters and script were truely terrible and cliched.
Now i am a big achievement junky so a pc game with achievements was a nice novelty for me however even tho i completed the game i got cheated out of the 80 achievement points you're supposed to get for finishing the game, yeah brilliant, and then to cap it off i continued playing to get the achievement for reaching 90,000 in campaign score but when i reached 78,000 the game stopped spawning random missions cheating me out of yet another achievement not to mention making me waste 6 hours of my life getting that far.
So after reading countless other people complaining of the same glitches and crashes in the single player i decided to leave the campaign well alone untill relic patch the game they never should have shipped until it was done in the first place. So it was on to the multiplayer.....which in short is so bad it makes the single player look like game of the year. To begin with the multiplayer mode crashes my pc 60% of the time and everytime it does it counts as a loss, without these crashes in 3vs3 games i would have a record of 61 wins to 47 loses, but thanks to the crashes i have a record of 61 wins and 132 bloody loses. There is no rhyme or reason to these crashes so yet again countless hours of my gaming time have been wasted by getting near the end of a multiplayer player game only to have it crash thanks to these bugs and glitches.
Even putting the game crashing bugs to one side atleast 1 in 3 games suffer from people laging out the game and ruining the multiplayer experence. Then on top of that there are only 2 1vs1 maps and 4 3vs3 maps with no 2 vs2 maps at all, that's only 6 measly multiplayer maps in the entire game, absolutly pathetic!!
You've then got problems with path finding and line of sight firing issues with some units but the biggest problem of all is how unbalanced the game is. Tyranids when played correctly beat the crap out of all the other races, only the eldar put up a half decent fight, the space marines are a distant 3rd and orks are beyond worthless.
To make matters even worse then what i've said above the match making system is as good as broken as well. Apart from it taking anywhere up to 10 minutes just find a game the teams it creates are very rarely balanced, i've lost count of the amount of times i am a better player then anybody on the other team but because it pairs me with a bunch of 'noobs' who dont have a clue what they are doing i end up on the losing team.
In short this game needs a major patch and it needs it a week ago.
