Dawn of War II is not an RTS game. Well, certain parts of it aren’t, anyway. Relic have been responsible for the hugely successful series which combined the depth of strategy in the Warhammer 40K Tabletop gaming with accessible Real Time Strategy conventions, and before Dawn of War II, this had barely changed. Even now, with the release of the new game, some things haven’t changed. Relic are probably still devoted to producing a plethora of Sims-like expansion packs for the game in the near future. Indeed, you can just see future content through its lack in Dawn of War II. No Chaos Space Marines, for example, means that they’ll be back in a separate standalone campaign. The fact is, Relic know that they’ve attached the perennially popular Warhammer licence to a successful gaming genre. Not only that, but they know how to milk it. A tad cynical, perhaps, but when the refined gameplay works so well, why complain? And that’s really the mantra of RTS gaming, staunchly upheld since the days of Westwood’s Dune and Command and Conquer series: don’t change what works.
 
But Relic, bravely as those Space Marines in the face of Tyrannical (should that be Tyranid-ical?) odds, have. They’ve changed the genre. And it works a treat. While the multiplayer works as it always has in the series: you build a base and capture control points to build your armies and attack the enemy, the single player has been completely changed. Rather than bother with faceless hordes of infantry, you’re given a small, highly customisable squad of named men. Each squad has its own specialities, from sniping to grenade throwing. There’s even an RPG-ish element to the game, where it rates your performance after each mission, awarding you points accordingly to level your men up with. This feels highly personal, especially as in the heat of battle, a Marine called Cyrus falls to a horde of enemy Orks. You really sympathise with your men, feeling precisely the kind of camaraderie that’s supposed to exist between the Space Marines in the Warhammer literature and lore. Granted, we’re not quite into Fire Emblem territory here; squads can be revived and are resurrected automatically for the next mission, but it’s still miles away from the faceless waves of GDI troops you frequently find yourself sending to their doom in Command and Conquer. It actually brings to mind the WWII Commando games which I talked about last time: a highly personal RTS series with adventure elements thrown into the gameplay. This genre hybridisation of the RTS, as with any other over-familiar genre, is the only way out of its own formulaic repetition.
 
But Dawn of War II has an agenda above innovation for gaming’s sake. It has another audience to appease, one which might have felt left out by the lack of customisation and personal attachment that RTS games fully fail to offer: the Warhammer Tabletop audience. A lot of RTS gamers bought Dawn of War II for its expert use of the genre, less so for the original licence. But the alteration of the game’s single player mode will change this. A lot of the RTS conventions have been stripped out of the single player gamplay: you now don’t need to build outposts and power plants to gather the resources of requisition and power, and base building is completely unnecessary, much like in the Tabletop game. With the emphasis now on individual man-customisation and personalisation, it feels more like the Tabletop game than the series’ own RTS past.
 
Is this a good thing? Gamers often worry when their hobby is overlooked as developers use it to try and reach non-gaming audiences. But when a genre is as stuck in its ways as an Ork behind barbed wire cover, taking inspiration from other pastimes can freshen it up. Gaming shouldn’t necessarily be about repetition, but integration. How can games bring in things that are beyond their natural territory, and make them work in a gaming environment? Dawn of War II takes the complexity and intimacy of your tabletop squads and gives them the immediacy of RTS interaction. After a few playthroughs you’ll be swapping war stories with your friends, such as that time when "Epic George" managed to take out a tank single-handedly with his rocket launcher.