I must confess, I don't actually own Dawn of War II: Retribution yet. I do, however, own pretty much every other Dawn of War PC game. Even Soulstorm (shudder). One of my mates has it though and he gave me the basic rundown; pretty much Dark Crusade meets Dawn of War 2. The two best games of the IP as far as I'm concerned and to top off the awesomeness, it no longer has the horrible Games For Windows Live 'service'. Don't get me started on Games For Windows Live. Seriously, I could rage for days about that.
Back in Dark Crusade (which I thoroughly enjoyed) I was an avid fan of the custom shoulder and flag icons that you could add to a colour scheme in their army painter tool. It was a fairly simple affair of grabbing the appropriate images and placing them in the correct folders within the game directory and then locating them in the in-game army painter. I must have spent hours creating and tweaking my Dark Angels in that game but it wasn't without it's issues. Being a third party modification, you couldn't see anyone's custom schemes and their icons unless you had the same scheme on your own machine, so unless your mates were a little helpful and copied the scheme over to their computer you'd be the only one who could see the visual change.
This is one of the reasons why I am so excited to see a similar thing coming straight from Relic themselves. Official support means that there's no dodgy glitches in multiplayer. Everyone can see your glorious Angels of Darkness as you (hopefully) crush them beneath your boots. Very cool.
I like that it's not just a re-skin of the standard space marine models, they've actually gone to the effort of re-model some of the units. The Force Commander gets swapped out for the Company Master model that most Dark Angels players will be familiar with. Personally, I think the helmet could have been made to look a bit cooler. Still, not a bad change.
Not all of the models have been given equal love though. The Assault Marines pictured above seem to be a simple re-skin. That said, they still look adequately awesome to me. The same goes for the Dreadnought pictured below.
The DLC pack is $US7.50. I'm not quite sure it's worth it for the fairly simple visual change it offers. I've only seen what's in the screenshots here so I've yet to view the Deathwing Terminators and whether they got a model upgrade or not. Still, considering you can already play Dark Angels with the included colour schemes, I'm inclined to think that $7.50 might be aiming a bit high. I mostly play as Angels of Redemption anyway. My only other gripe is that the models seem to be fairly low resolution but I guess these are close-up shots and when actually playing the game you'll be viewing them from way up high. Like I said, I haven't actually seen these in action so most of this is just speculation. Maybe I'll grab the DLC if it goes on sale. Maybe.
What do you guys think? Tell me if you think it's worth it in the comments below.
- Dugatron