Warhammer 40,000: Winter Assault

My goal is to finish something before I review it for you. Due to the soon-to-be discussed nature of this game, I wouldn't be able to make the deadline if I decided to beat it before updating. I've played for 9-12 hours, so far, almost nonstop and I'm only about a third of the way through.

If you're not familiar with the series, then you and I are in the same boat. The intricacies of the plot that goes along with the tabletop model game is mind blowing if you try to absorb it all at once. But that's really not necessary to pick up this game. First off, it's an expansion to Dawn of War, which was an excellent game...second, it's one of the only real-time strategy games that has had me repeating levels due to failure after failure. I have not had to do that since I was twelve and first played Warcraft 2. This game is hard. It's not impossible, though I haven't tried out any difficulty above Normal. I won't.

On to the gameplay. It's a strategy game, so a lot of your time is spent micromanaging seperate units with their own varying statistics and specialties. Dawn of War game you a brief glance at the weak troops in a few of their missions, but once you can actually control them...they're more complicated, weaker, and over all some of the most obnoxious pixelated people I have ever dealt with. Your hero, of sorts, has his own troop, and they suck. Sure they can be amazing, but to make them so you have to spend time and precious resources to summon up his sidekicks. They are expensive and pretty quick to drop, so I typically let the hero buddy absorb bullets while my weak "Imperial Guard" soldiers fire off what has to be bean bags at the Orks with their nasty bloody axes and guns the size of panthers. By the end of every mission I've lost ninety percent of my forces and am struggling to push back the tide of superior enemies, and I honestly can hold my own in practically every RTS out there.

Your team (when playing as the good guys) is a pathetic United States National Guard-ish faction who are known for merely running and shooting, and then having those corpses turn into a barricade against tanks and the like. Maybe I exaggerated, but I've been told I'm not far off. I can't decide if the British company who created the series was taking a jab at America, or if they just felt like having a miserable group to make the other, more expensive faction models seem that much better. Regardless, the Guard is like a colony of ants up against spiders...scratch that: bears.

Anyway, the story for this expansion sucks. I'm not trashing the series as a whole, just this expansion. I know, I know, it's an RTS...how many variations of "build things and kill the other guys" can you come up with? Dawn of War made missions with the same objectives feel unique, though, and that game's story was intense, if simple. In each level you got story to accompany the build-kill format that was pretty cool and dark. It was all about the defense and reclamation of a besieged planet, and gradually became a fight against an impending resurrection of a demon that could lay waste to galaxies. It won't spoil anything in telling you that, as a whole, you win and lose at the same time.

Winter Assault shares no characters and the story is pretty much identical, only without any of the motivating forces of its predecessor. Your hero is dull, the enemies unnamed and generic, and then there is the whole brutal difficulty. I can't say I recommend this game to anyone but WH40k die-hard fans who also like getting their pc gamer egos crushed repeatedly.